That code leads to a corridor. The corridor leads to a junction on a county road in the Texas Hill Country. And that junction leads to a man.
Not the man who ran the facility. Not the ones who strapped wolves to tables or drew blood.
The man who made sure the system worked.
Garrett Forrester.
Brenna and Merric have been working with those ledgers, building a case for the council hearing that will make it public record. Names, dates, payments. The premium for younger wolves. The financial trail that connects the Forrester operation to a network spanning six states. It will all be official, eventually. Part of the political machinery they’re building toward a reckoning with Nathan Bern.
It’s not enough.
A hearing is words in a room. Garrett Forrester is still in his compound, still breathing the air of the territory he maintained, and somewhere in the system he fed, there are more boxes. More shoes. More rabbits with button eyes.
I reach the truck and open the door.
I could hand this over. Let Brenna finish building it. Let Merric take it through the channels they’ve been putting in place. Let the council decide what justice looks like.
But that leaves him where he is.
Not good enough.
I stow the pack behind the passenger seat and climb in. The keys are in my jacket. The route is already set—through Arkansas, south through the flats, into the Hill Country.
I know the terrain around the Forrester compound. I spent two weeks on those ridgelines with Willow, tracking scent trails through the brush, scouting approaches the sentries didn’t cover. I know where the gaps are. I know which trails run close to the boundary without crossing it. I know the eastern approach because I walked it in the dark.
And I know Garrett Forrester rides that boundary alone.
I saw him ride out on a bay horse, no escort, heading for a point on the ridge where a marker stone sits under an old live oak. He stayed for twenty minutes. Then he rode back.
He did the same thing a week later.
A man alone. A routine. A vulnerability.
I start the engine. The ranch recedes in the mirror—lodge, cabins, smoke rising from Greta’s kitchen, wolves moving between buildings. Safe. Rebuilding. The slow work of putting something back together after it’s been torn apart.
That’s what they’re doing here.
It isn’t what I do.
Merric used to say I was born in the wrong form—that the wolf fit better than the woman. He wasn’t wrong.
I’ve spent more of my life on four legs than two, running territory no one else wanted. The few times I’ve tried to do something different, it never held.
This does.
This is a hunt. That’s something I was born for.
But this time, I’m tracking something with teeth.
Chapter 2
Garrett
The compound is too quiet. Not the physical quiet — the dogs are barking at the barn cats, the generator is running, and somewhere behind the meeting hall, one of the younger wolves is splitting firewood with the steady thud of someone who’s been told to stay busy. What’s missing is underneath.
I cross the yard with my coffee. Ellis is hauling water to the chicken coop.
“Morning, Alpha.” He nods.