Mate.
But that’s not a word I want to process right now.
I yank the door of my truck open, climb in, and start the engine. I’m supposed to track her. Supposed to find her and bring her back.
Instead, I drive to the compound office. Because before I go looking for a woman who came here searching for the truth, I need to know what the truth actually is.
And tonight, my father is going to tell me.
Chapter 22
Conner
I spend the day in the compound office, going through the files I’ve already seen and looking for the ones I haven’t. The relocation records are where I left them: thirty-seven folders, thirty-seven transfers, thirty-seven dead ends. But this time I’m not looking at destinations. I’m looking at money.
It takes me three hours to find the ledger. Not in the filing cabinets. In a locked drawer in the desk that I’ve never had reason to open. The lock is old, a simple tumbler, and I pick it with a fence staple in under a minute. Garrett would be embarrassed.
Inside: a leather-bound ledger, the kind ranchers used before computers. My father’s handwriting: tight, precise, the penmanship of a man who learned to write in a one-room schoolhouse. The entries go back ten years. Dates in one column. Dollar amounts in another. And in a third column, a notationthat corresponds to each relocation file: a number, a date, and the word RECEIVED.
Payments. Timed to relocations. Every time a magic-blooded wolf was walked to the junction and loaded into a truck, money came in.
I count the entries. They match the files. Thirty-seven payments over ten years. The ledger goes back before my time as enforcer. The earlier entries are in smaller amounts. The later ones are larger. The program scaled up. More wolves, more money. Supply meeting demand.
My hands are steady. The rest of me is not.
I close the ledger. Lock the drawer. Put the fence staple in my pocket. Walk out of the office into the late afternoon sun.
The compound is quiet. Most of the pack is in the west pasture, moving cattle. Tate is at the training grounds, running drills with two younger wolves. My mother is in the garden beside the main house, pulling weeds with the focused aggression of a woman who’d rather fight the earth than deal with what’s happening inside her family.
I walk past all of them to the porch. My father is in his chair. He sees me coming and doesn’t look away. He’s been waiting for this. Maybe for years.
I sit in the chair beside him. The same chair Garrett uses for beers and sunsets. The wood is warm from the afternoon heat.
“Tell me,” I say.
He’s quiet for a long time. His hands rest on the chair arms… not gripping this time. Flat. Palms down. As if he’s bracing himself against the wood to keep from floating away.
“After Maren died,” he says, “I couldn’t think straight. For months. Your mother was… she was destroyed. Garrett took over the pack because I couldn’t function. I’d get up in the morning, and I’d stand in the kitchen, and I wouldn’t know why I was there.” He pauses. “You remember.”
“I remember.”
“About six months after, a man came to see me. I didn’t know his name then. I don’t know it now; he never gave one. He said he represented people who shared our concerns about magic-blooded wolves. People with resources. He said they were building a network to remove magic-bloods from pack territories across the south. Containment, he called it. A coordinated program.”
“Syndicate.”
My father flinches at the word. Not denial—recognition. “I didn’t use that word. Neither did he. But I knew what he was. I knew the kind of people who have that kind of infrastructure. I knew they weren’t running a goddamn resettlement charity.”
The admission is quiet. Matter-of-fact. The voice of a man who made a decision a decade ago and has been sitting with it every day since.
“You knew,” I say. “You knew they weren’t being placed in safe communities.”
“I knew they weren’t coming back. That’s what I wanted. I wanted them gone. Off my land. Out of my territory. I wanted every wolf carrying magic to disappear, because one of them killed my little girl, and I couldn’t—” His voice breaks. For a second, the old man surfaces… the father, not the alpha, the man who watched his fourteen-year-old while she bled out on Forrester soil. Then he pulls himself back. “I couldn’t let it happen again.”
“So you made a deal.”
“I made a deal. The network would handle removal. We’d cooperate: identify magic-bloods on our territory, escort them to a handoff point. In exchange, they’d ensure our land stayed clean. And they’d compensate us for the service.”
“Compensate.” The word makes my lip curl. “You mean they paid us. Per head.”