My wolf goes very still. Again. That odd focus once more.
No.
I press my chin to the rock and breathe through my mouth until it passes. It takes longer than it should.
I know the story of this family. Conner told Willow. Willow told Brenna. The sister. Magic. A death that built a policy that built a corridor that built the boxes I found in a storage room with numbers instead of names.
No family tragedy justifies that policy.
And now, he gets to sit here with live oak and limestone and a view of his territory.
The child who owned the rabbit in my truck doesn’t have a stone. Just has a code — F-7 — and a box of belongings weighed in grams.
Garrett Forrester’s grief is real. But the distance between that grief and what he built on it — all those lost wolves, the junction, the trucks going south — is a gap he filled with other people’s children. A stone doesn’t close it.
He stays twenty minutes. Then he mounts up and rides west.
I let him go. His scent hangs in the air long after the hoofbeats fade.
My wolf holds it. I let her. Tomorrow, when I’m tracking him in the dark, that scent is what I’ll follow.
I move south, in the direction of something I found during my original exploration of the Forrester packlands. The cabin is a twenty-minute run through sparse trees on mostly game trail. Stone foundation. One room. Cedar-shake roof, intact. The door hangs on rusted hinges, but the frame is hardwood, not rotted through. Inside, there’s a dirt floor packed hard enough to hold weight. A dead hearth. One window facing north.
I stamp my heel on the floor in three places. Solid. It’ll hold an anchor point — bolted bracket, lag screws into the subfloor joists. The chair is in the truck. Steel frame, wooden components, heavy enough that it won’t shift but light enough that I can move it alone.
The window faces north. When he wakes up, the first thing he’ll see is the Hill Country stretching out in front of him. The territory his corridor ran through.
I check the door. Measure the frame by eye. A bar across the inside, metal if I can source it, timber if I can’t. He’ll be restrained. But if he gets loose, the door needs to hold long enough for me to react.
I walk the outskirts. A seasonal creek fifty yards south provides water; it’s running low but running. Approach routes north and south, both through forest cover. Nobody walks up on this place without making noise in the brush.
It’ll work.
I stand in the doorway and look at the room. Chair center, facing the window. Medical kit on the shelf to the right. Knife on the table. And the rabbit — button eyes up, facing the chair, the first thing he’ll see when the tranquilizer clears and his vision settles.
A toy from a box that his corridor filled.
I shift and run back to the truck. Three miles of scrub, twelve minutes, the heat nothing to a wolf built for this.
I sit on the tailgate and eat a protein bar. The Hill Country buzzes and ticks around me. The ridge goes amber in the late light.
He rode that route the last time I was here. Same hour, same direction. The routine is his — which means I wait, and I move when he does.
Tomorrow. Maybe the day after.
I’m not going anywhere.
Chapter 4
Briar
He doesn’t ride east the next day. Six hours on the ridge in wolf form — stone under my belly, sun on my back, the compound below going through its stressed routines. He stays in the main house. The stocky patrol coordinator crosses the yard three times. The woman runs her fighters through drills. Nothing moves east.
Fine. I’ve got nowhere to be.
I eat jerky when I get to the truck, drink from the creek, then sleep four hours in the cab with the windows cracked and my knife where I can reach it without sitting up.
The cabin takes two trips from the truck. The anchor bracket is heavy; the lag screws heavier. I bolted the bracket to the floor joists with a hand drill I picked up outside Austin on the drive down, same stop where I bought the dart gun. Modified veterinary model, single shot, compressed air, effective to thirtyfeet. The ranch supply store didn’t ask questions when I paid cash and said I was managing feral hogs.