I settle back in my seat and avoid saying anything that might rile her. Which is basically anything at all. I stare out the window again.
The mark on my neck pulses where Willow’s teeth found it in the tack room. Not pain. Presence. A constant low-frequency awareness of where she is: two vehicles ahead, riding with Brenna, alive and whole.
Briar breaks the silence outside Temple.
“The girl from the east wing. Kessa. She’s been talking to Arden.”
“About what?”
“About the facility. How it operated. The internal hierarchy, the guard schedules, what they did to the wolves inside.” Briar’s voice carries no inflections. “Arden was inside for months. She kept her head down, made herself useful to the staff, and memorized everything. She’s got a map of the entire operation in her head.”
“That’s useful intelligence.”
“It’s more than that. She knows about other facilities. The one we hit isn’t the only one. There’s a network, at least three more that she’s aware of, scattered across the south. Different locations, same operation.”
The information doesn’t surprise me. Of course there are more. The payments in my father’s ledger went back a decade. One facility wouldn’t have needed a constant, ongoing supply. The network is bigger than a single compound in the brush country.
“Does Brenna know?”
“She knows.” Briar turns the wheel, guiding us around a slow-moving cattle truck. “Arden’s been debriefing with Nadia. The intelligence she’s carrying is going to reshape the Aurora Collective’s entire operation against the Syndicate’s southern network.”
“And Lachlan? The man who was with her?”
“Different pack. Not magic-blooded. He was imprisoned because he was protecting someone who was.” She’s quiet for a moment. “He hasn’t left Arden’s side since the extraction. Not once.”
I don’t comment on that. But I make a mental note. A wolf who went to prison for protecting a magic-blood. A different kind of loyalty than the one I was taught.
“I’m glad she had someone there for her,” I finally say. “Our family has a lot to atone for.”
She shoots a look at me. “I can see you believe that, Conner Forrester. I think you’re sorry about what happened.” Her eyes move back to the road. “Others, not so much.” Her jaw sets. “Some people deserve everything they’ve got coming to them.”
I frown at that, but don’t say anything. She’s not wrong.
We cross into Arkansas in the late afternoon. The terrain changes, brown giving way to green. Creeks that run with actual water.
Willow’s territory. The hills she described—green and wet, fog in the valleys, everything growing. I understand now why she talked about it the way she did. It’s beautiful in a way that’s nothing like where I grew up. Not better. Different. Alive in a different way.
The convoy turns off the main highway onto a series of increasingly narrow roads. Gravel, then dirt, then a track through hardwood forest that opens into a valley.
Ravenclaw.
A sprawling timber-frame lodge anchoring a spread of outbuildings—barns, workshops, a long bunkhouse with a porch that wraps its full length. Cleared pastureland runs down to a river that catches the last of the light, and beyond it, forested hills climb into evening mist. The scent of the valley hits me through the open window: damp earth, river water, the green sweetness of a place where rain is the default and drought is a rumor. Everything about this land sayswe grow things here. The Forrester compound sayswe hold the line. Different philosophies built into the soil itself.
The place has been rebuilt. I can see it in the fresh timber on the barn, the new fencing along the pasture, the solar panels on the workshop roof that look recently replaced. Whatever this ranch looked like before Brenna and Merric arrived, it’s been brought back from something worse. A training ground has been cleared east of the bunkhouse, the packed earth still raw, the posts new. Someone built that recently, and the precision of the layout says Merric’s hand was in it.
Smoke rises from the lodge chimney. Wolves are moving between buildings, turning at the sound of the convoy.
“Alpha Brenna!” someone calls. Wolves come out to meet us. They’re running toward the vehicles, toward the doors opening, toward the wolves climbing out. The sounds that follow are not words. They’re the sounds wolves make when the missing come home: cries, names, the physical collision of bodies that haven’t touched in months.
A woman breaks from the group and reaches the van where the worst cases are being unloaded. She sees someone inside, and the sound she makes—a raw, unfiltered howl of recognition—cuts through everything. She climbs into the van. The healer tries to stop her. She pushes past. Whatever she finds inside, she stays.
A gray-haired man stands at the edge of the crowd, scanning the faces climbing out of the trucks. He’s looking for someone specific. I watch him check face after face, the hope tightening in his expression each time it’s wrong. Then a woman steps out of the second vehicle—thin, unsteady, supported by a Ravenclaw fighter—and the old man makes a sound I’ll hear in my sleep for the rest of my life. He crosses the distance in three strides and takes her in his arms, and his legs give out. They go down together, kneeling in the dirt, holding each other, and nobody tries to move them.
I stand beside the last truck, watch the homecoming, and try to breathe through the fist that’s closed around my chest. These wolves. These families. Once lost, and now they’re home. The people who love them are holding them, and the sounds they’re making are the sounds of a pack reknitting after a wound.
A wound I helped inflict.
“Hard to watch.”