“The pack? Probably not. We’re not worth the resources — we’re a broken supply line, not a threat. But if they want to send a message to the other packs still running corridors…” I look at the yard. The fighters on the mat. “They’d come for me.”
Jessie is quiet for a beat. “That’s not going to happen.”
“It might.”
“Garrett—”
“If it does, it does.” I look at her. “But no more wolves take damage for what I built. Not Forrester. Not anyone. That’s not negotiable.”
She holds my eyes for a moment. Nods once. Then she walks back to her group, shoulders tight with something she’s decided not to say.
I stand in the yard and reach for Briar. The press against whatever she keeps closed. I can’t stop. I don’t try to stop anymore.
The closed door doesn’t slam this time. It eases shut. Slowly. Reluctantly. And in the half-second before it seals, something comes through that isn’t anger. I store it alongside the feel of her fingers tracing the scar on my forearm while I moved inside her. The word she whispered —please— that cracked me open more than any knife could. The fact that she stayed.
I walk back to my study and sit at the desk.
The Syndicate is circling. The hearings are coming. The compound is stretched thin, and the wolves who stayed are going to learn the truth. Some of them will leave. Three hundred miles north, a woman who carried a stuffed rabbit six hundred miles for revenge is carrying my bite on her neck and going back to her life.
My wolf is quiet. Not restless. Decided.
I sit at the desk and get to work.
Chapter 19
Briar
I run the perimeter three times the morning I get back. Not because it needs checking. Because my body is still humming with the aftershock of the night with him, and the only thing that quiets the hum is exhaustion. So I run. South ridge, creek crossing, western slope, back again. Human form, because I still don’t trust my wolf not to turn me around and point me in his direction.
The third time up the ridge, my stomach flips.
Not nausea. Something sharper. A rolling lurch, and then it passes, and I’m fine. Except I’m not fine, because my wolf just did something strange. She curled inward. Toward my center, toward my belly, with a protective focus I’ve never felt from her before. Not guarding against a threat. Guarding something.
I stop on the ridge. Press my hand to my stomach. Nothing hurts. Nothing feels different.
The protective curl relaxes. Whatever it was, it’s gone.
Probably just the damn heat cycle.
I keep running.
Back at the compound, the day is already going wrong.
I hear the argument before I see it. Voices from the lodge — raised, multiple, the pitch of wolves who’ve moved past discussion into grievance. I come through the back door, and the kitchen is full.
Martin Donovan is standing at the head of the table. Fifties. Lean. The kind of face that used to be open and now carries permanent lines the facility carved into him. His wife sits behind him, silent, her hands in her lap. Three other survivors are ranged around the table: a woman I know as Elly, a younger man whose name I haven’t learned, and Kessa, standing apart near the window, arms folded, watching.
Brenna is at the counter. Merric beside her. Conner at the end of the table, Mia on his hip. Willow is in the doorway opposite me.
“—three weeks,” Martin is saying. “Three weeks since the raid, and the Forresters are still in their compound. Still running their ranch. Still living their lives while my family—” His voice breaks on the last word. He pulls it back. “My wife can’t sleep. My children won’t eat in rooms with closed doors. And the man who put us in that facility is sitting on his porch drinking coffee.”
“The council hearings will hold him to account,” Brenna says.
“The council hearings are politics.” Martin’s hand comes down on the table. Not a slam. A placement. Deliberate. “We don’t need politics. We need those wolves held to account.”
“And they will be. The evidence—”
“Evidence takes months. Years. Bern has allies on every council in the south. He’ll delay, deflect, bury it in procedure. And while he does, Garrett Forrester walks free.”