“You said you have the ledger,” I say.
He opens the satchel. Pulls out a leather-bound book and a manila folder thick with papers. Holds them out.
I take them. Open the ledger. The handwriting is small and neat. Dates, amounts, columns of figures. I flip through the pages that go back a decade. There’s so much here that it feels overwhelming.
“The folder has communication logs,” he says. “Contact protocols. The relay numbers my father used to coordinate with the network. And financial routing information. The payments came through a series of accounts. A decent financial analyst should be able to trace them back to the source.”
He’s right. This is exactly what Aurora needs. The physical ledger corroborates the digital images he already sent. Thecommunication logs and financial routing are new. Intelligence we didn’t have.
“Why?” I ask. Notwhy are you helping?He covered that in the text. I mean something more fundamental. “Why now? You’ve had ten years to ask questions. Ten years to open a filing cabinet. Why didn’t you ask sooner?”
He doesn’t flinch from the question. “Because I didn’t want to. You already know that. I told myself the story, and I lived inside it, and I didn’t look at the walls because looking at the walls meant seeing what they were made of.” He pauses. “And then you sat next to me at a diner counter, and for some reason, I needed to question things. I couldn’t stop the answers from sounding wrong.”
It’s honest. I canfeelthe honesty, the involuntary connection still pulsing at the edge of my awareness, still reading him. He’s not performing. He’s not manipulating. He’s a man standing in a truck stop parking lot with nothing left except the truth and the hope that it’s enough to buy him a seat at the table.
It’s not enough. Not by a long way. But the intelligence is real. Brenna needs it, and the families in the facility don’t care about my feelings.
“Follow me,” I say. “Stay behind my truck. Don’t deviate.”
I drive south. He follows. Briar falls in behind him. He’ll see the second vehicle in his mirror and know he’s being watched. Good. Let him sit with that.
The motel is thirty minutes south. When we arrive, the full team is there.
Brenna and Merric pulled in two hours ago, earlier than expected, Merric having driven through the night. The Ravenclaw fighters and Frostbourne wolves are in rooms along the corridor. Rook is at the operations table with Nadia, refining the assault plan. Sienna is outside, running a circuit of the lotthat looks casual and isn’t. Dane is standing by the door, arms folded, large enough to make the room feel small.
Conner walks in behind me, and everything goes cold.
Every wolf present reads him instantly. Enforcer. Forrester. The man who formed part of the system we’re trying to take down. Dane straightens from the wall, his body shifting to combat readiness. Sienna appears in the doorway, silent and fast. Rook’s hand moves to the knife on his belt.
Merric doesn’t move. He watches from beside Brenna with the patient assessment of an alpha who’s been in enough rooms to know the difference between a threat and a complication.
“He’s an asset,” I say. “He has intelligence we need. He stays.”
“He’s a Forrester. A purist,” Dane says. Not an objection, a statement requiring response.
“Hewasa Forrester. He walked out this morning. Brought us what we need to crack the facility’s network.”
It feels odd to be defending him, considering the mess of emotions I’m trying to unravel, but somehow, it feels important that they accept him.
I hand the ledger and folder to Jericho. He opens them, scans the first pages, and his expression shifts: the look of a man who’s found exactly what he needed.
“The routing information,” Jericho says. “Give me two hours, and I can trace the entire network from the Forrester operation to the facility’s internal systems.”
That settles it. Not trust. Utility. Conner is tolerated because what he brings is worth more than the risk of having him in the room.
Brenna watches the exchange. Says nothing. But her eyes move between Conner and me, and I know she’s reading everything I’m not saying. The connection I can’t explain. The way my wolf—my beaten, buried, sullen wolf—has calmed down, the agitation easing simply because he’s in the room.
I hate that she can see it. I hate that it’s visible.
The planning session runs through the afternoon. The team assembles around Nadia’s makeshift control center. Briar delivers the ground picture: approaches, guard rotations, the creek bed blind spot, the four-minute patrol gap. Jericho layers in the communication intelligence—now enhanced by the Forrester logs—and charts the facility’s internal security. Rook builds the assault framework. Merric inputs field experience.
Conner sits at the edge of the group and contributes when asked: transport protocols, the handoff procedure, the contact’s operational patterns. His knowledge fills gaps in Jericho’s analysis. The team listens with the grudging attention of professionals who recognize useful intelligence regardless of the source.
Brenna runs through the operation. Three teams: breach, perimeter, extraction. The breach team hits the main entrance through the creek bed blind spot during the patrol gap. Perimeter holds the outside and neutralizes any response from the guard rotation. Extraction moves in behind the breach team to locate and evacuate the captives.
“Willow leads the breach,” Brenna says. “She’ll feel where the families are and guide the team to them.”
Rook nods. “Dane and I stack behind her. She reads, we clear.”