“Yes.”
“How much?”
“It varied. More for families. More for…” He stops.
“More for what?”
The silence stretches. My mother has stopped pulling weeds. She’s standing with her hands at her sides, facing the garden, but her head is turned toward the porch. Listening.
“More for children,” my father says. “Young wolves. They paid more for the young ones.”
The ground lurches under me. Not physically. The porch is solid stone, built to last three lifetimes. But something inside me moves, the foundation I’ve been standing on for a decade sliding sideways to reveal what’s underneath.
They paid more for children. The eight-year-old in the ravine. The toddler on his mother’s hip. The families I walked to the junction… the younger the kids, the more money came in.
“Did you know what they were doing to them?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “In the facilities. Did you know?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“That’s not what I asked you. Did you know?”
My father looks at me. And for the first time in the conversation, his eyes are wet. Not crying… he’s too far gone for crying, too hollowed out by a decade of knowing what he did. But the moisture is there, the body’s acknowledgment of something the mind has been refusing.
“I heard things,” he says. “Over the years. From the contact. References to procedures. To extraction. To… viability assessments.” His jaw works. “I didn’t want to understand what those words meant. So I didn’t. I locked them away, and I didn’t think about them. I sat in this goddamn chair, and I watched you drive families to that junction, and I never said a word.”
He’s shaking, his whole body; a fine tremor that starts in his hands and works through his shoulders. The big man in therocking chair, the alpha who built this ranch, shaking like a leaf in a storm he created.
“And Garrett?” I ask.
“Garrett inherited the program when he took over. I told him what I’d told you: that the network placed wolves in appropriate communities. I gave him the contact number. I gave him the protocol.”
“Did you tell him the truth?”
“I told him what he needed to keep the program running. He didn’t push. He didn’t want to push. Your brother is a lot of things, Conner, but he’s not a man who asks questions when the answers might interfere with his duty.”
So Garrett maintained the system in genuine—or willful—ignorance. He believed, or chose to believe, the same story I believed. The difference between my father and Garrett is that my father knew the story was a lie and told it anyway.
“You should have told us,” I say. “Years ago.”
“I know.”
“People are dying. Wolves. Children. In facilities that you—”
“I know, goddammit!” His voice cracks. “I know, Conner. You think I don’t know? You think I sit in this chair every day and don’t feel it? Every file you brought back. Every family you walked to that road. I watched you do it, and I knew where they were going, and I couldn’t make myself say the words because saying them would have meant—”
“Would have meant admitting you sent them to die.”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.
The screen door opens. My mother steps onto the porch. Her face is set in the expression I know from childhood. The look she wears when she’s decided something is not going to happen. Arguments, questions, challenges to the way things are. That look has shut down more conversations in this family than Garrett’s alpha voice ever has.
“That’s enough!” she says.
“It’s not enough, Ma. It’s not close to enough.”
“Your father made decisions to protect this family. After what happened to Maren—”
“Stop using Maren,” I growl, a low rumble in my chest, audible, unmistakable. My mother takes a half-step back. I’ve never raised my wolf at her before. Never come close. “Maren died from a stray wolf’s ward. She didn’t die so we could sell children to the goddamn Syndicate.”