Chapter 6: Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
The silence in the truck cab was a living thing. It pulsed between us, thick with the smell of sun-baked vinyl, Jean-Luc’s expensive cologne, and the ghost of my father’s cigars. The mayor’s “yes” still echoed, but it was hollow, a trophy won with a weapon I didn’t understand.
I started the engine. The rumble was too loud. “Why?”
Jean-Luc didn’t look at me. He watched the empty square, where TJ and his friends had finally scattered. “Why what?”
“That story. The dinner in Austin. Turning you down.” I put the truck in gear, my movements jerky. “Why tell them that?”
“Because it worked.” He said it like explaining rain.
“But it wasn’t true.”
“Truth is a flavor, Briar. Sometimes you serve what the palate expects.” He finally turned his head, those piercing blues cutting through the dusty air. “You saw their faces. Which version of you commanded more respect? The one they could pity, or the one they could envy?”
I focused on the road leaving town, my knuckles white. “I don’t want to be envied. I just want to be left alone.”
“A luxury you cannot afford. Not anymore.” He shifted in his seat, the leather groaning. “You walked in there this morning like a sheep going to market. All dignity, no teeth. You asked. They refused. The world operates on this principle: those who ask, concede power.”
The heat of shame washed over me. “So what was I supposed to do? Kick his door down?”
“No.” His voice dropped, low and serious. “You walk in like you own the room they are merely leasing. You do not ask. You present a new reality. You made it about his future, not your past. His reputation, not your failure.” He paused. “You looked like a sheep. I made you look like a wolf. Wolves do not get patted on the head. Wolves get deals.”
I made you look like a wolf.
The words didn’t feel like a compliment. They felt like a brand. A transformation I hadn’t agreed to. My reflection in the rearview mirror looked the same—red hair escaping its ponytail, a smudge of dirt on my temple, tired green eyes. But I felt different underneath, as if he’d rearranged my guts while I wasn’t looking.
“I don’t want to be a wolf,” I whispered, but even I heard the lie in it. Because part of me had thrilled at TJ’s stunned silence, at the mayor’s backpedaling. That part was hungry, and it scared me.
“It is not about want,” Jean-Luc said, his gaze returning to the endless fields. “It is about necessity. Tonight, at the mill, you may need teeth. Sentiment gets people killed. Your friend Tommy is currently proof of that.”
We drove the rest of the way in a silence that was no longer empty, but charged, like the air before a storm.
The plan was simple, which was the only part that worried me.
Carter had the details. “Old man Varner closes the mill office at five. The night security is a guy named Dale who does a loop at ten and again at two AM. He sits in his car by the main gate, listens to talk radio. The main storage shed, the one with the padlock that’s always broken, that’s where they’d stow something… or someone. No cameras. Varner’s too cheap.”
Jean-Luc had listened, then asked for three things: wire cutters, a dark blanket, and Carter’s second-best hunting knife.
“What’s the knife for?” Carter had asked, his bravado thin.
“For looking like we might use it,” Jean-Luc had said, his tone leaving no room for debate.
Now, at half past one in the morning, the world was rendered in shades of ink and silver. We were in Carter’s friend’s beige 2004 Camry, a car so anonymous it was practically invisible. It coughed to a stop in a scrubby thicket a quarter mile from the mill’s back fence. The air was cold, smelling of creosote and diesel.
“Remember,” Jean-Luc murmured, his face a pale moon in the dark. “In and out. Find him. Move him. We do not engage unless forced. Silence is the priority.”
I nodded, my throat too dry to speak. The wire cutters were heavy in my jacket pocket.
The chain-link fence was old, rusted in places. The snip of the cutters was obscenely loud in the sleeping landscape. We slipped through, Jean-Luc going first, moving with a fluid grace that seemed impossible for a man in cowboy boots he’d taken from Carter’s closet. I followed, every crunch of gravel under my own boots sounding like a landslide.
The Liberty Feed Mill was a graveyard of industry. Hulking, corrugated-metal silos rose against the starry sky. Conveyor belts, skeletal and still, tangled between buildings. The main storage shed was a long, low shape at the far end, its windows boarded up.
We moved from shadow to shadow. My heart was a frantic drum against my ribs. This was madness. This was breaking and entering. This was what happened after you started looking like a wolf.
A pool of yellow light spilled from a security lamp near the office. We skirted it, pressed against the cool metal siding of a hopper. From somewhere near the front gate, the faint murmur of talk radio reached us. Dale was on his phone, laughing at something.
“Go,” Jean-Luc breathed.
We sprinted the last twenty yards to the storage shed. The padlock was, as promised, a rusted sham. Jean-Luc didn’t bother with tools. He wrapped the chain around his boot and yanked downward with a sudden, brutal torque. The hasp snapped with a metallic ping that made me flinch.
