Willow’s scent changed the same day I relocated the Louisiana family. Her questions shifted; less about work, more about operations. And Briar’s been walking the same terrain every day with a focus I can’t explain. There’s a pattern here. I can feel it.
And then there’s the other thing. The part that doesn’t fit the enforcer’s assessment. The way my whole body knows when she walks into a room. The way her scent—even the cold version, even the wrong version—makes something in me orient and settle. That scares me worse than any fight I’ve been in.
The enforcer says: She’s hiding something. Watch her.
The wolf says: She’s yours. Protect her.
I don’t know which one’s right. I don’t know if they can both be right. I finish my coffee and head for the compound, because the questions I need to answer today aren’t about Willow.
They’re about wolves getting into a van and never being heard from again.
The compound has an office in the back of the meeting hall—filing cabinets, a desk, a computer that predates the internet. Garrett runs the administrative side from the study in the main house, but the operational records live here. Patrol logs, boundary reports, assessment files. The paper trail of a pack that’s managed its territory for three generations.
I pull the relocation files. Boxes of them—manila folders, handwritten in most cases, going back years. Each one documents an assessment: who was found, where, what the outcome was. For wolves who were relocated, the file includes a contact number and a date.
It does not include a destination.
I open folder after folder, my gut tightening with each one.
Thirty-seven relocations over the past ten years.
Thirty-seven families or individuals assessed, found to be magic-blooded, and moved along. Each file ends the same way: a date, a contact phone number, and the notation TRANSFERRED — NETWORK.
No address. No facility name. No confirmation of arrival. No follow-up.
Thirty-seven wolves taken to a junction and loaded into a truck, and not one of them has a recorded destination.
The girl Tate mentioned. Kira. I search for cross-references. Our files wouldn’t have her directly, since she was Hartley pack. But if the Hartleys used the same network, the same truck, the same junction, then the system isn’t just ours. It’s regional. And the girl Tate knew disappeared into the same void as our thirty-seven.
Never heard from again.
I put the files back. Close the cabinet. Sit at the desk and stare at the wall. The light is changing. Late afternoon. I’ve been in here for hours.
Thirty-seven wolves. Some of them were families. Some had children. I personally handled at least a dozen of those transfers, including the latest one.
Where did they go? Where did any of them go?
I lock the office and head to the main house. Garrett’s on the porch with our father. Dad’s in his rocking chair, smaller every time I see him. The big man who ran this ranch shrinking into the grief that arrived with Maren and never left.
I take the porch steps. Garrett reads my face.
“What?” he says.
“The relocations.”
The alpha slides forward in his expression. Subtle but unmistakable.
“What about them?”
“Thirty-seven transfers in ten years. Not one recorded destination. No follow-up. Where do they go, Garrett?”
Dad’s eyes move between us. Alert. More present than he’s been in months.
Garrett takes a drink of his beer. Sets it on the railing.
“They go where the network places them. Communities equipped to manage their situation. That’s what we were told when we established the program, and that’s what I believe.”
“You believe. But you don’t know.”