Conner folded his affairs.
I take my coffee outside. The morning is warm already — Hill Country warm, the dry heat that builds early. Jessie has six of the younger fighters working close-quarters on the training ground east of the equipment barn. She moves through them quietly, adjusting a grip with two fingers on a wrist, moving on before anyone has time to say thank you.
She sees me cross the yard and nods. The nod is correct — respectful, professional, the nod she’s given me every morning for a decade.
But her eyes hold a beat longer than they used to. A question she hasn’t formed the words for.
I nod back and keep walking.
Ridley is in her stall, saddled. One of the hands anticipated me. I lead her out and mount up in the yard. She takes the ranch track without guidance. Past the south pasture where the Herefords are standing in the shade of the single live oak that survived the last drought. Through the cedar break where the limestone pushes up through the soil. Up the long slope to the ridge.
I let the reins go slack. My thighs do the work.
Which means the thoughts come. They always come on this ride.
Conner two nights ago. Calm, which made it worse. Conner angry I know how to manage. I’ve been redirecting his anger since he was fifteen. Conner calm is somebody I haven’t met. I think of his voice on the phone during our final call:
A three-year-old girl. She sleeps holding my finger because I’m the first person who didn’t hurt her.
The wolf stirs under my skin.
I tighten the reins. Conner is compromised. The magic-blood turned him. One child does not invalidate a system that has kept three generations of Forresters alive on this ground.
The wolf doesn’t respond to that. The wolf keeps pacing.
Ridley tops the ridge and stops without being asked. The marker stone sits under the live oak where it’s sat since the memorial service. Limestone, about two feet high, the surface smooth.
I dismount. Ground-tie Ridley. Sit on the rock shelf beside the stone.
The Hill Country stretches below, pastures going amber. The creek. The compound rooflines through the trees. My grandfather’s land. My father’s land. Mine now.
I touch the stone. My palm finds the place it always finds, where the weather has worn the limestone smoothest. The gesture is older than thought.
I was twenty-one when the call came. One of the townsfolk, telling me a girl had been found on the east trail, and she was alive, but there was magic involved, and we needed to come quickly.
We didn’t get there quickly enough.
My sister was on that trail.
A stray wolf was moving through our territory, a young male who didn’t know how to control the power he was carrying let a ward loose. The magic hit Maren and her horse, and neither stood a chance.
She was fourteen.
Conner held her. He was the one who got there first. I just got there for the aftermath. That was enough.
But not enough from me. I should have been there. I should have seen what that wolf was and gotten the bastard off our land.
Too late now, Forrester.
I shut the memory down. It waits here, at the stone, every time. I know its tricks. Today, it is not going to get more than this.
The corridor. My father started it in the summer after the funeral. He had contacts he’d never spoken about. A phone number. A name I was told to memorize and never write down. Thirty-seven wolves over ten years. I took it over when he stepped back, and I ran it. I was good at it. I made it efficient.
Ten years. Thirty-seven consignments. I never questioned the system.
Clean hands, clean ledger, clean pack.
I touch Maren’s initials with my thumb. The stone was for her. The corridor was for her. Every wolf who ever left on one of those trucks left for her, because I could not have another deadgirl on my ground. I could not have my mother in the kitchen when the phone rang again. I could not tell another father that his little girl was gone.