Page 41 of Oakheart

“Family?”

I swallowed hard. Ma had left Pa, and I couldn’t do it to him too. Even if he’d have told me to run for the hills, I couldn’t do it. Not until it meant keeping Evie safe.

I sighed. “Family.”

More than a minute passed in silence before Evie whispered. “I’m glad you stayed.”

My lips twitched. As hard had things had been, as much as we’d all had taken from us...“Me too, kiddo.”

If I hadn’t stayed, I wouldn’t have Evie. I never would’ve met Aleks or his brothers. I wouldn’t know how Pa was doing except through secondhand information passed back and forth between Janice and Maia.

However shit my life was sometimes, there were people I loved in it, and I wasn’t ever going to be sorry for keeping them.

Overcome with feelings that were sometimes too hard to voice in Wildwood, I huffed through my nose and admitted, “I love you, Evie.”

She snorted. “I know, nerd.”

But when I glanced over at her, she was searching my face. I didn’t know what she was looking for, but a moment later, she sighed and looked out the front windshield. “I love you too, and I’m sorry.”

I took one hand off the steering wheel, only to reach over and grasp hers tightly. “You don’t ever have to be, Evie. Not for this,okay? None of this is your fault. None of it. Ihatethat they’ve taken so much from you, and I fucking hate that they want—” They wanted to take more, but there was no sense saying it, scaring her more than she already was.

I swallowed my bitterness and shook my head. “We just have to get to California, okay? Then we’ll figure it out from there. One way or another, things will be better. They’ll be good.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

I had to believe that, because if I was wrong, it might just break us both.

CHAPTER 20

Aleks

The leaderof the Boise coven, Ermengarde, was like a hole in the world.

Just being in a room with her made everything feel darker. Uglier. She was a beautiful woman, so it wasn’t some kind of childish “she’s unattractive so I don’t like hanging around her.”

No, it was that her very presence was dark. She made me feel cold and shivery, like when I was a child, worried about monsters hiding under my bed. Like maybe she’d been the monster under everyone’s bed all along.

She looked like the princess in that German fairy tale, with pale skin, hair as black as night, and lips as red as blood. Sure, all of those things were likely makeup and hair dye, or maybe some kind of cosmetic magic, but instead of making me think “she’s beautiful,” every time I looked at her, the falseness of it was what struck me.

The young man at her side, who looked too alike to her for them to not be related, had similar features, but softer, less dramatic. His hair was auburn, matching his eyebrows perfectly, unlike her own brows, which looked like they were some shade of brown, but penciled in with makeup. His skin was light andunblemished, but there was a smattering of freckles across his nose that made him seem more real and less like an idealized painting. She’d called him Daire, and the disdain in her voice when she’d said it had made me think the fairy tale princess had perhaps grown up to be just like her wicked stepmother.

“You’ll challenge them,” she told Grant, and I almost laughed, barely holding myself back in time. Viktor was standing behind me, uninvited to the meeting, but having showed up nonetheless. I suspected he wasn’t going to leave my side until things were entirely settled over Evie, one way or another.

The witch wanted him to challenge the huge, square-jawed wolf from the cover of the magazine? That man would tear Grant in half, easily.

Not that such an outcome would break my heart.

Grant, though, clearly agreed with me, because he pursed his lips and while deliberately not looking at any of us, said, “He destroyed my brother. He’s not exactly an easy target.”

Ermengarde seemed unimpressed, and huffed an impatient sigh, which sort of messed up her perfect, polished facade, but I wasn’t going to be the one to say something like that to a woman who looked like she enjoyed turning people into toads. “Not the alpha,” she told him, her tone suggesting his intelligence was on par with the toads I’d been picturing. “People are saying they’re an alpha pair. It means the actual alpha has accepted the cute little boy as an equal.”

My mind froze a moment on calling the younger Asian man a “cute little boy.” He looked about my age, so that was dismissive at best, but also...

“You called him witchwolf,” I pointed out. “He will use magic, set Grant on fire.”

For a moment, I treasured that image. Wished I hadn’t pointed it out, so maybe I would get the chance to see it in person.