Page 50 of Oakheart

And Jax knew that Grant had come to challenge him. He’d be ready.

I was pretty sure he had the nicest house I’d ever been in, even just looking at the smooth ceiling. The bed sure was comfortable, all things considered.

“So what does this mean?” another person asked. I looked over at Jax’s mate. He had his mark. He was a young man with tan skin and dark eyes. Definitely Asian, though I’d never met enough Asian people to guess exactly where he was from.

He was handsome though. Thewitchwolf.

What did that even mean? Could he actually do magic?

“Some guy from Idaho is going to lay siege to the Crescent Building?” Jax’s mate went on. “This isn’tDie Hard, Jax. We have a whole pack. Even if he does too?—”

“Pack code,” I struggled to say. The pretty man met my eye, so I tried my best to explain. “Grant found a loophole. Because he took the pack from Reeve, he can rechallenge anyone who broke away to get control back.”

“Surely he’d have had to do that years ago for it to be valid,” an older woman said.

Fuck if I knew the details. The room had gone hazy again, and my eyes slipped shut. I listened to them talk, but only got the gist of what they were saying.

Yeah, Grant could stretch the code to try and stake a claim here. Yes, it was mostly bullshit. Jax maybe felt guilty about something? I couldn’t tell, but join the club, buddy.

As I drifted, I wondered where Evie was. She was good at hiding. Even if she was right under Grant’s nose, those assholes weren’t smart enough to find her.

Maybe she’d gone to the Crescent building and she’d be here soon.

That’d be nice.

Yeah, Jax had just come straight to me, so they’d missed each other. But she’d be here soon, and safe, and until then, I wasgoing to stay in Jax’s perfect guest bed and hope the world forgot me.

CHAPTER 26

Aleks

After that initial confrontation,Grant acted as though he’d entirely forgotten Evie, Cash, and even Leo’s imagined betrayal.

Well, maybe not imagined. Maybe more like Leo’s betrayal of him, but not of anyone who mattered.

He immediately went back to planning his little takeover of a pack that had nothing to do with us. The entire plan made no sense to me, but what could I say to him? More, why would I say it to begin with? Grant knew what he wanted, and my opinion was irrelevant to him. I didn’t even have all the information about why he was doing what he was doing, so there was no way to know why he’d made such a poor decision.

Still, he dragged us all out of the house, only pausing long enough to glare at Viktor once as he told us we were going to confront “the puppies,” and tell them it was time to come back to the fold.

I wondered if he was being deliberately rude to make them less likely to be kind in their dealings with us. Did hewantthem to fight us?

I wondered what he might do if they agreed that certainly, we should merge packs.

On the other hand, if they did that, Grant wouldn’t be the one who ended up alpha. I knew that going in, without ever meeting a single one of the San Francisco wolves.

The moment Jax opened the door of their fancy house, that fact was even more apparent. There were no fewer than half a dozen wolves in this pack who would never bow to Grant. Jax wasn’t even close to the most intimidating of the lot.

No, that was the woman standing next to him in a suit that somehow looked... spiky. She was even taller than him, probably because of high heeled shoes, but that wasn’t what made her alpha material. No, that was the hard set of her shoulders, and her impressive expression of disdain for Grant, without ever saying a word.

There was also the enormous dark-skinned man who stood watchful at the back of the group, a stance and attitude that reminded me strongly of Viktor—an impression firmed by how Viktor’s gaze lingered on him as he looked the group over. He was the threat Viktor’s eye was drawn to.

No, Grant had no hope to win a fight with any of these people.

Next to me, Mother trembled, and I looked down to find her not frightened, but amused. Clearly, I wasn’t paying enough attention to whatever was going on. I took a deep breath of the air, trying to use scents to parse...

Cash.

There was the rather confusing scent of arousal coming from one of the San Francisco wolves, but I didn’t care about that anymore, or anything else. I’d spent the last night obsessing that Cash was dead and it was my fault, only able to try to move forward, not go back and fix my mistakes, but here it was.