I reach across him. Pick up the phone. It’s warm from the nightstand lamp he turned off before we fell asleep… or before he fell asleep. I haven’t slept. Haven’t come close.
His hand is resting palm-up on the pillow beside his head. I take it gently—his fingers, limp and warm—and press his thumb to the sensor. The phone unlocks, and the screen flashes to life.
Biometric. The strongest lock a phone can have, and the only way past it is to be the person lying next to him at 3 a.m. with his hand in yours. That’s what this whole night was for. The text. The kiss. The hours in his bed while he held me and his wolf made that sound, and I lay there counting his breaths and waiting for this moment.
That’s what I’ve become. A woman who weaponizes the fact that a man trusts her enough to sleep.
He put them on a truck, Willow. Families. Children.
I open the contacts. Scroll. Find what I’m looking for: a number with no name attached, just the word NETWORK.
I photograph the screen. Then I scroll further; there are other numbers, other names, contacts that might connect to the pipeline. I photograph those too. Six screenshots in total. Thirty seconds of work.
I put the phone back on the nightstand. Ease his hand back to the pillow. Slide out of bed.
My clothes are on the floor where they fell. I dress in the dark, moving with the trained silence of a wolf who spent two years living in contested territory where noise meant death. I don’t look at him. If I look at him, I’ll see the way his face softens in sleep, the arm that held me, the place on his chest where I rested my head while his wolf made that contented sound, and I’ll lose the thing that’s keeping me functional right now.
I don’t look.
I walk down the hallway. His house in the dark: a jacket hung by the door, a pair of boots beneath it, a framed photograph on the hallway table that I can’t make out in the shadows but that I know, from the glimpse I caught earlier, is a teenage girl on a horse. Maren… I’m sure of it.
I open the front door. Close it behind me without a sound.
The night is cold. Stars. Foliage. The smell of cooling stone and the distant sound of a coyote. My truck is in his driveway, where I parked it when I walked up to this porch with a mission behind my eyes and kissed him like I meant it.
I meant it. That’s the part I can’t reconcile. The kiss was real. The sex was real. The way my body responded to him—not performing, not faking, genuinely and completely present—was real. I used him, and the using was authentic, and I don’t know how to process that without something cracking.
I get in the truck and take several deep breaths, letting the silence press against me.
Then I drive.
The motel is twelve minutes away. Briar is awake, dressed, bags packed. She’s been ready since I left.
“Got it.” I hand her my phone with the screenshots.
She scrolls through them. Six images. The contact list, the NETWORK number, the associated names. Her expression doesn’t change, but her shoulders drop a fraction—the Briar equivalent of relief.
“Good work,” she says. The closest she comes to praise.
I forward the screenshots to Brenna’s encrypted line. Then I start packing. There isn’t much. We travel light, always have. Clothes, maps, phones, and the few supplies we accumulated in a town that never stopped watching us.
Barely two weeks. It feels like months.
It feels like minutes.
We’re in the truck by 4:30 a.m. Cedar Falls is dark and silent as we drive through. The main street empty. Dutch’s shuttered, the neon sign in the window turned off, the counter where I sat beside him visible through the glass. The Railhead, a dark shape against the sky, the parking lot where I stood in a dress that wasn’t mine, and told myself one drink couldn’t hurt.
I don’t want to look toward Sycamore Road as we pass the turnoff. I look anyway. The road disappearing into darkness. The house at the end of it, where a man is sleeping in a bed that still holds the shape of two bodies and doesn’t know yet that one of them isn’t coming back.
I put my eyes on the highway. The signs point south.
Briar takes the lead. I follow. The Hill Country falls away behind us as the terrain shifts, the ridges sinking, the trees thinning, the land flattening into the long, dry stretch of south-central Texas. Scrub brush and mesquite. The sky widening as the hills let go. A different country down here. Harder. Less forgiving.
I watch the Hill Country disappear in the rearview mirror and feel something release inside me. Not relief but severance. The clean cut of a thing that’s done. Cedar Falls is behind me. Conner is behind me. Whatever I felt in that house, in that bed, in the dark hallway where Maren’s photograph watched me leave—it’s behind me now.
My phone buzzes at six. Brenna.
“Got the images,” she says. “Jericho’s already working the number with the Aurora tech team. He thinks they can trace the network within hours. The contact connects to a relay system, which connects to the facility’s communications. If they crack the relay, we’ll have their internal comms.”