“If you go to her,” Garrett says behind me, “I’ll know. And I’ll assume everything you know about this pack’s operations is compromised.”
I stop. Don’t turn. “You should assume that anyway.”
I walk out.
My father is on the porch. I didn’t expect him. It’s early, and he hasn’t been an early riser since he gave up the alpha seat. But he’s there. Standing, not sitting. The rocking chair empty behind him. He’s dressed. Boots on. His hands are at his sides, and his face has the expression of a man who’s been waiting for this moment for longer than this morning.
He heard. The meeting hall isn’t soundproofed. He heard every word.
We look at each other. Father and son. The man who built the program and the man who ran it, standing on a porch where three generations of Forresters have made decisions about who belongs on this land and who doesn’t.
“You’re leaving,” he says.
“Yes.”
His mouth opens. Closes. Whatever he wants to say—an apology, a defense, a plea—gets stuck behind the same wall that’s kept him silent for years. The wall he built after Maren, the one that turned a grieving father into a man who could sell children and sit in a rocking chair and not speak about it.
“Take care of yourself, son,” he says finally.
It’s not enough. It’s not close to enough. But it’s the only door he knows how to open, and I can see the effort it costs him.
“Goodbye, Pop.”
I walk through the compound. Past the barn. Past the training grounds. Past the pencil marks on the doorframe. My mother drew those lines with a carpenter’s pencil every birthday, and after Maren was gone, the pencil went into a drawer and never came out.
I get in the truck. I don’t drive south immediately.
I drive east. To the ridge.
The place where my sister died is fifteen minutes from the compound. An outcrop overlooking the eastern valley, where the forest thins and the sky opens up. The stray wolf’s camp is long gone. The blast scar has healed over, the rock darkened but covered now with lichen and scrub. The only sign that anything happened here is a small marker stone that my father placed a month after the funeral. No inscription. Just a stone.
I sit on the ridge. The morning is bright. Below me, the valley stretches east. The same valley I’ve patrolled for a decade, the same ridgelines I’ve run in wolf form, the same terrain I’ve loved my entire life.
This land made me. The dirt is in my bones, and the water is in my blood, and the cedar is in my lungs. Leaving it is going to hurt in ways I can’t prepare for. Not the sharp pain of a break but the slow ache of something essential being removed, the phantom limb of a territory that’s no longer mine.
But the land didn’t build the pipeline. The land didn’t sell children. The land didn’t watch families drive south into a system designed to cut them open.
I did that. My family did that. On this land, using its roads and its ridgelines and its quiet places where no one asks questions.
I touch the marker stone. Warm from the sun. Maren’s stone.
I’m sorry, Mare. For all of it. For what they did in your name. For what I did.
I’m going to try to fix it.
I stand. Walk back to the truck.
I pull out my phone and type a message to the burner number:
I’m out. Left the pack. I have the physical ledger and the files. I know you don’t trust me. You shouldn’t. But I know things about the pipeline that could help your operation, and I’m not going to sit in Cedar Falls while wolves rot in a facility my family helped fill.
Tell me where to meet you. Somewhere neutral. I’ll come alone.
The response takes forty minutes. I sit on the ridge while the morning deepens and the shadows shorten and the Hill Country does what it always does: goes on being beautiful regardless of what the wolves on it have done.
My phone buzzes.
An address. A truck stop off the interstate, south of San Marcos. Then:Come alone. If I smell anyone else, you’ll never see me again.