By the time the last ambulance left the holding yard, the night had settled properly over everything. The smoke from the damaged building still hung in the air in a thin bitter layer, the floodlights threw hard white patches over the cracked yard, and the cold had started to creep back in now that the rush of movement was slowing down. Men were still working all around her, officers moving prisoners, medics clearing the last of the equipment, Cedric gathering ledgers, route sheets, and whatever else had survived the blast, but the part that mattered most was already gone. The wolves they had pulled out were alive. Hurt, drugged, furious, half broken in some cases, but alive. That should have given her something that felt like relief.
It didn't.
What she felt instead was the same cold anger that had been sitting under her skin from the moment she walked into the warehouse at the docks and saw the cages. The more she learned, the less it looked like a side operation or a hidden little trade moving around the edges of her territory. It looked organised. It looked practiced. It looked like the kind of thing that only lasted this long because enough people were getting paid to keep their mouths shut or their eyes closed.
Bren was one of the ones still left behind.
He was being loaded into the back of a second SUV when she turned and saw him, wrists bound, mouth bloodied, one eye already swelling from the fight at the docks. He had lost most of the cheap confidence he'd been wearing earlier, but not all of it. Enough was still there that he kept his head up, enough to keep telling himself he still had something no one else did.
That was fine.
She intended to take it from him.
Cedric came up beside her with one arm full of files and route sheets.
"We can move him to central holding," he said. "Safer there. Easier to control."
She looked at Bren and then back at Cedric.
"No."
Cedric already knew from her face that he wasn't going to like the rest of the sentence.
"He goes downstairs."
He sighed quietly.
"You're serious."
"Yes."
"The basement cells aren't for normal questioning."
"He's not getting normal questioning."
Cedric shifted the files in his arm and glanced toward the car where Bren was being shoved into place.
"You've been awake since early morning. You're sore, tired, pissed off, and probably one bad answer away from making this a lot messier than it needs to be."
She turned her head slowly and looked at him.
"That was almost a speech."
"That was me trying to stop you before I have to clean up after you."
She would have been more irritated by that if he had not been right about the mood she was in. Unfortunately for both of them, being right was not the same thing as changing the outcome.
"He goes downstairs," she repeated. "And I talk to him tonight before somebody else decides he knows too much and solves the problem for us."
That landed. Cedric knew as well as she did that they had already lost one prisoner to fast cleanup. He did not want to lose another. He was quiet for a second, then nodded once.
"Fine," he said. "But I'm staying in the room."
"That's your choice."
"No," Cedric said, looking at her properly now. "It's yours. I'm making sure it happens."
She almost told him not to push his luck. Instead she turned away and headed for the SUV.
The drive back to headquarters felt longer than it should have. The city had gone fully dark by then, the roads glistening under streetlights and headlights, everything outside the windows moving as if the world had not just shifted under her feet. Cedric sat beside her in the back with the files on his lap, going through route sheets and marking pages while she looked out the window and kept seeing pieces of the holding room at the yard. The collars. The cages. The notes written in quick practical shorthand by people who thought there was nothing wrong with writing live on a sheet of paper and treating that like business.
Leonel had not gotten into the same car.
She noticed that the second the door closed and hated herself for noticing at all.
By the time they reached headquarters, she had pushed him out of her head again. At least enough to be useful.
The basement cells sat under the oldest part of the building, in a section that had been there before the upper floors had become offices and conference rooms and polished versions of power. She did not use them often. Most problems did not need them. Most people broke with a table, a chair, and the right kind of silence. But the basement cells were still there because sometimes you needed a room that made a point before anyone said a word.
Bren noticed where they were taking him the second the elevator doors opened.
The bravado thinned.
The corridor below was narrow and cool, built of old stone and newer steel, with lights set far enough apart that the shadows between them never fully disappeared. The holding rooms were simple. Clean. No decorations. No unnecessary furniture. Just doors, locks, drains, reinforced hooks in the floor if they were needed, and walls thick enough that nobody upstairs would hear much if things got loud.
Bren was walked into the third room and put in the metal chair in the center. His wrists were restrained behind it. One officer checked the door. Another stayed outside. Cedric went in with her carrying the file stack and a recorder, because if they were doing this tonight, they were doing it properly.
Bren looked around once, then at her.
"This is a bit much."
She took off her jacket and folded it over the back of the second chair before sitting down opposite him.
"That depends how useful you plan to be."
He laughed through split lips.
"You think this is going to scare me."
"No," she said. "I think being stupid in here is going to hurt."
That made him shut up for a moment.
Cedric sat to her right, laid out the papers, and switched the recorder on.
"Name," he said.
Bren leaned back as much as the restraints allowed.
"You already know what they call me."
She watched him for a second.
Then she stood, crossed the small distance between them, and hit him hard enough across the face that the chair legs scraped over the floor. The room went quiet again.
When she spoke, her voice was even.
"He asked for your name."
Bren stared at her, one cheek already reddening under the split skin.
"That's assault."
"No," she said. "That was impatience."
She sat back down. Cedric did not look surprised. That, more than anything else, probably told Bren this was not going to be the kind of night he had hoped for. They started again.
