I start the engine. Pull off the ridge. Drive through the compound one last time, the gate passing on either side, the Forrester name on the post, the boundary between my world and everything else.
I don’t look in the mirror.
The highway stretches south. Three hours to San Marcos. The landscape I’ve known my whole life becoming unfamiliar, mile by mile, as I drive toward a woman who has every reason to hate me and a truth I’m no longer willing to run from.
My wolf faces forward. Toward whatever comes next.
The bracelet is warm on my wrist. Maren’s stone on the ridge behind me, growing smaller in the distance I won’t measure.
I’m going to try to fix it.
I don’t know if I can. But I’m going to try.
Chapter 25
Willow
The truck stop is a flat concrete square off the interstate south of San Marcos. Gas pumps, a diner with a neon OPEN sign missing the O, a parking lot half full of semis. The kind of place people pass through without remembering.
I arrive twenty minutes early. Briar is in a separate vehicle, parked at the far end of the lot with a clear sight line to the meeting point. Nadia is monitoring from the motel, tracking Conner’s phone signal as it moves south along the highway. If he’s not alone, we’ll know before he pulls in.
I stand beside my truck and wait. The air smells like diesel, fried food, and the dry-grass scent of brush country. A different Texas down here. Harsher. Less beautiful.
My magic is doing the thing again. Reaching north without my permission, stretching along the highway like a hand extended in the dark. I’ve been fighting it all morning, pulling it back,redirecting it toward the facility, toward the families. It obeys for a few minutes, then swings north again. Searching.
Then it finds him.
Not a direction this time. A presence. Specific, individual, unmistakable. I lock onto something coming down the highway, and the connection snaps taut. I feel him. Not his thoughts, not his words, but the sense of what he’s carrying. Grief. Determination. Self-loathing so deep it has its own gravity. And underneath all of it, aimed at me, something raw and unguarded that I flinch away.
I shouldn’t be able to feel this. The thread-sense connects to Ravenclaw bonds: pack bonds, family bonds, the web of connections I was born into. It has never reached toward a wolf outside my bloodline. Never latched onto a stranger’s emotional state. Until I arrived in a small town with a big secret and met him.
I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t have time to understand it. His truck is pulling off the interstate.
I watch him park. Three spaces away. He gets out.
He looks like hell. Two days of no sleep carved into his face, shadows beneath his eyes that look like bruises. He’s carrying a leather satchel, old-fashioned, fastened with a clasp. The physical evidence. The ledger.
His eyes find me across the parking lot, and my magic flares so hard I have to grip the truck bed to keep my face neutral. His intentions wash through me: no deception, no ambush, no hidden agenda. Just a man who’s driven for hours to hand over the evidence that will destroy his family, because a woman he barely knew told him the truth about what that family built.
I don’t want to feel this. I don’t want to know his intentions with the intimacy of someone reading a letter over its author’s shoulder. The connection is invasive, unwelcome, and terrifyingly clear.
Why do I feel like I’m in his head?
I shut it down. Or try to. The link dims but doesn’t disconnect. It sits at the edge of my awareness like a radio turned low—still audible, still tracking him, still feeding me information I didn’t ask for.
He walks toward me. Stops at ten feet. Respects the distance.
“Willow.”
“Conner.”
We look at each other. Forty-eight hours since I lay in his bed with his arm across my waist. Forty-eight hours since I pressed his thumb to a phone screen and walked out of his life. He looks older. The lines around his eyes are deeper. He looks like a man who’s just lost everything familiar and hasn’t found anything to replace it.
I feel nothing. That’s what I tell myself. I feel nothing for this man except the cold utility of an operative assessing an asset.
Liar.
My wolf objects from the dark place I’ve buried her. I ignore her.