“Sorry.” The word comes out in a gasp. Then: “Briar.”
“Not now.”
“Briar. I need to tell you—”
“Not. Now.”
“I got it. What I went in for. I got what I needed.”
I almost stop. Almost. My stride hitches, and Conner feels it and adjusts, and we keep moving.
“What?”
“Everything Creed told me. The locations of other facilities he mentioned during interrogation.” He coughs. Blood on his lips. “I wasn’t just sitting in that chair, Briar. I was working.”
I look at the ruin of him, the battered body, and the torn flesh. And underneath the damage, the expression on his face. The same expression I saw at the hearing. Not the alpha mask. Not a performance.
A man who walked into a cage with his eyes open and came out with the map.
“You stupid, reckless, arrogant son of a bitch,” I say.
The corner of his mouth lifts. The good side. The side that isn’t split.
“Missed you too.”
We reach the vehicles. Willow opens the back of the SUV. We load Garrett. He goes down on the seat and his body curls. The sound he makes when his ribs hit the upholstery is the first real sound of pain I’ve heard from him. I get in beside him. Conner takes the front. The other captives go in the second vehicle, Rook and Sienna with them, the chained man across the back seat, his chains pooling on the floor.
Merric drives. The headlights stay off. We pull out of the creek bed onto the access road, and the burning facility falls behind us, the orange glow shrinking in the mirrors.
Above, the Cravens bank away from the smoke. Two shapes against the stars, massive, the wingspan blocking the light as they climb. They’re pulling out, covering our retreat from altitude.
Mara’s voice is in the earpiece. “All teams clear. Facility compromised. No pursuit detected. Say again: no pursuit.”
“Copy,” Merric says.
The road opens ahead of us. Dark. South Texas scrub on both sides. The smell of smoke fades as we put miles between us and the burning.
On the seat beside me, Garrett is breathing in short, shallow pulls. I have his hand in both of mine, his fingers cold despite the fever heat of the rest of him. I hold on. His fingers tighten, faintly, around mine.
I sit in the back seat, and I face forward, and I don’t look at his face because if I look at his face, I’m going to do something that wolves don’t do in vehicles full of people.
But finally, the beast within is quiet. Settled. The stillness of an animal that has retrieved what was taken from her and is holding it close.
My hands are still shaking. But they’re holding his, and his are holding back.
The miles pass.
Merric drives.
Nobody speaks.
Chapter 31
Garrett
The compound appears through the trees like something from a different century. Log buildings. A barn with a cedar-shake roof. Smoke from a kitchen chimney. Fenced pastures running up into forested hills, and the hills rising into the Ozark ridges that I’ve been feeling through the bond for weeks without ever seeing.
So this is Ravenclaw.