“What you’ve been doing has been hard, Willow.” Briar locks eyes with me. “Using people is not in your nature. That’s a good thing. You’re doing it because you know lives are at stake. Doesn’t mean you don’t feel like shit though.”
I rub a hand over my face. “Why does it have to be so complicated?”
“Because you’re human and you have feelings,” she says. “You have a connection with this male, and now we’re making you use it. You’re conflicted. That’s natural. That’snormal. If you didn’t feel something, you’d be a sociopath.”
I can’t argue with her, because she’s right. It doesn’t make me feel any better, though.
“I need to call Brenna.”
“I know.”
I pull the burner from the nightstand drawer.
Brenna answers on the first ring. “You’re early.”
“We’ve got confirmation. The Forrester pack is running the pipeline. Briar’s mapped the full corridor through their territory. Months, maybe years of use, multiple passages. And she witnessed a relocation this morning. Conner Forrester personally drove a family with two children to the junction and supervised the transfer to a Syndicate vehicle.”
Silence on the line. When Brenna speaks, her voice has gone clipped and cold, the intelligence operative, not the aunt. “How confident?”
“Briar has photographs. Scent evidence from the corridor matches the compound wolves. The enforcer’s involvement is confirmed firsthand. This isn’t a one-time thing. It’s systematic.”
“Shit.” A rare curse from Brenna. It lands with weight.
“Yeah, that sounds about right.”
Brenna exhales. “All right. Listen to me. I’ve been working with Nadia on the bigger picture, and this actually ties in with what we’ve been working on. Aurora’s had eyes on Syndicateactivity in South Texas for weeks. There’s a facility: a converted ranch property south of San Antonio, in the brush country. Satellite imagery shows a compound with security infrastructure that doesn’t match its cover as a cattle operation. Heat signatures suggest a significant population inside.”
“A holding facility.”
“That’s what Nadia thinks. Jericho’s been analyzing the security patterns; he knows Syndicate protocols from the inside. He says it looks like a processing center. Wolves go in. They don’t come out.”
My wolf snarls from the dark place I’ve buried her. The sound vibrates in my throat, and I have to press my hand over my mouth to keep it from carrying. Briar glances at me. Doesn’t comment.
“The families,” I say. “Our families. Do you think that’s where they’ve ended up?”
“We can’t confirm. But the geography lines up. If the Forresters are feeding wolves into a southbound pipeline, and there’s a Syndicate facility south of San Antonio with an unexplained population… the connection is logical.”
“How far along is Aurora’s intelligence?”
“Nadia’s building a full picture. Jericho’s mapped the security from satellite. They’re thorough, but they need ground-level confirmation before they can plan anything operational. That’s where you come in.” A pause. “When the time comes, we won’t be going in light. I’m not sending my niece into a Syndicate facility with two wolves and a prayer.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, when we have enough to act, I’ll mobilize. Merric’s team. Our fighters. Nadia and Jericho with Aurora backup. We’ll do this right.”
The relief of that—Brenna’s calm certainty, the promise of real force behind the mission—eases something in my chest that’s been wound tight since Briar showed me the photograph.
We’re not in this alone.
“There’s something else,” Brenna says. “Bern.”
Nathan Bern. The political wolf back in the Ozarks who’s been feeding intelligence to the Syndicate. We’ve known for some time that he’s compromised, but proving the extent of his network has been slow work.
“I want to test how far south his reach goes,” Brenna says. “Route a piece of information through a contact channel that Bern has access to. Something fabricated: a fake safe house location, say. If it gets passed to the Syndicate, we’ll know his network touches the southern operations.”
“And if it does?”
“Then Bern isn’t just a leak in the Ozarks. He’s connected to whatever’s running this pipeline. And that changes the scale of what we’re dealing with.”