My wolf won’t let me sleep deeply. Every few minutes, she surfaces, draws my attention, and shows me something that filters into my dreams. Garrett, awake, pacing in a dim room. Garrett sitting at a kitchen table with his head in his hands. Garrett at a window, his palm flat on the glass. My wolf wants me focused on him, wants me to feel that he’s still there, still breathing, still planning whatever he’s planning.
By the time dawn is breaking, I’m behind the wheel again, and Willow is pointing at a turnoff.
“There. Left.”
I take the left. A gravel road through sparse pine. A rest area with three picnic tables, a concrete pad, and a single streetlight that’s probably been flickering since the seventies. Empty, except for one vehicle: an old pickup parked at the far end.
I kill the engine fifty yards back. We wait.
A man gets out of the pickup. Tall, built, fifty or so. Forrester wolf. I can scent him from here, the undertone that every wolf from a pack carries. He walks around to the truck bed and lowers the tailgate. I see movement in the bed — blankets, faces.
The family.
“Let’s go,” Merric says quietly.
We get out. Walk toward the pickup, spread in a loose formation that isn’t quite a threat display but isn’t quite not, either. The Forrester wolf watches us approach. His hands are visible, away from his body. He’s on his own. No backup.
Dawes.
I recognize him.
He recognizes me, too. His mouth quirks. He knows something. Maybe not everything, but he’s nobody’s fool. None of them is. I’m keeping a secret that everyone seems to know about, but nobody’s acknowledging.
“Ravenclaw,” he says.
“Forrester,” Merric returns.
“The family’s in the bed. Two adults, two kids. Fed them as well as they’d eat, let them sleep. The kids are exhausted. The father’s got a dislocated shoulder that my wife set last night — she knows enough to do that much.”
Willow walks past the men and to the truck bed. She climbs up, quiet, and kneels at the tailgate. I hear her voice, low, gentle, the voice she uses with Mia. I don’t hear what she says. But the shapes in the blankets shift, and after a moment, a boy’s head appears above the tailgate. He stares at Willow. She smiles and says something else.
Dawes watches them. Then looks back at Merric, and at me.
“He wanted me to tell you something,” he says.
“Who?” Merric asks.
“Garrett. For her.” Dawes looks at me.
Merric’s eyebrows lift. Minutely. He says nothing.
“Go ahead,” I say.
“He said: ‘Tell her whatever’s wrong with her, she should know I’d be there if I could.’” Dawes delivers it like a man reading text off a screen — no interpretation, no embellishment. “He said you’d know what it meant.”
My wolf freezes. The warmth in my belly spikes — a sharp, protective flare.
He knows. He doesn’t know specifically, but he knows enough.
Of course he does. He’s practically in my head.
I don’t give Dawes the satisfaction of a reaction. “Thank you.”
“He also said to tell you to stay out of whatever comes next.”
“Noted.”
“And he said—” Dawes pauses. For the first time, his professional neutrality slips. “He said that whatever happens, the compound stays standing. Jessie’s in charge. He’s gone somewhere else.”