“And then what?”
“Bring them back. Or at minimum, find out where they are and who they’re reporting to.”
“And if I find out where those relocated families actually went? Will we discuss that, too?”
The silence is a wall. Garrett stares at me. I stare back. The desk between us holds the photograph of a woman I slept with and the printed intelligence that tells me she’s everything my family taught me to fear, and underneath all of that, the question I’ve been asking for days sits between us.
Where did the thirty-seven go?
“Don’t make this about the relocations,” Garrett says. “This is about a security breach.”
“It’s about both. She came here looking for her people, Garrett. Ravenclaw wolves. The families we moved south. She didn’t come to seduce me. She came because her pack members are missing, and the trail led to us.”
“And you know this because she told you? The woman who lied about her name, her purpose, and her bloodline?”
He’s right. Everything she told me could be fabrication. The story about looking for work. The waterfall in the hills. The cousin who was tortured. The night she came to my door at 2 a.m.
Except my wolf doesn’t think it was fabrication. And the enforcer in me—the one who reads people for a living, the one who noticed every tell and chose not to connect the dots—that part of me doesn’t think so either. She was lying about who she was. She wasn’t lying about why she came.
“Find them,” Garrett says. “That’s an order.”
I stand. Walk out. Don’t agree. Don’t refuse. Let the silence be its own answer.
The hallway is dim. I pass the kitchen, where my mother is washing dishes with the intensity of a woman who heard every word through the wall and is pretending she didn’t. I pass thedoorframe with the pencil marks—Maren at six, at eight, at ten, at twelve. The marks stop at fourteen. The year she died.
I step onto the porch. My father is in his rocking chair. The morning sun catches his face, and for a second, he looks like the man he used to be: the alpha who built this pack, who made the decisions that shaped our world. Then the light shifts, and he’s old again. Smaller. The grief and the guilt wearing him down like water on stone.
He heard the fight. I can see it in the way he’s holding himself: still, careful, the posture of a man who’s bracing for something.
“Pop.”
He looks at me. His eyes are clear. More present than they’ve been in months.
“You heard,” I say.
He nods. Doesn’t speak. But his hands—resting on the arms of the rocking chair—are gripping the wood hard enough that the knuckles have gone white.
I look at my father. At the white knuckles. At the guilt I’ve been seeing in his face, the guilt I couldn’t name until I found out about thirty-seven wolves, and the world rearranged itself.
My father knows something. About the relocations. About where the wolves go. About the program he helped build after Maren died. He knows, and the knowing is eating him alive, and he’s been sitting in this rocking chair for years watching his sons execute a system he created and never telling them what it costs.
“We need to talk,” I say.
His grip tightens on the chair. His mouth opens. Closes. The words are there; I can see them stacked behind his teeth, heavy and overdue.
Then my mother’s voice from the kitchen doorway: “Leave him alone, Conner. He’s tired.”
I look at her. She looks at me. And in her face I see the same thing I saw in Garrett’s study: not ignorance but defense. Thefortress of a woman who knows exactly what her family has done and has decided that knowing doesn’t change anything, because Maren is dead and the rest is noise.
“We’ll talk,” my father says. Quiet. “Tonight.”
I nod. Walk away trying to come to terms with it all.
Willow Corvus. Ravenclaw. Magic-blooded. The woman who came looking for families my pack sent into the dark. The woman who slept beside me last night and left before dawn and took something with her that I can’t get back.
Not information. Not intelligence.
Something else entirely. Something I don’t have a word for yet, except that its absence has left a hole in my chest that the morning sun can’t reach.