He stands too. Slowly. Watching me. Not reaching, not trying to close the distance. Just watching. And the look on his face isn’t the alpha mask or the wolf’s intensity or even the openness that cracked me this morning.
It’s patience. He’s letting me go.
Good. It’s for the best.
“I want nothing from you,” I say. My voice is flat. Briar’s voice. The one I wear when the real one is too dangerous to use. “Nothing unless I’m killing you.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it, Garrett.”
“I know you do.” He says it without argument. Without the alpha pushing back.
I turn and walk into the trees.
I don’t look back. If I look back, I’ll see him standing there, and if I see him standing there, my wolf will turn me around, and if I turn around, I’m lost.
The forest closes behind me. The distance stretches. He stays where he is, in the moss and the morning light, and he lets me go.
I shift and head back to the compound. It’s only when I’m back in my room that I sit on my bed and put my head in my hands. I don’t cry because I never cry, but my body shakes.
The part of me that almost laughed at something Garrett Forrester said — that’s the part that scares me most.
Because that part didn’t feel like hate.
It felt like the beginning of something I’m not equipped to survive.
Chapter 18
Garrett
The compound smells wrong when I get back. Not a threat. Just the wrongness of a place that should feel like home and doesn’t, because my wolf has relocated without telling me. Home is now a woman in the Ozarks, and this — the barn, the house, the fences I’ve been maintaining since I was barely a man — is just the place I’m standing while I figure out what comes next.
Two nights gone. Dawes knew I was leaving, though he didn’t ask where. He’s not asking now, though he’s reading everything the return is showing him: the scruff, the weight I’ve dropped, the general agitation. He looks at the silver scars on my forearms, processes them, and moves on. He’s never asked about those either.
“What happened while I was gone?” I ask.
“Cal spotted a vehicle on the south road Tuesday night. Slowed near the junction, didn’t stop. Plates traced to a shell company in Houston.”
Syndicate. Watching the junction. Reminding me they know where we live.
“There’s something else.” Dawes shifts his weight. The fidget that means he’s been sitting on something he doesn’t like. “Boundary patrol picked up a stray on the east line this morning. Female. Young. Magic-blooded. She was on foot, moving slow. Ellis said she looked like she’d been running for days.”
“Where is she now?”
“Still at the boundary. Ellis is with her. He didn’t know what to call it in as. Protocol’s been… he wasn’t sure what the protocol was anymore.”
The protocol. The word I built around the corridor so that moving magic-blooded wolves off Forrester land sounded like filing paperwork.
“I’ll go,” I say.
Ellis is at the east boundary with a woman who looks like the running has nearly finished her. Early twenties, maybe younger. Thin in the way that happens when a body’s been spending more than it takes in for weeks. She’s on her feet but barely, her weight against a fence post, watching my approach with the eyes of an animal that’s learned what alphas do.
She’s watching my hands.
I’ve noticed that. Since Briar pushed a child’s nightmare through, and I stood on the roadside with my face wet. I see it everywhere now. Wolves who watch hands instead of faces. Wolves who brace when someone moves toward them. We did that. The purist packs.
I’m not feeling so pure anymore.