“What do you need from me?”
“Stay where you are. Don’t pull out yet.”
The words land like a fist. “Brenna—”
“Listen to me. We have confirmation of the corridor, we have photographs of the enforcer, and we have a facility location. What we don’t have is the operational picture. How many families have gone through. How often. The contact network—who Conner calls to arrange the pickups, what numbers they use, what the chain looks like between Cedar Falls and that facility. We need this information. Without it, we’re assaulting blind.”
“So send someone else. I’ve done my part.”
“There is no one else. You’re inside the territory. You’ve built a presence in that town. If you disappear now, the Forresters will know they’ve been watched, and they’ll burn every trail Briar’smapped. The corridor, the junction, the scent evidence—all of it goes cold the moment they realize they’re compromised.”
She’s right, dammit.
“I also need you to route the Bern misinformation,” she continues. “I want to test how far south his network reaches. I’ll set up a fabricated safe house location through a channel Bern has access to. If it gets passed to the Syndicate, we’ll know his reach extends to the facility. You route it when I give the word. Don’t tell anyone—not your source, not anyone local. This stays between Briar and us.”
My source. She means Conner.
“Understood.”
“How are things on the ground? With your access?”
She’s asking about Conner without asking about Conner.
“It’s over,” I say. “The access. The closeness. Whatever it was… It’s done.”
“That is… a pity,” she says cautiously.
“A pity?” I say sharply. “Are you serious?”
A pause. “I’m not asking you to go back to his bed, Willow. But I am asking you to stay in Cedar Falls. Keep your cover intact. Be seen in town. If Conner approaches you, don’t shut him out so hard that he gets suspicious. You don’t have to touch him. You just have to not disappear.”
“So I sit across from the man who loads children onto trucks and pretend nothing’s changed.”
“Yes.” No softness. No apology. “That’s exactly what I’m asking. Because the families in that facility need us to get this right, and getting it right means you hold your position for a few more days.”
A few more days. In a town that smells like him. Walking past the diner where we sat together. Staying in the motel where his hands were under my shirt twelve hours ago.
“Fine,” I eventually say, wishing I didn’t feel so sick about it. “But Brenna? When we go in for the families—when we hit that facility—I want to be the one who breaches.”
“We’ll talk about that when the time comes.”
“I’m not asking.”
Silence. Then: “Call me again as soon as you have more. We need to step this operation up now.”
“Of course.” I set the phone down.
Briar is watching me. She’s been listening to my side of the conversation. She reads gaps the way she reads terrain.
“She says there’s a facility,” I tell her. “South of San Antonio. Syndicate-adjacent. Looks like a processing center.”
“And the Forresters feed into it?”
“That’s the working theory.”
Briar starts cleaning the dust off her boots with a cloth. Precise, unhurried. When she speaks, her voice carries something I haven’t heard from her before. An edge. Personal.
“He’ll answer for every name that went through that corridor.”