I hope she can’t feel it. But at some point, she will. At some point, I won’t have the strength to stifle my reaction to whatever they do to me. And she’ll be forced to ride it out.
The cold keeps working. The tube keeps flickering. The drain watches me with its dark mouth.
I close my eyes, and I think about what Creed said. Sixteen facilities. Four continents. The scope of what I fed. I thought I was feeding a regional operation. A single facility. A system that did whatever it did and stayed contained.
There’s nothing contained about it. The corridor I managed was one tributary feeding a river that spans the world. And the man who just walked out of this room wants me to help him keep the river flowing.
I won’t. That’s the one certainty I have left in this room. Whatever they do tomorrow, I won’t give him the map. I won’t draw the blueprint. I won’t help them rebuild what I helped destroy.
My breath fogs under the flickering light. Hours pass.
Sometime deep in the night, when my teeth are chattering, and my hands have gone numb in the cuffs, and the shivering has become a constant, full-body tremor, I feel her.
Warm. Sudden. Not her anxiety. Something else.
She’s pushing toward me. Deliberately, the way she pushed Mia’s nightmares weeks ago. But this isn’t fury. This isn’t vengeance. This is just… her. The walls she keeps between us have dropped, and what pours through is everything she usually holds back. Not words. Not images. Presence. Her… fierce, small, unguarded, saying something I can’t translate, but my body understands.
I’m here.
I hold it. My hands are numb, and my body is shaking, and the room is a concrete box with a drain in the floor and a dead fluorescent tube that’s finally given up and gone dark. But she’s there, and the warmth of her is real. I hold it the way I’ve held everything she’s given me: against my will, against my judgment, because the wolf decided and the man got dragged along, and the man stopped fighting somewhere between the cabin and now.
I hold it until morning. Until the lock disengages. Footsteps. More than two sets this time.
An observation slot opens in the door. A face appears, impassive.
“Mr. Creed will see you now.”
The door opens. Three men enter with equipment I don’t recognize, and the clinical efficiency of people who’ve done this before and will do it again, and see nothing unusual about it.
I hold her warmth. I hold it as the first hands reach for me, and I don’t let go.
Chapter 29
Briar
The plane is a Craven Industries jet that smells like leather and money and dragon. Merric sits across from me, reading mission files. Rook is in the cockpit with the pilot, running approach routes. Sienna is asleep, the trained habit of a fighter who knows to rest when rest is available. Conner is at the back, staring out the window.
I’m in a window seat with my hand on my knee, my shoulders tense, and a low, sick feeling in my stomach that started an hour after Garrett was taken and hasn’t let up. I know what the feeling is. I know where it’s coming from. I don’t need to name it every thirty seconds. It’s there. I carry it. We move on.
What I’m thinking about is the van.
Loaded at the grain depot on County Road Eleven at approximately two o’clock yesterday. Dawes confirmed the location by tracking Garrett’s phone. The depot is sixty miles west of the Forrester compound, off a farm road, accessible fromtwo county highways. A van leaving that depot has a limited number of route options before it hits the interstate system, and once it hits the interstate, it becomes traceable.
That’s Mara’s job. And from what Nadia told us, Mara is very good at her job.
The jet puts us in Denver in under two hours. A black SUV is waiting on the tarmac. The driver is human — Craven Industries security — and doesn’t ask questions.
The staging house is a ranch property forty minutes south. A long, low building with multiple vehicles in the yard. The kind of place that looks like a corporate retreat and functions as something else entirely.
Caleb Craven meets us at the door.
I’ve never met him. The files don’t prepare you for the physical reality. Not just the size but the quality of attention behind his eyes. He takes in the five of us in a single sweep. Dragon eyes doing calculations the human face doesn’t show.
“Brenna’s team,” he says.
“Merric Rourke. Frostbourne.” Merric extends a hand. Caleb takes it. Two apex predators calibrating. “My mate Brenna Corvus. Ravenclaw.”
Brenna nods at him. Caleb nods back.