And she left anyway.
The sinking feeling starts in my stomach and spreads outward. Not heartbreak… though that’s there, sharp and new and humiliating. Something worse. The professional recognition, arriving too late, that I’ve been played. The questions she asked.The coffee and conversation that were never just coffee and conversation. The specific, operational interest in how the pack manages its territory.
She used me. She came to my house for a reason that had nothing to do with wanting me, and whatever she got, she got it while I was sleeping.
The drive back to the compound takes twenty minutes, and every mile of it feels like dragging myself over gravel. My wolf is in a state I’ve never felt from him. Not the restless pulling toward her that I’ve gotten used to, but something closer to grief. A sustained, low sound in my chest that I can’t stop and can’t explain. He’s mourning something, and the mourning feels out of proportion to the situation, as if he’s lost something more fundamental than a woman who walked out.
I park at the compound. Walk toward the main house. Tate sees me from the bunkhouse steps, reads my face, and looks away. Even the kid knows something’s wrong.
Garrett is in the study. The door is open, which means he’s expecting me. He’s standing behind the desk with a folder in his hand and an expression I’ve seen exactly once before… the day after Maren died, when he told me he was taking over as alpha and the pack was going to war against magic.
“Sit down,” he says.
“I’ll stand.”
“Sit the fuck down, Conner.”
I sit. The chair is hard. The desk between us is the same oak desk our grandfather built, the same one our father signed documents on, the same one Garrett runs the pack from. Three generations of Forresters making decisions at this desk. Right now, it feels like a courtroom.
“I told you to watch them,” Garrett says. His voice is low. Controlled. The alpha frequency that makes every wolf in earshot go still. “I told you to observe, report, and maintaindistance. Instead, you fucked one of them and let the other one run surveillance on our territory.”
“Garrett—”
“I’m not finished.” He opens the folder. Drops a photograph on the desk. It’s Willow. Not a surveillance shot from a distance; a clear image, well-lit, the kind taken at a public gathering. The barbecue. Someone at the barbecue photographed her, and I didn’t notice because I was too busy walking her through my family’s compound, wanting to touch her.
“When it became clear you weren’t going to do your job, I put Ellis on it.” Ellis. A quiet wolf in his mid-forties who handles intelligence for the pack. The man I should have been coordinating with from the start. “Ellis got this photo. Ran it through contacts in three states. The network identified her in less than forty-eight hours.”
Less than forty-eight hours. Ellis accomplished in two days what I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do in nearly two weeks.
He pulls a printed page from the folder and sets it beside the photograph.
“Her name is Willow Corvus. Ravenclaw pack. Based out of the Ozark territory in Missouri and Arkansas. And she’s magic-blooded, Conner. Full magic.” He lets each word land separately. “She was in your bed. In your house. On your land. A magic-blooded Ravenclaw wolf, and you invited her to a pack barbecue.”
The information hits me in layers.
First: her last name. Corvus. The name I spent two weeks trying to get. The name she deflected every time I asked:“Ask around. You don’t need my last name to have coffee with me.”She never gave it because giving it would have ended everything.
Second: Ravenclaw. The pack that my people use as a cautionary tale. The pack that was raided and scattered. The settlement she described at the swimming hole. That wasRavenclaw pack land. She was telling me about her home, and I didn’t hear it because I didn’t want to.
Third: magic-blooded. Full magic. The thing my sister died from. The thing my family has spent a decade trying to purge from our territory. She sat beside me at Dutch’s, and her magic was humming under her skin, and I couldn’t feel it. Or I could—the way she moved, the reflexes on the ledge at the swimming hole, the flinch at the wordcontamination—and I chose not to put it all together.
The woman I fell for. The woman whose laugh I memorized. The woman who kissed me last night with a tenderness that I felt in my bones.
Magic-blood.
“Say something,” Garrett says.
I don’t trust my voice. My wolf is tearing at me. Not with anger but with something I can’t identify. A howling contradiction between what I’ve just been told and what the animal knows. He doesn’t care that she’s magic-blooded. He doesn’t care that she’s Ravenclaw. He cares that she’s gone, and the absence is physical, and the information Garrett’s laying on the desk doesn’t change that by a single degree.
“I didn’t know,” I say.
“That’s the problem. You didn’t know because you weren’t doing your job. You were thinking with your dick instead of your head, and now two intelligence operatives have been monitoring our operation and walked away with whatever they found.”
“What do you think they found?”
The question shifts something in the room. Garrett’s expression tightens. Not anger this time. Caution. The alpha calculating how much to reveal.
“Doesn’t matter. What matters is containment. We need to know what they plan to do with it. You’re going to find them.”