“Conner.”
“Was any of it real?” No preamble. No warmth. Just the blade. “The Railhead. The truck. Coming to my house in the middleof the night. Was I just the job? The mark you fucked for information?”
“That’s not—”
“Because I’ve been going back through every conversation. Every question you asked. Every time you steered me toward the relocations, the boundary protocols, the pipeline. You were extracting intelligence. The whole time. And I just… I sat there and handed it to you because I thought—” He stops. When he speaks again, his voice is rougher. “What did you think was going to happen? You’d get what you needed and disappear? Leave me waking up in an empty bed, wondering what the hell I did wrong?”
“You want to know what you did wrong?” The anger comes fast, clean, welcome. Easier than the guilt. Easier than the pain behind my ribs that spiked the instant I heard his voice. “You walked families with children to a truck that carried them to hell. You executed a program that feeds wolves to the Syndicate, and you did it for years. You know what’s wrong, Conner? Everything. Everything about what your pack does to wolves like me.”
“Wolves like you. Magic-bloods.”
“People. Families. Children. You remember my cousin? He was seventeen, and he barely made it. And you’ve been loading toddlers onto trucks headed for the same thing.”
The silence that follows is so long I check the screen to make sure the call hasn’t dropped.
“I didn’t know,” he says. “I didn’t know what happened to them.”
“Spare me the bullshit,” I snap.
“I swear to you, I had no fucking idea, Willow!” Something in his voice makes me pause, but it doesn’t make things better.
“Then you didn’twantto know. You didn’t know because knowing would have made it harder to keep doing your job, andyour job was the only thing holding you together after your sister died.” I’m shaking. Not from anger, from the effort of keeping my voice steady while something inside me tears at the sound of his pain. “So don’t you dare call me and ask if any of it was real while you’re standing on a foundation built out of missing people.”
“And what you did is better?” His voice hardens, the hurt crystallizing into something sharper. “You sat next to me. Ate with me. Laughed with me. Let me take you to a place I hadn’t shared with anyone since my sister died. Let me touch you. And the whole time, you were working me. Filing away everything I said. Reporting it back to whoever sent you.”
“Yes.” I don’t flinch from it. “I was.”
“And the night you came to my house. Was that the job too? You needed something, so you showed up and fucked me for it?”
“Don’t—”
“You came to my door. You kissed me. You stayed. And before I woke up, you took what you needed and left without a word. So tell me, Willow—tell me how that’s different from what I did. I walked wolves to trucks. You walked into my bed to steal from my phone.”
The comparison is obscene. I know it’s obscene. He’s equating sex under false pretenses with feeding children into a system that cuts them apart. They’re not the same. They’re not even in the same universe of moral weight.
The accusation stabs anyway. Because underneath the false equivalence, there’s a splinter of truth: I did use his body to access his phone. I did kiss him knowing I was there to steal from him. And the fact that my reasons were righteous doesn’t make the act clean.
“We both do things that are morally reprehensible,” I say. “The difference is, what I did might save lives. What you did ended them.”
Another silence. Then: “You used me. You slept with me to get information. You came to my house and you—” His voice breaks. Reassembles. “You whored yourself for a fucking phone number.”
The word lands. It’s designed to hurt, and it does—a slash across something already raw. My wolf howls from the place I’ve buried her, not in rage but in anguish, the sound of an animal that recognizes its other half inflicting damage and can’t make it stop.
I don’t let the hurt color my voice.
“Call it whatever makes you feel righteous. I’ll take that word over the one the families in your trucks would use for you.”
The silence stretches. I hear him breathing. Rough. Uneven. The sound of a man holding himself together the way I’m holding myself together: by force of will.
When he speaks again, the cruelty is gone. What’s left is something worse: honesty.
“I found the ledger,” he says. Very quietly. “My father’s. They were paid for every wolf they relocated. More for families.” A pause. “More for children.”
The information registers through the rage. Payments. For lives. More for children.
“Your father,” I say.
“He made the deal. After Maren. He knew what they were: Syndicate, or close enough. He told us that they were being taken to be resettled. But he knew that wasn’t true. Knew they weren’t coming back.” His voice is raw. “Garrett maintained the program. I executed it. And none of us asked what was on the other end of the road because asking would have meant admitting what we were.”