He slid the door open just enough for us to slip inside.
The darkness was absolute, thick with the suffocating smell of moldering grain, fertilizer, and something else—sour, human. The beam of Jean-Luc’s flashlight cut through the black, revealing stacks of pallets, busted machinery, drifts of empty sacks.
Then it found a shape.
In the far corner, slumped against a sack of lime, was Tommy. Duct tape covered his mouth. More tape bound his wrists and ankles. One eye was swollen shut, a dark, glossy mess. His other eye widened in the light, rolling with animal fear.
“Jesus,” I choked out, rushing forward.
Jean-Luc was faster. He was at Tommy’s side, the hunting knife out, slicing through the tape at his wrists with efficient strokes. “It’s us. Briar and Jean-Luc. Be quiet.” His voice was calm, a command.
Tommy whimpered as the tape ripped from his mouth. He sucked in a ragged, wet breath. “Bree?” he croaked.
“Yeah, it’s me. Can you walk?”
“They… they wanted to know about the guy in the picture. The French guy. I didn’t tell them nothing, Bree, I swear I didn’t.” His voice was a child’s, trembling with pain and relief.
“I know. We’re getting you out.” I got a shoulder under his arm. He was heavier than he looked, and he cried out as he put weight on his left leg.
“Ankle’s busted, I think,” he gasped.
“Then we carry him.” Jean-Luc took Tommy’s other side. “Quickly.”
We were a clumsy, three-legged beast staggering toward the slit of moonlight at the door. We were almost there when the beam of another flashlight swept across the grimy windows.
“Hey!” a voice shouted from outside. Dale. “Who’s in there? I heard something!”
“Go, go, go!” Jean-Luc hissed.
We burst out of the shed into the night. Dale stood thirty feet away, fumbling his flashlight and a bulky radio. He was a big man, gone soft in the middle, his face confused.
“Stop right there! I’m calling the sheriff!”
Jean-Luc let go of Tommy, pushing him toward me. “Get him to the fence.” He turned and took two steps toward Dale, his hands up, empty. “My friend is injured. We are leaving. There is no need for any trouble.”
“The hell there ain’t!” Dale dropped the radio and reached for the baton on his belt.
What happened next was a blur of terrible, efficient motion. Jean-Luc didn’t fight like in the movies. There was no grandstanding. As Dale swung the baton, Jean-Luc stepped inside the arc, his movement almost casual. He grabbed Dale’s wrist, twisted, and drove his other forearm into the man’s throat. It wasn’t a punch. It was a thrust. A sickening, wet crunch cut Dale’s shout into a gurgle. The big man dropped to his knees, clawing at his neck, eyes bulging in the flashlight beam that now lay on the ground.
Jean-Luc stood over him for a second, a dark statue. Then he bent, picked up the radio and the flashlight, and smashed them together against the side of the silo. The plastic cracked, the light died.
“Come,” he said, turning back to us. His voice hadn’t changed. It was still calm, level.
I was frozen, Tommy’s weight sagging against me. I’d seen fights before. This wasn’t a fight. This was something else.
“Briar. Now.”
The sound of my name broke the spell. I hauled Tommy forward, half-dragging him toward the torn fence. I didn’t look back at the shape gasping in the dirt. My mind was a white noise of terror.
We shoved Tommy through the fence, Jean-Luc and I scrambling after. The run back to the car was a nightmare of stumbling through brush, Tommy’s cries of pain, the sound of my own ragged breathing. Carter had the back door open. We piled Tommy in, a tangle of limbs and fear.
“Go, Carter! Drive! Normal speed!”
Carter stomped on the gas, the Camry’s wheels spitting gravel before finding purchase on the blacktop. He drove, his eyes huge in the rearview mirror. “What happened? Is he okay?”
In the backseat, Tommy was sobbing quietly. I turned, my hands shaking, to look through the rear window. The mill was just a cluster of darker shadows against the night. No lights came on. No sirens.
In the passenger seat, Jean-Luc was wiping his hands meticulously on a dark cloth. He caught my stare in the reflection of the window.
“He will live,” he said quietly, answering the question I couldn’t form. “But he will not talk. And he will remember.”
The car was filled with the smell of sweat, fear, and lime dust. The jazz standard from an earlier chapter was gone, replaced by this new, violent silence. I looked at my hands. They were clean. But I felt the echo of that terrible crunch in my own bones.
He had made me look like a wolf. Now I had seen what wolves really did. The line had been crossed, not in an office with words, but in a mill yard with a crushing forearm. There was no going back.
Tommy moaned. “They’re gonna come for us, Bree. They’re gonna know.”
Jean-Luc folded the cloth and placed it in the door pocket. He stared ahead at the unspooling road, his profile sharp and unreadable. “Let them come,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “We have a barn to burn tomorrow.”