I’m not going to bring her back. Garrett can go to hell with his orders.
But I’m going to find her. Because she came here looking for the truth about wolves my family sent to die. And now I know enough of that truth to choke on it.
And I think she might be the only person in the world who’ll help me learn the rest.
Chapter 23
Willow
Briar shakes me awake at 3 a.m. “Willow. Willow, wake up, for fuck’s sake! You’re doing it again.”
The air in the motel room is buzzing. A ward, tight and dense, is wrapped around the beds. Stronger than anything I’ve ever intentionally built. The magic vibrates against my awareness, hot and volatile, and when I reach for it to take it down, it resists. Pushes back. As if the power doesn’t want to let go.
I dismantle it in stages. Layer by layer. By the time the last thread dissolves, my hands are shaking, and there’s sweat on my face.
“Third time it’s happened,” Briar says. “The last one nearly woke Nadia next door.”
“I know.”
“You need to get a handle on this.”
“I know, Briar.”
She doesn’t push. But the look she gives me before she lies back down says she’s logged this under problems that are getting worse.
She’s right. Something is wrong with my magic. Not wrong in the way a machine malfunctions. Wrong in the way a river floods. There’s more of it than there used to be, and it’s not behaving. The wards I throw in my sleep are one symptom. Yesterday, when Jericho said something that irritated me during the planning session, the air around my hands shimmered with heat. No fire. No ward formation. Just energy, leaking from my skin. Jericho saw it. Didn’t comment. But he moved his laptop to the other side of the table.
And the thread-sense has changed. It’s sharper than it was in Cedar Falls. I can feel the families in the facility with painful clarity, individual bonds, individual levels of distress. But it’s also reaching in directions I don’t direct it. Searching for something to the north with a persistence I can’t override.
I tell myself it’s the stress. The proximity to the facility. The children’s fear agitating my wolf, who’s been volatile since I saw that photo. The wolf is angry. Wounded. Straining against the containment I’ve held for days. And the magic seems to respond to her agitation, flaring when she pushes, settling when she retreats.
That’s the explanation. It has to be. Because the alternative—that the hollowness in my chest and the northward pull are connected to a man I left sleeping on Sycamore Road—is not something I’m prepared to consider.
Morning. Nadia has set up in her room: laptop, satellite feeds, comms equipment that emerged from their van in a steady stream. The four of us work the facility layout. Jericho cracked the relay network, and he’s been monitoring the facility’s internal communications for hours.
“They’re nervous,” he says. Quiet, precise, a man who spent years inside the Syndicate and learned to read their patterns the way Briar reads terrain. “Increased chatter on the security channels. Someone’s flagged something. They’re tightening up, and they’ve doubled the internal guard rotation.”
“How long before they start moving captives?” Nadia asks.
“If they’re this jumpy, days. Maybe sooner.”
The urgency is a physical pressure. I can feel the families—right there, forty minutes south—and the knowledge that the window is closing makes my magic flare. I have to consciously pull it back. Breathe. Hold.
My phone rings. Not Brenna’s number. I stare at the screen, and it takes me two seconds to place it. Then my stomach drops. The text I sent at 2 a.m. the night I went to his house.Are you awake?I gave him this number myself. Handed it to him like an amateur while I was busy planning how to steal from his phone.
Shit.
What the fuck was I thinking?
I wasn’t.
I stare at it. Four rings. Five. Briar looks at me, then at the phone, then back at me.
I answer.
“Willow.” His voice is different. Not the warmth I’m used to, not the rough tenderness of the man who held me in his bed. Cold. Controlled. Stripped of everything except purpose. “Or should I say Willow Corvus. Ravenclaw pack. Magic-blooded.”
I suck in a breath.Fuck.I knew this might happen… the moment I left Cedar Falls. But hearing my full name in his voice, spoken with the level precision of an enforcer identifying a target, turns something inside me to ice.