Page 11 of Oakheart

I crossed my arms, shoulders slumped and neck shrinking into them.

“Aleks,” Leo said, “you are good, yes? Not harmed?”

“Yes.”

“And Cash”—Leo turned my way—“you are also not harmed?”

“No,” I whispered thickly. “I’m—I’m fine . . . ”

“Then there is no need for—” Leo broke off and waved his hand, indicating the whole of me. “I will look out better. Is not your fault.”

It was. I was the one responsible for keeping them safe, and when I’d met Freddie at twenty-one, there was no way he’d have set me loose with a chainsaw and so little supervision.

But I wasn’t Freddie, and we weren’t human, and I didn’t have a whole crew of people to spread the work around. I had Aleks and Leo, for as long as they were willing to help and as long as Grant would allow them to.

I forced myself to drop my hands to my sides but looked away too. “No, you’re right. It was just a mistake. Ah, thank you, Aleks, for—” I swallowed hard. “You shouldn’t have had to do that, but I appreciate, um... Let’s get back to work, yeah? Lots to do.”

And because I was an idiot and couldn’t stand another second of either one of them looking at me without crawling out of my skin, I relegated myself to stripping bark off the logs we’d already felled.

CHAPTER 6

Aleks

Building a house was. . . fun?

That seemed a strange word for hard, sweaty labor that involved painstaking accuracy and moving enormous trees around, but somehow that was what it was. We piled logs and moved things where Cash told us to, though he was shy about anything that resembled giving orders, and always tacked a “please” or an “if you would, thank you,” to the end of every order.

Request. That was the word.

Not a thing I was used to at all.

Still, something about working together that way was better than just random physical labor. I liked a hard day’s work, because it was a good way to get your mind off of other things, but this was even better. I didn’t just get to stop worrying about Viktor and Grant and the pack for hours every day. I got to do that, and then go back with a smile on my face, thinking about Leo nearly dropping a log on his toes, or the way Cash blushed when Mama told him he could take his shirt off if he was too hot.

Tragically, he’d demurred and told her that it was safer and cleaner for him to keep it on. That made sense, as at the timehe’d been sanding the logs down, and with the shirt he was less likely to get splinters or get covered in... tree dust? I needed to see if there was an English word for that.

We spent over a week like that, felling trees and then preparing them, which wasn’t exactly slow work, but it took a lot of wood to build a house. And that was to say nothing of the fact that first, Cash had needed to measure and level the area where the house would go, as much as he could. Then came the digging, deep holes for the posts that would hold Mama’s house up, which then needed to be measured and cut precisely, and stabilized with concrete.

I didn’t ogle him as much as I wanted too, too busy to be staring at him instead of doing my work, but it was nice anyway. Every time I looked up, I was surrounded by either some of the people I loved most in the world, or the lovely picture of Cash, wearing his clear goggles as he measured and cut wood.

He had answers for everything—how to make water flow, how the sun could warm the tank and the wood stove could keep it from freezing in winter, how to best take advantage of sunlight. He meant to build something better than what we’d had before, and watching him figure out how was marvelous.

The way he would tug his lower lip between his teeth when he was deep in thought, so focused on his work that I was sure the world had fallen away for him. I had always been comfortable being forgotten, because forgotten meant no beatings, no humiliation, no attention from people who might want to do me wrong. But in this case, Cash forgetting we were there seemed like the best of compliments.

He was so nervous, so skittish around most of the pack, that his level of comfort with us felt like a gift.

The concrete had been “curing” for a few days, though I was unclear on why that was the word used, and we were finishing with the last of the logs that would make the walls, when Leogave me a sly smile and ducked behind a huge old oak and returned with... Mama’s picnic basket.

Had he brought lunch? Usually Mama brought us all food around lunch time, but if Leo had brought it with him—well first off, how had I not noticed? And more, why was he giving me that look, like the proverbial cat who got his cream.

Instead of opening the basket and handing me food, he handed me the whole basket, then pulled a blanket I hadn’t noticed from under his arm. He turned around and, selecting a likely spot, whipped it out and spread it across the grass.

Then he turned, winked at me, and whispered, “Only today.”

It was... something we’d taken to saying to each other after we had escaped Russia; a kind of shorthand to remind ourselves that we might not have decades and decades to live, like most wolves, or even humans. We might only have this one day, so we should live it as best we could.

While we weren’t happy in Idaho, exactly, we were settled. Safe. Complacent. It was easy to forget that everything could be gone in an instant.

That your brother could be standing at your side one moment, and the next, just... gone.