“Information?”
“He plans to find out as much as he can about their operation while… while he’s still alive in there.”
God. Oh God!
I’m fighting to keep my breath steady, the wolf’s anxious panting influencing my own.
Get it together. This is no time to fall apart.
“Thank you, Dawes. I’ll be in touch.” Brenna hangs up.
The kitchen is quiet. Willow’s hand has found Conner’s arm across the table. Conner’s face is gray.
Brenna looks at me. “You want us to go get him.”
“I…” I can’t answer immediately because the answer is…
Complicated.
Why would I want him back? The corridor. The boxes. The rabbit. The wolves whose names we still don’t know. The childMia was when the facility he fed put her on a table and gave her a number.
Why should I risk Ravenclaw, risk my pack members, risk the child I’m carrying, to pull him out of a hole he dug himself into by doing exactly what he built the hole for?
Why care if he dies?
My wolf’s answer comes through so fast it bypasses my mind entirely:mine, mine, mine,the same thing she’s been saying since the second she caught wind of him.
But underneath the wolf, something else.
I think about the hearing. The simple sentence —I have no defense— delivered to a room full of his peers with no performance left in him. I think about his hand on his sister’s stone, the grief in his body. Dawes’s at the rendezvous this morning:he asked me to contact you if he didn’t come back. A man who’d expected to die for his pack and made peace with it.
And the other moments. His hand on my belly. Him catching my palm against his chest and holding it there while his heartbeat slowed.
He became something else. While I was watching. And somewhere between the clearing and now, the woman inside the wolf started choosing him too, and never quite noticed it happening.
I look at Brenna.
“Yes,” I say. “I want us to go get him.”
Brenna studies me. Then she nods once. “Merric. Call Nadia.”
Chapter 27
Briar
Nadia takes the call on the second ring. Brenna puts it on speaker. I stand at the counter with my hand flat against it because I can’t trust my legs right now. Willow stays near me, and Conner sits at the table with his hands gripping the edge of it.
“Brenna.”
“We have a situation. I need Aurora.”
“Talk.”
“The Syndicate has taken Garrett Forrester. Alpha of the Forrester pack in Texas. He went in voluntarily; we’ve confirmed the details with his head of security. He made a deal that traded himself for the safety of his compound.”
A long pause on Nadia’s end.
“And you want him extracted.”