Dawes doesn’t talk. Somewhere past Austin, he says, “You have the statement?”
“Inside pocket.”
“Good.”
He doesn’t ask which version. I don’t offer.
The warmth in my chest travels with me. The pull north is quieter today than it’s been in weeks. Not gone. Softer.
Whatever is happening to her, it’s not pain. I know what her pain feels like — I felt it the night she pushed the child’s nightmares through. This is the opposite. A rightness. An anchor.
I should know what it is. I don’t.
We pull into Lost Creek a little before ten. The council ranch is already full — trucks, SUVs, the pickups of pack delegations that have driven in from across the southern territories. The lot is a map of who showed up: pack colors on hat bands and jacket patches, the tribal courtesies of a governance system my father taught me to read when I was sixteen.
Dawes parks and turns off the engine.
“Brenna Corvus’s delegation is here,” he says, nodding toward the far end of the lot. A cluster of Ravenclaw wolves by a larger truck. Merric Rourke, the Frostbourne alpha, is with them. So is my brother, who aims a brief nod in my direction. And standing at the tailgate, dark hair pulled back, high collar even in the heat — Briar.
The pull in my chest sharpens. A tightening. Recognition.
She doesn’t look up.
“Let’s go,” I say.
We walk across the lot. The warmth in my chest is steady. My wolf is watchful. The statement is in my pocket.
The hearing hall is timber-framed, high-ceilinged, already half-full of wolves arranging themselves by delegation. The respondents’ side has a single row of chairs. Dawes and I take two of them.
I look across the room. My eyes find her without deciding to. Third row, behind the Corvus woman. Her profile. The line of her neck. She’s not looking at me.
Whatever is different about her is close, now. Close enough that my wolf has gone completely still.
I sit down.
The statement is in my pocket.
I don’t know yet which version I’m going to give.
Chapter 21
Briar
I don’t want to be here.
The meeting hall is on a ranch that’s hosted inter-pack councils for longer than anyone alive can remember. Open and airy, long windows, rows of chairs arranged around a central floor. The kind of room that smells like old wood and politics and the accumulated tension of a hundred decisions made by wolves who believed they were right.
Brenna didn’t give me a choice. “I need you there. You ran the reconnaissance. You traced the corridor. If their lawyers challenge the route evidence, I need the wolf who walked it.”
So I’m here. Third row, behind Brenna and Willow, wearing my now-customary high-collared shirt, and sitting very still while my body does its best to ruin me.
He’s across the room.
I knew he’d be here. Brenna told me he’d been summoned, that everyone expected him to send a representative, to dodgeit the way most men in his position would. He didn’t dodge. He came in person, and he’s sitting on the respondents’ side with his foreman beside him. The first time my eyes find him across thirty feet of meeting hall, my body lights up like I’ve touched a live wire.
He looks terrible. Weight he’s lost, the hollows under his eyes, the scars on his forearms visible below rolled shirtsleeves. He’s not hiding the cuts I gave him. I don’t know if that’s deliberate or if he’s past caring.
He feels me looking. His head turns. His eyes find mine across the room, and the contact is a physical thing: heat in my chest, my belly, lower. My wolf rises with a want so sharp it takes my breath. I look away before my face can betray what my body is doing.