“And you?” I ask the teenager. “How long?”
“Seven months.” She drinks the water. Sets the cup down. “My name’s Kessa. Hartley pack. Oklahoma.”
Hartley pack. The pack Tate’s friend Kira came from. The girl who was relocated at sixteen and never heard from again.
“Did you know a girl named Kira?” I ask. “From Hartley. Relocated about three years ago.”
Kessa’s hands tighten on the blanket. “Kira was there when I arrived. She helped me. Showed me how to survive, which guards to avoid, how to make yourself useful so they didn’t—” She stops. “She was transferred out two months before you came. I don’t know where.”
Transferred out. To somewhere else in the network. Another facility. Another set of fluorescent lights and restraint straps.
I look at Mia. She’s fallen asleep against my chest, her breathing finally even, her fists still twisted in my shirt. Too thin. Too fragile.
I was the machine. For ten years. The front end of a system that took children like Mia, wolves like Kessa, and people like Kira, and fed them into a network that cut them apart. I didn’t know what was at the other end. I told myself that mattered. It doesn’t.
“Conner.”
I look up. Willow is standing ten feet away.
She’s filthy. Dust and smoke and dried blood on her hands—not hers, I think, but I can’t tell from here. Her hair has come loose from its tie, auburn strands stuck to her face. Her eyes are red-rimmed with exhaustion and something else. Something raw.
I’ve never seen anything more lovely.
She looks at me. Looks at Mia sleeping on my chest. Looks at Kessa beside me. Her expression does something complicated, too many things moving behind it for me to read.
“Can we talk?” she says.
I look down at Mia. Kessa reads the situation and reaches over. Gently, carefully, she eases Mia’s fists open and lifts her into her own lap. Mia stirs, whimpers, then settles against Kessa’s chest. The teenager wraps the blanket around both of them and nods at me. Permission to go.
I stand. The shoulder protests. I follow Willow away from the barn, past the vehicles, to a fence line at the edge of the property.
We stand at the fence. Not touching. Not looking at each other. Two wolves at a property line, staring at the horizon. The air between us hums with something I can feel along the bond that’s becoming so familiar to me. Her presence, warm and electric and complicated, registering in my chest like a frequency my body has learned to track.
“You were good today,” she says, almost reluctantly. I nod. “I’m not saying it’s enough, but I wanted you to know that.”
“I’ll do whatever I have to do,” I tell her. “For them… For you.”
A muscle in her cheek works. “Sure,” she says.
It’s not an enthusiastic response, but I don’t expect one. As it is, I can sense a flood of emotions at war inside her. I don’t want to add to the turmoil.
“I need to tell you about Maren,” I say.
She doesn’t respond. But she stays. That’s enough.
“It was October. The last morning I saw her alive, she was in the kitchen arguing with Mom about whether she could take the bay mare out. The bay was half-wild; Dad hadn’t finished breaking her. Maren said she could handle it. Mom said no. Maren went and saddled the horse while Mom’s back was turned.” I almost smile. Almost. “That was Maren. She’d argue until you stopped listening, and then she’d do it anyway.”
I haven’t told this story in full to anyone. Garrett knows it. My parents lived it. But the complete version—the one with the details I’ve been carrying for a decade—I’ve kept that locked away.
“A stray wolf—male, mid-twenties, magic-blooded—had been camping on the eastern margin of our territory for about a week. We knew he was there. Dad knew. Nobody moved on him because he wasn’t causing trouble. He was just there. Passing through.”
I look at my hands on the fence rail. The same hands that carried Mia out of the east wing.
“The stray was unstable. His magic was erratic, flaring at random, wards going up and coming down without pattern. We should have moved him along the day Dawes found him. But Dad said leave him. He wasn’t hurting anyone.”
A hawk crosses the sky above us. Neither of us watches it.
“Maren took the ridge trail above his camp. She was on the bay. I don’t know if she saw the camp or just rode past it… It doesn’t matter. His magic blew. A ward—massive, uncontrolled, the kind of thing that happens when a wolf can’t regulate his own power. It went off like a bomb. The blast wave hit Maren and the horse. The horse died instantly. Maren didn’t. It probably would have been better if she had.”