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For a second, Aiden paused. Buck looked genuinely confused.
“The wards closed, and they’re still closed,” he said.
“You come here and accuse my boy—” Nathan began.
“Open the wards, Buck, and we’re done.” He looked from father to son, horrified that they were related to him.
“I didn’t touch the wards,” Buck said.
“If you didn’t, who did?” Aiden asked the teenager.
When he blinked, Aiden leaned forward. “You didn’t. But you know who did. Who was it out there with you?”
Buck didn’t move.
“That wasn’t a rhetorical question.”
Buck opened his mouth.
“Tell him, son,” Nathan said.
“Me and the twins, Carter and…” he hesitated.
“And?”
“And Louis.”
Sick horror spread through Aiden. Carter was seventeen and a good kid, but still in awe of his stronger cousin. The twins were sixteen, rare shifters born to a couple without wolves themselves. They were treasured miracles in a pack on its last legs, and Buck had led them into a fight? And then there was Louis.
“You took Louis?”
Louis was of age, and his father insisted they treat him no differently than any adult wolf in the pack, but he’d never spoken a single word. Aiden’s mother said in the fight between wolf and man, man had to win. But for Louis, the opposite was true. He was almost all wolf. He was never out of control, never violent, and never anything but kind to the pack he loved, but he wasn’t all the way human. And this young asshole had dragged him into the woods to fight witches?
For a second, he wished he was in charge of these boys. He wished someone was. This was the result of their pack’s neglect. Entitled boys who thought they were men had started a feud that could still metastasize into a larger war and end his pack.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever screwed up as royally as you have today,” Aiden said in disgust. “You’ve endangered every single person in these woods.”
Buck wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at his father.
“Don’t look at him. Look at me when I’m talking to you.” Aiden clicked his teeth together. When did he start sounding likehisfather?
Buck’s eyes snapped back to him.
“You have a chance to start fixing this right now. Open the wards.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“Then who was it? Louis?”
Buck flinched. “Ain’t it a good thing they can’t get in?”
“Not with a witch on the wrong side of the wards! You’re only making the witches more mad and giving them more time to get ready.”
“And bankrupt us when we can’t get the horses out and sold,” Ellis muttered.
“Wasn’t me!”
“Hell, wait long enough and we starve,” Ellis added.
