“I felt them.” I’m sitting up, drenched in sweat, my hands gripping the sheets. My canines have lengthened, my nails are sharp against the cotton, and the thread-sense is still live. Dimmer now that I’m awake, but the echo of the child’s distress makes my head throb. “The families. I felt them.”
Briar lowers the knife. Comes to the edge of my bed. Her face is unreadable in the dark, but her body language has shifted from combat readiness to attention.
“Tell me.”
“Family groups. South. They’re alive. I could feel individual bonds. The Donovans, the Hartwells, a younger group I couldn’t identify.” My breathing is ragged, and I force it to slow. “One of the groups is damaged. Bonds torn, wolves missing from the cluster, or too weak to register. And there’s a child in pain. Real pain, Briar. Not fear. Something is being done to her.”
“Distance?”
“I don’t know. The signal was stronger than it’s ever been. Could be my range expanding, could be the distress amplifying the connection.” I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. The child’s signal is still there. Faint now, exhausted, the quiet of a kid who’s given up crying because no one comes when she cries. “Something’s happening to them. Right now. Tonight.”
Briar sits on her bed. Sets the knife on the nightstand.
“I finished the route yesterday,” she says. “The full line. I pushed through overnight, drove south, then tracked on foot through ranch country. Picked up the last section where the scent signatures concentrate around a fixed location. Sent the coordinates to Merric. He checked it out.”
She’s been ranging further than I realized. Overnight trips. Driving hours, then tracking on foot through unfamiliar territory, alone, in the dark. I knew she was pushing wider. Ididn’t know she was pushing that far. The fact that she did it without complaint or announcement is so purely Briar that I almost smile, despite the child’s signal still throbbing in my chest.
“The facility location matches Nadia’s satellite coordinates?” I ask.
“Within a mile. This is it, Willow. We know where they are.”
The confirmation should feel like victory. Instead, it feels like the starting gun of a race I’m not sure we’re fast enough to win.
I reach for the burner phone. The clock on the nightstand reads 1:47 a.m. I call Brenna anyway.
She answers on the second ring. Not groggy. Alert. Brenna doesn’t sleep the way other people sleep; she rests in shifts, the way she taught me to during the raids. Three hours down, two hours watchful, repeat.
“What happened?”
I give her everything. The dream. The thread-sense spike. The family groups confirmed alive. One damaged. A child in active distress. Briar’s completed route terminating at the facility coordinates.
Brenna is quiet for a beat. When she speaks, her voice has changed, the aunt gone, the handler in full command.
“Nadia contacted me six hours ago. Aurora intercepted chatter from Syndicate-adjacent channels. The facility is preparing to transfer captives to a secondary location. Deeper south, harder to reach. Jericho says it’s standard Syndicate protocol when they suspect an operation’s been flagged.”
My stomach drops. “Flagged how?”
“Not sure. Maybe someone’s heard we’ve been asking questions.”
Goddammit!
“How long do we have?” I ask.
“Days. Once transfer protocols start, the window closes fast. If they move those wolves to a secondary site, we may never find them again.”
“Then we go now.”
“Not without force, and not without a plan.” Iron in her voice. “Merric’s mobilizing. His full team: Rook, Sienna, Dane. Our Ravenclaw fighters are ready. Nadia and Jericho are already moving south. They’ll reach you within a day.” A pause. “But I need the full team in position before we hit that compound. We go in half-strength, we lose people.”
“And if we wait too long, we lose the captives.”
“I know. Believe me, Willow, I know.” A rare crack in the alpha voice. Then she seals it. “We work fast. Two things I need from you. First, route the Bern misinformation. I’m sending you the details now. We need to know if his network touches this facility before we go in, because if it does, he could tip them off about the assault.”
“And second?”
“The contact number. The one the Forrester enforcer uses to call in the pickups. If Jericho can trace it, he can crack the communication network between the purist packs and the facility. That gives us their internal intel. It could be the difference between a clean extraction and walking into a kill box.”
The contact number. The one Conner must use to arrange his pickups.