I don’t say anything. I sit beside him, and I let his words exist without trying to soften them.
“The Forrester,” he says again. “He’s here. I saw him.”
“Yes.”
“Is he a prisoner?”
“No. He left his pack. Brought evidence. Helped with the extraction.”
Martin is quiet. Processing that. The enforcer who walked his family to the truck is now sleeping in a cabin fifty yards from the one where Leah is wrapped in a borrowed blanket because her mother’s quilt is in a box in a storage room that no longer exists.
“I don’t know what to do with that,” he says.
“You don’t have to know tonight.”
He nods. Goes back inside. I sit on the porch alone and listen to the valley settling. Crickets, the creek, an owl somewhere in the eastern woods. Sounds I grew up with. Sounds that mean home.
Conner is in the last cabin on the row, the one Merric assigned him, at the far edge of the property, as far from the rescued wolves as possible. He’s awake. I can feel it: the restless, uneven energy of a man who can’t shut his mind off. He’s replaying the facility. The medical room. The children’s faces. The drain in the floor. I can see these images in my head as clearly as if I’d witnessed them myself.
I could go to him. My wolf, content at last, is oriented toward his cabin the way she’s always been oriented toward him. Going to him would be easy. Natural. The claiming was two days ago, and my body still hums with the memory of it: the tack room, the saddle blankets, his teeth on my neck.
I don’t go. Not because I don’t want to. Because I need to be here. With my wolves. With the families I went to Cedar Falls to find. The claiming doesn’t change the mission. The bond doesn’t erase the work.
There’s still so much to be done. It’s a thought that doesn’t leave my mind as I run through a string of tasks before I finally head to bed. Not with Conner; it’s too soon for the survivors to be faced with that right now. But it’ll come.
The second day is logistics. Brenna runs Ravenclaw the way she runs everything. With precision, delegation, and the understanding that people heal faster when they have something to do. The rescued wolves who can work are given tasks: meal prep, supply sorting, the simple labor of settling into a new place. The ones who can’t are left alone with the healers and the quiet.
I spend the morning with Arden in the back room of the lodge, a map of Texas spread between us on the table. She’s remarkably composed for a woman who spent months in a Syndicate facility. Or maybe composure is what got her through it.
“Tell me what they were doing in there,” I say. “Not the layout, we saw that. I need to understand the operation.”
She doesn’t hesitate. “They were trying to extract magic. Isolate it from the blood, separate it from the wolf. They thought if they could identify the mechanism—the thing that makes magic-blooded wolves different—they could weaponize it.”
“How?”
“Blood draws first. Constant. Multiple times a week for every wolf in the facility. They’d test, catalog, compare results across bloodlines. Different wolves carry different signatures, and they were tracking the variations.” She pauses. “Then the procedures. For the wolves whose magic was strongest, they went further. Surgical extraction. Tissue samples. Bone marrow. Whatever they thought carried the highest concentration.”
I write it down. I don’t push.
“The children were the priority,” she says. Her voice doesn’t change, but her hands press harder against the table. “Young wolves, wolves whose magic hadn’t stabilized yet… they were the most valuable. Something about the developing signature being easier to isolate. The guards talked about it like livestock grading. Premium stock.”
I study her face. She says it the way you’d describe a system you’d been forced to learn: matter-of-fact, clinical. But her hands are flat on the table, fingers spread, pressing down like she needs the contact with something solid.
“Did it work?” I ask. “The extraction.”
“I don’t know. They never told us results. But the wolves who went through the worst procedures came back… less. Quieter. As if something had been taken that didn’t grow back.” She breathes. “Whether they got what they wanted, I can’t say. But they kept doing it. Month after month. That tells you they thought they were getting somewhere.”
“And the wolves who supplied them—the packs feeding the pipeline. Did they know what was happening inside?” I don’t ask it for the mission; I ask because I need to know.
“The facility staff didn’t discuss sourcing with us. But I overheard things. The intake process was standardized. Wolves arrived with paperwork… not names, numbers. Assigned on arrival. Whatever the packs were told about resettlement, the people inside that facility had no illusions about what they were running.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then:
“It wasn’t chaos in there. That’s the thing people won’t understand when we tell them. It was a system. Intake, assessment, procedure, recovery, repeat. They had schedules. Forms. Filing cabinets.” Her mouth thins. “The banality of it was worse than the pain.”
I think about the ledger. Tidy rows of figures, as innocuous as any ordinary accounting system. The banality was built into the structure from the beginning. Nobody who designed the pipeline thought of themselves as a monster. They thought of themselves as administrators. Scientists.
“Other facilities,” I say. “What do you know?”