The convoy pulls out. I ride in the lead vehicle. Conner is in the third. The distance between us is the length of two trucks and the width of everything that’s happened since a bar restroom in Cedar Falls.
Brenna is beside me. She drove. She hasn’t spoken since we cleared the compound.
We’re ten miles north, the facility burning orange in the rearview mirror, when she says: “You know what that was. Back there. When you lost his signal.”
I stare at the road ahead. Don’t answer.
“I saw your face, Willow. I saw the ward drop. I saw what happened to you when you couldn’t feel him.” She pauses. Chooses her words the way Brenna always chooses her words: with the precision of a woman who’s spent her life making language do exactly what she needs it to. “That’s a mate bond.”
I suck in a breath, the sound sharp in the silence of the cab.
Mate bond. The thing I’ve been denying. The pull I couldn’t explain, the hollowness when he was gone, the thread-sense reaching for a wolf outside my bloodline.
“It’s why your magic has strengthened,” she adds. “Your wolf chose him. Even before you understood what choosing meant.”
Oh, my God. Of course.
“I’ve seen it,” Brenna says. “I’ve lived it. What you felt when his signal disappeared… I felt the same thing when I thought Merric was dead. It’s the bond. It’s been the bond since the beginning. Your wolf knew. You didn’t want to.”
I don’t argue. I don’t have the energy to argue. The facility is burning behind us, and thirty wolves are in the convoy, and the toddler’s screaming is still echoing in my head, and the man in the third truck carried children out of a building I breached. And I nearly killed us all when I couldn’t feel him.
Mate.
The word sits in my chest beside the steady pulse of his signal; back now, warm, alive, two trucks behind me.
I don’t say anything. Brenna doesn’t push. We drive north. Dawn is coming. The sky to the east is lighter, the stars thinning.
Behind us, the facility burns.
Ahead of us, the road home.
And the bond hums between us. Alive. Damaged, unresolved. But alive.
Chapter 28
Conner
The convoy stops at a ranch north of San Antonio that belongs to someone Brenna knows. I don’t ask who. The property is fenced, gated, set back from the road. A safe point, anonymous, the kind of place that doesn’t appear on anyone’s radar.
Dawn is breaking when we pull in. The sky is pale gray, going pink at the edges. In the distance are the first ridges of the Hill Country. Familiar terrain. Not mine anymore, but familiar.
They triage the freed wolves in the main barn. Blankets, water, medical supplies that Nadia organized before the assault. Merric has brought in Frostbourne healers, who move through the group with the calm efficiency of people who’ve done this before, assessing injuries, treating wounds, separating the wolves who need immediate care from those who can wait.
I sit on a hay bale outside the barn door and let someone look at my shoulder. Dislocated. The healer—a woman in her thirtieswho won’t meet my eyes—resets it with a grip that I feel all the way to my teeth. She wraps it, gives me something for the pain that I pocket without taking, and moves on.
The toddler won’t let go.
She’s been handed off to a healer twice now, and both times she’s screamed herself purple and reached for me with both arms until someone brought her back. She’s sitting on my lap with her fists locked in my shirt, her face against my chest, making small hitching sounds that aren’t quite crying. She hasn’t spoken. I don’t know if she can.
The teenager—the one from the east wing who shielded the younger children with her body—sits on the hay bale beside me. She’s wrapped in a blanket, holding a cup of water she hasn’t drunk. She hasn’t spoken either, but she hasn’t left. She’s positioned between me and the barn door. Guarding. Still guarding.
“What’s her name?” I ask, looking down at the toddler.
“Mia.” The teenager’s voice is rough. Damaged from disuse or screaming or both. “She’s been in there since she was two.”
Since she was two. Which means she’s spent half her life in a Syndicate facility. Half her life in the building I just pulled her out of. The building my family’s program could have delivered her to.
This child on my lap. She was two years old when a wolf like me walked her family into hell. She’s been in a cage ever since.