“I’ll get it,” I say.
“How?”
“Leave that to me.”
A pause. Brenna reading the tone. Hearing what I’m not saying. “Be careful.”
“I will.”
“Route the misinformation. Get the number, get moving south. I want you and Briar within striking distance of the facility by the time the team arrives. Ground-level reconnaissance. Approach routes, security patterns, anything the satellites can’t give us.”
“Understood.”
“And Willow… the timeline has changed. No more slow play. Get what you need and get out of Cedar Falls.”
“Copy.” I end the call, then sit on the edge of the bed in the dark, the phone warm in my hand, the child’s terror still echoing. The clock reads 1:53 a.m. Six minutes. Six minutes to confirm what I’ve been chasing for weeks and to learn that the window for saving them is closing.
Briar is watching me. Waiting.
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” I say. “Dawn. Brenna’s mobilizing everyone. Merric, Nadia, Jericho, the fighters. They’ll be in position within days.”
“And the contact number?”
“I’ll get it tonight.”
Briar’s eyes narrow a fraction. She doesn’t ask how. She can see the answer forming in my face, and she’s too professional to comment on it. What she says instead is: “You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do.”
“There might be other ways to—”
“There aren’t. Not tonight. Not in the time we have.” I pull the second phone from the nightstand drawer. “I know where it is. I know how to get to it. And I know he’ll let me in.”
I hate myself for saying it. Because what I’m about to do isn’t intelligence work. It isn’t operational necessity dressed in professional language. It’s using a man’s body to get access to his phone, and the fact that my body will respond to his—genuinely, hungrily, the way it always does—doesn’t make it better. It makes it worse. It means the betrayal is authentic.
I compose the Bern misinformation first. Brief, coded, routed through the channel Brenna specified. A fabricated safe house location fed into a network that Bern can access. If it reaches the facility, his web extends this far south. I send it. Put the phone down.
Then I pick up the other phone. The one with Conner’s number in it.
My hands are steady. The child’s panic twists in my chest: faint, constant, a frequency I can’t unhear. Somewhere out there, a little girl is in pain, and the number I need to help find her is stored in the phone of a man I can reach if I choose to.
I type:Are you awake?
The response comes in under a minute. He wasn’t sleeping either.
Yeah. You okay?
Two words.You okay.Notwhat do you want,orit’s 2 a.m.The concern is automatic. Genuine.
I close my eyes. Breathe. Open them.
Can I see you?
The pause is longer this time. Maybe thirty seconds. I can picture him in the dark, reading the message, his wolf responding before his brain catches up.
His reply: an address. A house on Sycamore Road, south edge of town. Then:Door’s open.
I reach for my clothes. Briar watches me from her bed, silent. I don’t explain. She doesn’t ask. I’m halfway to the door when she speaks.