She’s quiet. I look at her across the table, and I can see her turning the problem over — the operational risk, the pack’s interests, the responsibilities of an alpha to her wolves — and finally she exhales through her nose.
“Whatever else you are to each other,” she says, “he doesn’t know he has a child. You’re going to bring him back, and you’re going to tell him. Yes?”
“Yes.”
He’s going to know anyway. It’s not something a wolf can keep from her mate.
“Fine. But let’s make something clear: before you go in, you will do everything in your power to protect the pregnancy. Your wolf will want to throw herself into the middle of whatever we find. You’ll override her when you need to. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“Go pack.”
I stand. My legs are unsteady, but they hold me. I reach the door, and her voice stops me.
“Briar.”
“Yes.”
“You love him.”
I don’t turn around. I don’t answer. I don’t have to, and she isn’t asking, and we both know what the silence means.
I walk out of the kitchen and across the yard to my cabin. The sun is almost down. The compound is moving into evening — fires being lit, dinner being served in the lodge, the family from the Forrester handoff sitting on the bunkhouse porch with bowls in their hands, the mother speaking quietly to her daughter. Normal wolf life, continuing. Around me, in spite of me.
My room is dark. I don’t turn on a light. I sit on the bed with my hand on my belly and the bond taut between me and the man somewhere south of me. He’s in a room now. Not moving. The restraints are still on. He’s alert but trying to keep the bond muted on his end. He doesn’t want to send me what he’s feeling.
Too late. I’ve already felt enough.
I press against the connection. Let him sense me.
We’re coming for you, Garrett.
The bond warms for a second. Long enough to tell me he’s still there. Still conscious. Still receiving.
Then it dims again. He’s pulling back.
Tomorrow, a journey. Seattle. A team. And after that — if Viktor’s intelligence works, if the mole doesn’t sabotage us, if Creed doesn’t decide to make him an example before we arrive — a Syndicate facility somewhere in the southwest where the Forrester alpha is ready to sacrifice himself.
Forty-eight hours.
Chapter 28
Garrett
The van stops after what I estimate is four hours.
I’ve been counting. Not miles; I can’t see the road. Time. Counting the way wolves count when counting is the only control left. Four hours at highway speed puts me roughly two hundred and fifty miles from the depot. South or southeast, based on the turns.
The doors open. I flinch against the light. Not daylight. Banks of fluorescent tubes in a high ceiling, buzzing at a frequency that my dampened wolf can barely register. The air is dry. Chemical. Sealed ventilation. No open windows.
“Out.”
Two of the men pull me by the arms. My legs buckle when my feet hit concrete — four hours restrained with the dampening runes has left my muscles dead from the knee down. I go to one knee. A hand catches my collar and hauls me upright.
“Walk.”
I walk, pins and needles climbing from my ankles into my calves with every step. A loading bay — concrete floor, steel walls, mounting points for machinery that’s been stripped out. Drainage channels cut into the floor. Faded safety markings on the walls that nobody’s painted over. Whatever this building was, it was industrial. The Syndicate hollowed it out and filled it with something else.