Page 27 of Oakheart

Viktor had quietly compared it to slavery, but this wasn’t that. People never declared slaves to be their heirs, did they?

“Well?” Grant asked Mama. “What do you think of my hospitality now?”

“I think your carpenter has the most remarkable skill I’ve ever seen,” she answered, and we all knew she was walking afine line. She called Cash Grant’s, which was good for his ego. But she had also given him credit for his own work, which Grant never liked to hear. No one should get credit for anything in his presence, except for him.

“I think that kid’s starting to get a remarkable ass,” one of the goons said. Marcus.

It took me a moment to figure out what the fuck he was talking about. Evie, heading off into the woods.

“She’s eleven,” I pointed out.

He shrugged, his expression smug and self-satisfied as he turned to Grant. “Getting on toward time for her to move in with Giselle. Don’t you think, Alpha?”

Grant turned to stare out the window too, but Cash, sweet, innocent Cash, stepped in front of the window. “She’s a child.”

Grant lifted a single brow at him, unimpressed. “Hardly.”

A pressure started to build in my chest.

Eleven.She was a child.Not that I’d spent any time looking at her body, but she was still skinny and wiry, in the way every prepubescent wolf child was. She had long legs that were muscular from running and jumping, but even I, with a libido Grant had once suggested was “broken,” knew that she wasn’t a woman. She was nowhere near it.

The room around me went a little fuzzy, like it was on a television screen during a storm, and I couldn’t focus on?—

“Breathe,” the word was whispered in Russian, almost entirely inaudible, against the shell of my ear, and I whipped around to find Viktor behind me. Viktor, holding my arm like a vise, like he had to stop me from running away. Or falling down.

Breathe.

I gasped in a deep breath and... when had I stopped breathing?

“—a kid,” Cash was saying somewhere behind me. “She’s not an adult. She’s not going to live with Giselle.”

“Oh?” Grant asked, his own voice taunting. “You get to make that decision?”

Viktor shook me, and I realized I had started to turn toward them, and I was... I was losing control of myself. My teeth had come out, and my whole body was buzzing with a subvocal growl.

Viktor met my eye, his own steel-gray irises hard as flint. Slowly, he shook his head, then took a deep breath. Somehow, I forced myself to follow suit. It was poorly done, but I breathed.

And again.

The goons around me laughed, and I started to turn again, but Viktor tightened his grip. He cleared his throat and said, “It should be Aleks. He’s the heir.” It was strange, how perfect his English was, without the trace of an accent I had never been able to shake off. “With him as your second, and the whole pack yours, that means that through him, everything he touches is yours.”

The room went silent around us, and I froze, because I had no idea what Viktor had just volunteered me for. I hadn’t heard most of the conversation. But this was Viktor, and I’d have trusted him if he’d suggested I go off to war, so I forced down another deep breath and turned back to Grant and the goons. “I agree. I am always happy to stamp the alpha’s claim.”

If he’d suggested I was supposed to have sex with Evie, we were going to have a problem, because there was no way that was going to happen, and it wasn’t a thing you could fake. I could lie to anyone with ease, even Mama, after years of practice. But you couldn’t fake sex in a pack of werewolves.

And I would die fighting every goon in the kitchen rather than hurt a child like that.

I looked to where Tommy was standing, motionless, like a deer in the sights of a predator. But he wasn’t looking at hisdaughter, or even his alpha, who had suggested maybe it was time for his child to be used. He was looking at me.

Like he thought I was about to lunge forward and tear his throat out.

For a moment, I considered doing it.

Grant drew my attention away, though, with a broad grin and a smack on my shoulder that was meant to be hard enough to jar me. He’d taken to doing that over the last year, thinking to use his strength against me the way bigger men sometimes did when they were bullies.

But Grant wasn’t bigger than me, and his hardest hit wasn’t likely to budge me. I weighed almost twice what he did.

I wasn’t sure why he continued to try.