“Merric’s twelve hours out. I’m with him. We hit the facility tomorrow night.”
Tomorrow night. Some of those families have been in that facility for months, maybe longer. The children have been suffering all that time.
And tomorrow night, we go in.
The thread-sense hums in my chest. The families. The children. The damaged bonds. And underneath all of it, the inexplicable pull toward a man who just called me a whore and then sent me the evidence to bring down his own family.
I close my eyes. Breathe. Open them.
Tomorrow night.
Chapter 24
Conner
I find Garrett in the meeting hall at dawn. He’s alone, which is rare. The hall is empty, and he’s standing at the table with the territory map spread in front of him and a cup of coffee going cold beside it.
He looks up when I walk in. Reads my face. His expression closes like a door.
“You didn’t go after them,” he says.
“No.”
“That was an order, Conner.”
“I know what it was.” I stop on the other side of the table. The map between us shows Forrester territory in detail: every boundary, every ridge, every road. The handoff junction on the county road is marked with a small red dot. I’ve never noticed the dot before. Now I can’t stop looking at it.
“I talked to Dad.”
Garrett goes still. Not the alpha-still he uses in pack meetings. Something more guarded. “About what?”
“The ledger. The payments. All of it.” I keep my voice level. “He told me everything, Garrett.”
“Where did you—?”
“The desk in the office. The lock took me thirty seconds.” I put my hands on the table. “He knew they weren’t being resettled. Knew they weren’t going someplace safe. He told me to my face.”
Garrett’s jaw works. His coffee sits untouched. For a moment, the space feels suspended. Two brothers on opposite sides of a table, a map between them, the red dot staring up at both of us.
“Dad was grieving,” Garrett says. “He wasn’t thinking clearly. He made decisions that—”
“He made a deal with the Syndicate to sell magic-blooded wolves. Including children. And then he handed the program to you, and you ran it for a decade. You called it protocol. You called it containment. You built a whole vocabulary around it so nobody had to say what it actually was.”
“And what was it actually, Conner? You tell me. Because from where I stood, it was the system that kept this pack safe after a fourteen-year-old girl died because some stray wolf couldn’t control his magic.”
“You’re going to use Maren to justify selling children.”
“I’m not justifying—”
“The facilities aren’t resettlement centers, Garrett. They’re labs. They experiment on magic-blooded wolves. Cut them open. All of them.”
Garrett’s expression doesn’t change. The alpha mask holds.
“You have that from the Ravenclaw woman,” he says. “An intelligence operative who was manipulating you. She’ll say whatever she needs to turn you against your own pack.”
“This isn’t about her. This is about the ledger. Dad’s handwriting. Payments per head—more for families, more for children. That’s not her word. That’s his.”
“The ledger is Dad’s business, not mine.”