“Bullshit.” I snarl the word. “You signed the assessment forms. You set the protocol. You told me where to take them and who to call. You might not have banked the checks, but you built the system that earned them.”
“A system that works.”
“Works for who? Not for the wolves in those trucks. Not for the kids I loaded into the back of a vehicle—”
“You don’t know what happens to them. You have the word of a woman who lied to you—”
“I have Dad’s word. He chose the Syndicate. And you maintained it.”
Garrett is quiet for a count of five. The longest silence of the conversation. When he speaks again, his voice has dropped. Not the alpha command tone; something lower, rawer. The brother, surfacing.
“What would you have had me do? Dad was broken. The pack needed leadership. I had a program in place that removed the one thing that killed our sister. Was I supposed to dismantle it?”
“You were supposed to ask questions.”
“I asked the questions that mattered. Are our wolves safe? Is the territory pure? The answers were yes.”
“And the question you didn’t ask: where do the wolves go after we hand them over?”
“That wasn’t my—”
“It was. The second you put a family in a truck, what happens next is your responsibility. You don’t get to draw a line at the junction and say everything south of it is someone else’s problem.”
He stares at me. I stare back. The red dot on the map sits between us like an accusation.
“Forget the magic for a moment.” My voice is cold. “The children, Garrett. Fuckingchildren. Did you ever—for one second—think about what was happening to them?”
The flicker. I see it: a beat where the mask shifts and something looks out from behind it that isn’t the alpha, isn’t the politician. Something that might be horror. Or might be the recognition that horror is what he should have been feeling all along, arriving ten years too late.
He kills it. Fast. The mask seals.
“The program is what it is. I won’t apologize for protecting my people. And I won’t let a magic-blood’s sob story dismantle everything this family built.”
I look at my brother. I see the man who taught me to track when I was ten. The man who held the pack together after Dad collapsed. The man who sat with me the night Maren died and said,“We’ll make sure this never happens again.”And I believed him because he was my brother, and believing him was easier than thinking about what “never again” actually required.
I believed him for ten years. I did what was expected of me. And every time I came back, his approval was waiting.Good work. Clean operation. Protocol followed.
Protocol followed.
“I’m done,” I say.
Garrett’s expression shifts. Not surprise; he saw this coming. The calculation in his eyes is already running: what this means for the pack, for security, for the program.
“You walk out of here, and you’re walking away from your pack,” he says. “Your family. Everything you are.”
“Everything I was.”
“There’s no coming back from this, Conner.”
“I know.”
We look at each other. Ten years of duty and shared grief stretched between us like a wire about to snap.
“Whoever she is,” Garrett says quietly, “she’s not worth this.”
“This isn’t about her. This is about whatwefucking did.”
I walk toward the door.