Willow glances at me. Says nothing. She can read the thread between us, but she hasn’t asked about it again since that first conversation. The fact that she hasn’t pushed is the kindest thing anyone’s done for me in weeks.
The Chairman calls the room to order.
Brenna opens the case.
The evidence is methodical. The ledger, in Garrett’s father’s handwriting — Brenna holds it up, reads the entries, the dates, the amounts. Per-head payments that increased for younger wolves. A pricing structure that treated people as livestock graded by age.
I watch Garrett while Brenna reads. His face doesn’t change. The alpha mask, solid as stone. But his hands are on his knees, and his fingers are pressing into the fabric of his pants, and I can feel what the mask is costing him. Not words, not thoughts, just the effort.
Conner testifies.
He stands in the center of the room and talks about the corridor. The junction. The trucks. The contact number hecalled. His voice is steady — Brenna prepared him well — but his eyes keep finding Willow, and each time they do, something in his shoulders eases for a fraction of a second before the weight settles back.
He describes the last handoff. A family. A boy with a backpack looking back through the car window at the man who told his father to pack up. Conner’s voice doesn’t crack, but the room changes around his words. Chairs shift. Someone in the back row makes a sound.
Garrett’s fingers press deeper into his knees.
“But we found them,” Conner says. “We brought them back.” His throat works. “And we’re not going to rest until we find the rest of them.”
Arden testifies. The facility. The intake process. The numbering system. She delivers it the way she delivers everything — flat, precise, the clinical detachment of a woman who survived by memorizing details and is now weaponizing them. Lachlan sits in the front row while she speaks, and his stillness has the quality of a man holding something together by not moving.
The council chair turns to Garrett. “The respondent may address the evidence.”
The room tightens. Every delegation, every observer, every wolf in the building turns toward the man in the respondents’ chair. This is the moment they’ve been waiting for — the Forrester alpha’s defense. The polished statement, the justifications, the political performance that everyone expects because that’s what alphas do. They manage. They frame. They control the narrative.
Garrett stands up.
He’s taller than most of the wolves in the room. Broader. The physical authority of him fills the space the way it filled his compound when I watched from the ridgeline. Every wolf in theroom feels it — the involuntary adjustment, the subtle shifts in posture that happen when a dominant male is on his feet.
He looks at the council chair. He looks at Brenna. He looks at Conner.
He looks at me.
One second. His eyes on mine. And what I feel from him in that second isn’t the alpha’s composure. It’s the man from the forest — the one who lay in the moss and told me about his father and the corridor and stroked his thumb over my belly.
“The evidence is accurate,” he says. “I have no defense to offer.”
The room goes silent.
The stunned silence of fifty wolves who expected a fight and got a surrender. The council chair stares at him. Bern’s representatives, clustered on the far side of the room, exchange glances. Dawes, beside him, closes his eyes briefly.
“The corridor operated under my authority for over a decade,” Garrett says. “The payments described in the ledger were received and processed by my family’s accounts. The wolves who were transferred through the junction on our territory were transferred under my orders.”
“Mr. Forrester.” The council chair, recovering. “Are you declining to contest the evidence?”
“I’m confirming it.”
Murmuring. The room shifting, recalculating. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Accused alphas don’t stand up and agree with the prosecution. The political machinery that Bern has been preparing — the defense, the counter-narrative, the framing of the Forresters as a single bad actor manipulated by larger forces — all of it collapses in the space of two sentences.
Bern’s senior representative is on his feet. “The council should note that the respondent’s statement is made without legal counsel and may not reflect—”
“It reflects what happened,” Garrett says. He doesn’t raise his voice. Doesn’t need to. “The corridor was my operation. The payments were my family’s income. And the wolves who went into those trucks—” A pause. The first crack in the delivery. “I never asked where they went.”
He sits down.
The hearing continues. More testimony, more evidence, Brenna building the links between the Forrester operation and the wider network. Bern’s people scrambling to adjust to a respondent who just confirmed everything they were planning to deny. The political machinery grinding forward.
I barely hear it. I’m sitting in my chair with my hands in my lap and the hum between us so loud I can’t hear the room over it. What he just did — the not-defending, the confirmation, the public admission — has made me look at him in a different light.