Page 3 of Oakheart

“Well, Miss Katie and her sons have been staying with us for a while, and they need somewhere to live. Somewhere nice. So I’m gonna have to see you putting all that practice you needed to work. You were gone long enough, so it ought to be good, yeah?”

I glanced up, and Miss Katie, she was the only woman in the room. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. I’d never known a Miss Katie before, so she must’ve joined the pack while I’d been gone.

She was a strikingly beautiful blond woman, standing by a young man who looked exactly like her, and another who was his shadow. The dark-haired man glared at the back of Grant’s head, and Miss Katie’s smile was tight even when she looked at me, so I thought I was missing something.

The blond man with the eyes blue as the sky? He was just staring at me, and that was the most disconcerting of all, so I looked back at his mother and offered my best smile.

It trembled nervously on my face. “I’ll do my very best for you, ma’am.”

Grant scoffed. “You’d better.”

CHAPTER 2

Aleks

Cash.

It was not a name I had heard before among the mass of American Davids and Johns and Williams, but that suited him even more, because he was unique among the people in the Wildwood pack.

Oh, they were all frightened and beaten down and most of them were miserable under Grant’s rule. I only believed it had been worse under my father because my mother assured me that was true.

But Cash wasn’t just sad or miserable.

He wasn’t... rebellious, exactly, but there was something remote about him. Like he was only present physically, and mentally, he had never entered the building.

I was well familiar with this way of checking out, so to speak. I’d been doing it myself regularly since we had arrived back in America.

Things under Reeve, my own father, had been bad enough that when I was four years old, my mother had taken me and fled back to the land of her birth—Russia. But by the time Grant had arrived, asking her to return and promising that thingswere better and my father was dead, that I was still the heir of the Wildwood pack, things had gotten so bad in Russia for werewolves that Mother had barely hesitated.

She had only forced him to agree that “her other sons” also had a place in Wildwood before packing our things and running.

Her other sons, Leo and Viktor, were not technically my brothers, but the twin sons of a friend of hers who had been killed in one of the government’s raids of the pack lands. They were also my best friends, and brothers to me in all but blood.

It still pained me to think of it, because only one of them had made it to America with us. Viktor had been taken in a raid just before we escaped, and despite the time and work Leo and I had put into finding him in the years since the government had kidnapped him, he was still missing.

Fuck only knew what was happening to him in the hands of the Russian government.

So... things were better in Wildwood. The American government at least pretended that they didn’t know about werewolves, and I’d heard nothing about us being attacked here, or scooped up out of our pack lands and never heard from again.

The only way in which America was a problem was Grant.

After all his assurances to my mother, he was only a better alpha than my father in that he wasn’t big and strong enough to beat her. The pack still lived in fear of its alpha and the gang of brutes he used to keep them in line. They still lived in rotten old huts and barely survived instead of thriving.

The biggest difference was that now, I was as big as the brutes, and if I wasn’t there to defend Mama, then Leo was, and he loved her every bit as much as I did. Also, we were both easily as good in a fight as any of Grant’s bullies. Better, probably, since we’d grown up learning to fight soldiers with guns who were trying to kidnap us.

No one would ever lay a hand on my mother again, unless he wanted to die.

And now, Grant had brought in this beautiful, distant man to build Mama a new house.

Apparently he had been away from the pack, learning the trade of carpentry for the entire time I had been back from Russia, and had only returned recently. Grant, unsurprisingly, thought his time and effort learning had been a waste, and no one ever needed an education.

As though men who knew nothing could build houses.

I envied people with educations. Mama had taught me to read, but I didn’t know much more than that, and sometimes I still longed for those answers that children demanded. Why was the sky blue, and where did magic come from, and why didn’t humans have wolves as we did?

I knew those answers existed. I simply didn’t have access to them, and asking questions had only ever gotten me derision in the past, especially from Grant and his ilk.

Sometimes, when we had to go into the human towns nearby, I would steal a book and devour every single page, over and over, until it started to fall apart. A book about the nearby Yellowstone National Park had taught me so many things I’d never even imagined about geology and wildlife. A copy of Dostoevsky’sCrime and Punishmentin English had lasted me years of reading, and taught me so many new words.