Page 26 of Oakheart

I froze, slowly turning back to him. “Yeah?”

“I wish I could come back too.”

My heart throbbed. Did that make it better or worse, that he might want to?

Either way, he couldn’t, and all I could do was nod, looking down to hide eyes that were stinging when I barely even knew why.

CHAPTER 14

Aleks

Just two yearsafter they started it, Mama’s house was finished.

It was good, because it would put her and Leo and Viktor just that one step away from Grant. Make it harder for him to hurt them on a whim, because they weren’t just a thirty-second walk away. If he did go for them, it would give them a fighting chance to escape.

He had informed me just that morning, however, that I would not be moving with them. He needed me nearby, because of my duties as heir. Never mind that those duties mostly involved sitting around with his goons, and being molested by witches.

But at least my family would be safer.

More than that, I’d talked Grant into letting Cash start on a second house. I was worried he would claim it for himself, but if I nudged Cash into building it on the small side, too small for Grant’s grand ego, he wouldn’t take it.

I was picturing a little cottage, just big enough for Cash and his father, with room for little Evie to stay there.

Fuck knew her father was as useless as men came.

He had slowly become just another of Grant’s goons over the years I’d known him.

When we had first met, his wife had recently gone off into the woods, and he’d been working hard to raise a daughter by himself, haunted and lonely. Now? He spent all his time at Grant’s side, laughing at the alpha’s terrible jokes and bowing to his wishes. He had left his older brother to father Evie, and become useless to his family.

Maybe his initial intentions had been good, to become a buffer between his family and the unpredictable alpha whose moods changed with the breeze, but now, that was lost.

It wasn’t a terrible thing, though, because his brother was a better father than he’d ever been. I had no doubt Henry Roberts would defend Evie with the last strength in his body.

The problem was that Henry couldn’t be everywhere, and as a spry, quick now-eleven-year-old, Evie could.

The whole group of us left Grant’s sagging, awful home and headed toward Mama’s new one. The walk took almost fifteen minutes, and longer when Grant and his goons were straggling, stopping to make gross jokes and randomly piss on trees like they were stray dogs.

We could have been helping to carry the remaining things she’d kept in Grant’s house, but no. We couldn’t be expected to do anything to help the pack. We could only be expected to act like the previously mentioned dogs, feral and territorial, rude to everyone, including each other.

And Grant was the worst of them, as he smiled at where two of them stopped to have a scuffle over one suggesting another walked “like a woman.” What kind of insult was that, even? There was nothing wrong with how women walked. It was just some macho bullshit.

Macho bullshit that Grant gloried in.

He wasn’t as violent as my father had been. Not as unsafe as living under Russian rule. But my uncle was just the best of all bad options I’d been offered in life.

No one would call him good, except maybe some of his less intelligent goons.

Even they would struggle with the idea, though, I thought.

We finally arrived at the house just after lunch time, the door hanging open, waiting for us. No doubt the people inside had heard us coming a long time earlier.

The house was... well, it was perfect. Enormous and airy, with big open rooms rather than the tiny ones in the current pack houses. As we came into the kitchen, Evie slipped out the kitchen door with the usual picnic basket, no doubt headed back toward her uncle’s house.

I smiled, because it made me happy that she’d continued coming out to have lunch with Cash and Viktor and Leo the whole time they’d been building the house. It was just Cash and Viktor in the kitchen, well, and Mama. She looked at Grant like he was a hurdle, as she usually did. He was the obstacle she had to pass to reach happiness.

I had always tried to copy the attitude, but I wasn’t sure it worked for me.

Mama could avoid Grant in a way I couldn’t. She owed him nothing, and he wanted little to do with her. He didn’t lay any claim to her present or future; she was simply part of the bargain he had made with me. As long as she was cared for, I belonged to him.