The first ten minutes got them nowhere useful. Bren gave half answers, wrong names, and that kind of smug delay people used when they thought every extra second was a victory. She let him try it three times. On the fourth, she reached across the table, took his right hand, bent one finger back until the joint cracked, and let go only after the sound had cut the room cleanly in half.
He swore loudly enough that the officer outside shifted his weight.
Cedric, calm as ever, slid one page across the table and said, "Let's try that again."
That worked better. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But better. The first real name out of Bren's mouth was attached to a dock supervisor on the south side, a man who had been signing off freight lists for months. The second was a driver who moved between the city and the inland route twice a week and had a habit of taking the same roads whether they made sense or not. Then came a woman in the outer records office who flagged patrol routes before certain shipments moved. None of them were the top. None of them were the planner. But they were enough to prove the network ran through her territory deeper than she liked.
Cedric wrote everything down without pausing.
She asked the next question.
"How long?"
Bren's swollen eye narrowed.
"Long enough."
She got up again. This time he answered before she reached him.
"Months," he snapped. "Maybe longer. I wasn't there from the start."
"Start where?"
He laughed once, bitter and breathless.
"You still think this is just your city."
She stopped in front of him.
"No," she said. "I think you should be more specific."
That was how it went for the next while. Question. Resistance. Pain. Answer. Not everything had to be dragged out of him physically, but enough did that by the time the first hour was gone, his face looked worse, his right hand was trembling, and the floor under the chair had streaks of blood on it from his mouth where he kept spitting and swallowing at the wrong times.
She kept it clean. No rage for the sake of it. No pointless cruelty. That was not what this was. This was work. What she got out of him was ugly enough without dressing it up.
They were moving wolves through holding sites and short-term routes. Some were local. Some came from outside territories. Some were grabbed because they were isolated, weak, or easy to move. Others were taken because they had no one strong enough behind them to make the loss expensive. A few were sold as labor to men with money and no morals. A few were sold to packs that wanted bodies they could control. The younger ones went faster. Women were harder to move but paid more if they were unmated and healthy. Anyone who fought too much got drugged harder, collared heavier, or moved quicker. Cedric stopped writing once. Then he went back to it.
She stood with both hands against the table and looked at Bren while he panted through another wave of pain.
"Who's buying?"
"I don't know all of them."
"That wasn't my question."
He swallowed blood and looked away. She caught his chin and turned his face back toward her.
"Who's buying?"
He listed three names, all probably false, and two territories where transfers had gone before the trail went dark again. One of them meant nothing to her. The other made Cedric look up from the notes immediately.
"That route shouldn't even be active," he said.
Bren laughed weakly.
"That's why it works."
She straightened slowly and went back to her chair. The room had grown warmer from bodies, blood, and time, but she still felt cold in the center of herself. The more he gave them, the more it became obvious that this operation had never been built just to hit her. It had been there already, under everything else, running alongside the city and her territory like a hidden channel. The attacks against her, the setup in the district, the money trail, all of that now looked less like the main plot and more like one arm of the same ugly body.
Cedric looked over the pages in front of him.
"One more site on the inland line. Two temporary holding points outside the city. One transfer crew that changes every run. Four names tied to the local side."
She nodded once and looked at Bren.
"Who's above you?"
He smiled through split skin. It looked worse than if he had not smiled at all.
"I told you enough."
"You told me what keeps you breathing for another ten minutes."
His head tipped slightly.
"That sounds dramatic."
She got up again, came around the table, and drove the heel of her hand into the already bruised side of his face. The chair scraped backward with the force of it. When she leaned down, her voice had gone quieter rather than louder.
"I dragged wolves out of cages tonight," she said. "So if you still think I'm in the mood to let you decide what counts as enough, you've misunderstood me badly."
He breathed hard for a few seconds and then laughed again, because some men mistook defiance for intelligence right up until the end. Cedric looked at the notes, then back at Bren.
"Who's above you?"
This time Bren shook his head.
"No."
She took hold of the back of his chair and pulled it forward hard enough that the front legs thudded back down. He sucked in a breath through his teeth.
"You really want to do this for another hour," she said, "because I can make the time."
His good eye moved between her face and Cedric's and then settled somewhere past her shoulder, as if he were trying to calculate whether silence was still worth it. That was when he changed tactics.
It happened quietly enough that if she had been less focused she might have missed the shift. The bravado did not leave him. It just turned sideways. Men like Bren always did that when they realised brute resistance was failing. They looked for another wound to press.
He licked blood from the corner of his mouth and said, almost conversationally, "You should be asking different questions."
She stared at him for a second.
"Try me."
His mouth twitched.
"All this time you've been asking who's moving wolves through your territory, who's paying, who's helping, who's cleaning up after us." He exhaled slowly. "Funny thing is, Alpha, the one question you should've asked by now isn't even about us."
Cedric's head lifted. Her expression did not change.
"If this is a stall, it's a bad one."
Bren looked straight at her.
"Is it."
The room went still in a way she had not expected. Not because of fear. Not because of surprise. Because some part of her had already gone alert before he said the next thing, as if her body had moved before the thought did.
He smiled again, and this time there was something uglier in it.
"You really don't know who your cook is."