“Greetings, all. I’m here. Now the fun can begin.” He walks through the room, absorbs the setup, sits beside Caleb, and swings his boots up on the table. The brothers communicate in glances.
We plan.
Jericho walks us through the facility. Entry point — a drainage culvert running under the south perimeter. He designed security protocols for three facilities with identical layouts. The culvert is a known vulnerability that the Syndicate’s engineers flagged, but leadership never fixed because they think they’re untouchable.
“Their mistake. They should have learned by now that they’re not,” Jericho says. “A four-person team can enter through the culvert and reach the loading bay in under three minutes. From the loading bay to the detention sub-level is four doors. Two keycard, two manual.”
“Keycards,” Merric says.
Mara holds up a device the size of a phone. “Cloned from the comms intercepts. Their security badges transmit an RFID signal that I captured from the shift-change traffic. Two cards, loaded and ready.”
“And the manual locks?”
“Me,” Jericho says. “I know the lock type. Syndicate standard issue. Thirty seconds each.”
Conner leans forward. “Where would they hold him specifically?”
“Sub-level. The detention wing has individual cells and two interrogation rooms. High-value prisoners go in the cells closest to the interrogation rooms for convenience.” Jericho traces the route on the blueprint. “Here. Three cells in a row. If he’s the only high-value intake, he’ll be in the first one.”
“If he’s not the only one?” I ask.
Jericho looks at me. “There may be other prisoners. The Laredo facility has capacity for twenty to thirty.”
“Then we take them all,” Brenna interjects.
The room goes quiet.
“Viktor’s brief was specific,” Merric says carefully. “Extract Garrett. Get out clean.”
“Viktor’s brief didn’t account for us finding a facility full of magic-bloods and walking past them.”
“Brenna—”
“Every wolf in that facility comes out. All of them. Or I’m not coming out either.”
Merric heaves a breath. Rubs his face with one hand. “You’re right. It’s not negotiable.”
Caleb looks at Dorian. The silent conversation takes two seconds.
“We take them all,” Caleb says. “We’ll adjust the extraction plan. The loading bay can handle a larger group. The dragons provide enough cover for an extended evacuation window.”
The plan takes shape over the next several hours. Approach through the culvert, Jericho leading, then me, Conner, and Rook. Sienna runs rear guard at the culvert entrance. Merric holds the loading bay as the extraction point. The Cravens hit the vehicle depot from the air at the same moment we breach the sub-level, cutting off Syndicate reinforcements and evacuation capability simultaneously.
Mara runs comms from a staging vehicle a mile out. Kael sits beside her and pretends to be patient about it.
“Oh-four-hundred departure,” Caleb says. “Flight time: three hours. On the ground by seven. Approach begins at oh-eight-hundred, timed to the morning guard rotation. Jericho identifies an eight-minute window during shift change.”
“Eight minutes to get from the culvert to the detention level,” Jericho confirms. “Not comfortable. Achievable.”
“And after the eight minutes?” Rook asks.
“Then stealth is over, and speed is everything.”
The room disperses to prepare. Weapons. Gear. The efficient work of people who’ve done this before.
I don’t check gear. Not yet. I step outside into the yard. The night is overcast — no moon, no stars. The air smells like Colorado dirt and approaching weather.
My stomach cramps. Low, dull, the pregnancy making itself known. I breathe through it, and it passes. The warmth underneath it doesn’t pass — the small, fierce presence that’s been growing since the clearing, that my wolf guards with everything in her.