“I know the wolves we move off our territory don’t come back. I know our people are safe. I know the protocol works.”
“Works for who? I went through years of files, and there isn’t a single piece of evidence that any of those wolves arrived anywhere.”
“That’s not our operation, Conner.” The alpha tone… not a shout. A lowering. “We protect our territory. What happens outside our borders is managed by people we trust.”
“Who? I call a number. A truck shows up. Two men I’ve never met take a family south. That’s the whole chain of custody. That’s enough for you?”
“It’s the system that’s kept this pack safe for a decade.” He stands. Squares to me. Not aggressive. Present. The alpha asserting that this conversation has reached its limit. “Maren died because magic was on our land. We built a system to make sure that never happens again. It’s not perfect. But it works, and I’m not going to tear it apart because you’ve suddenly decided to ask questions you’ve never asked before.”
The last sentence hangs.
Questions you’ve never asked before.
He’s right. I haven’t. For years, I’ve taken families to the transfer point and watched them drive south and never once followed the truck. Never once called the number back. Never once opened a filing cabinet and noticed that thirty-seven wolvesvanished into a system that produces no evidence they arrived anywhere.
“Why now?” Garrett asks. Quieter. “What’s changed?”
Everything. Nothing I can say.
“Nothing’s changed,” I say.
He watches me. Doesn’t believe it. But he lets me go, because pushing means a conversation neither of us wants to have.
I walk off the porch. Past my mother, who watches me pass without comment. Past the bunkhouse, where Tate is sitting on the steps with an expression that says he’s been thinking about a missing teenager.
I get in my truck and start the engine. And for the second time this week, I feel the doubt begin to grow.
Thirty-seven wolves.
Where did they go?
Chapter 18
Willow
The dream starts the way it always starts: the porch beneath me, the morning cold on my face. The valley is white below, the ridges breaking through. I can hear the creek running high from last night’s rain. I can smell the wet earth and the wood smoke and the deep sweetness of fall decay that means home.
Then it shifts.
The fog thickens. Turns wrong. Not the soft white of an Ozark morning but something darker, oily, pressing against my skin with an intensity that doesn’t belong in a dream. The hills disappear. The porch disappears. The creek goes silent. I’m standing in a space with no walls and no floor, and all my senses are wide open—wider than I’ve ever felt them, every bond I’ve ever held streaming out from my chest like filaments of light, reaching south, reaching further than they’ve ever reached.
They find something.
Ravenclaw bonds. Unmistakable. The resonance of my bloodline, the wolves I grew up beside, the people I held together for two years. The Donovans: Martin and Leah and their teenage son, whose signature I’d know anywhere because I taught him how to use his magic when the raids came. The Hartwells: Joanna and Ben and their daughter, the girl who used to bring me wildflowers and leave them on the porch without saying a word. And others I recognize but can’t name. Younger wolves, bonds I touched briefly before they vanished.
They’re there. They’re alive. The relief is so sharp it hurts.
Then one of the bonds lights up. Not warmth. Not connection. Pain. A scream of distress so acute it tears through the dream like a serrated blade. A child. Young. Too young to have language for what’s happening to her. The signal is ragged, exhausted, the frequency of a small creature who’s been hurting for a long time and has stopped expecting it to end.
I try to reach toward it. Try to hold the bond, feel the direction, find the distance. But the pain swallows everything. It’s not my pain, yet it fills me completely. The terror of a child in a room with no windows, where hands that aren’t gentle reach for her, where the wolf inside her is pressed flat against her ribs in the same way I’ve been pressing mine. I can feel her trying to be small. Trying to disappear inside herself.
And underneath the child’s distress, from the other family clusters: a low, sustained frequency of despair. Not acute. Chronic. Wolves who’ve been enduring for months and have stopped believing anyone is coming.
I wake up screaming.
Not a sound I make often. Not a sound I’ve made since the night the raiders hit Ravenclaw and I thought Brenna was dead. It rips out of my throat and fills the motel room. Briar is on her feet before I’m fully conscious, knife in hand, scanning the windows and the door.
“What?” She’s at the window, checking the parking lot. “What is it?”