Page 52 of Oakheart

Next to me, Mama’s hand shot out and steadied a glass. For a moment, I was worried about her, but then I realized she was just keeping Giselle’s glass from tipping across the table. The older woman grumbled something about there being too much “junk” on the table, but... that was odd.

And when I turned toward her, the odd whiff of magic remained on the air. Over everyone else’s head, I met Viktor’s eye, and he gave me the tiniest nod.

Well damn.

Do not piss off the witchwolf, I decided to myself. Not that I’d intended to before, but that was impressively petty, and so very well deserved.

Myself, I hoped next time she fell down, she broke her neck and saved me the trouble of killing her. I had enough old-fashioned sexism in me to not relish the idea of killing a woman, even though this one was a monster who deserved no better. When the pack as we knew it made its shift, she would definitely not have a place in its future.

I wondered, when Ajax ignored Grant’s demands for the fifth time, what it felt like to be so completely dismissed by someone you saw as a lesser being. Grant kept telling the man he was a child, a “lost stray,” and other insulting nonsense, and the San Francisco alpha was treating him like an enthusiastic five-year-old talking about the new thing he’d learned.

“That’s really not the way it works,” Ajax was saying as his mate slipped out of his chair and headed for the bathroom. “If it were, there would be constant challenges for every pack’s leadership, as though we lived in the dark ages. Honestly, only the most backward packs ever have to deal with challenges inthe modern era. We’re civilized people, and we don’t need to fight to make points, unless the people we’re forced to fight are incapable of reason.”

It was damned impressive, insulting Grant and the pack a dozen ways with a single little speech, and even though it annoyed me to be called backward, I couldn’t dispute it. He wasn’t wrong.

But then something occurred to me.

The witchwolf was alone. That could be good for me, or if the wrong goon headed to the bathroom right that moment, very bad for everyone.

I wouldn’t have put it past any one of them to follow him and try something, only to end up dead, because clearly, from the way Giselle had dropped her fork five times during dinner, and how she kept whining that the food tasted like metal, the witchwolf was no one to fuck with.

So I slid myself out of my chair and tried to be unobtrusive as I made my way to the bathroom. Sure enough, Marcus was staring down the hall thoughtfully, like he was thinking about going.

I almost stopped myself and let him.

It would take one ugly thing off my plate if Marcus forced the witchwolf to kill him, wouldn’t it?

But no. I needed to speak to a member of the San Francisco pack, and this might be my best chance.

My best chance to betray my own pack.

But I had to. I wasn’t betraying the future, I reminded myself. Only the past. A past that we would all be happy to leave behind.

I went in after him, and almost immediately, was inundated with the stink of a public bathroom. I made sure no one was following us, pressing the door closed with my body. I doubted it would intimidate the witchwolf, since he could probably kill mewith a flick of his fingers, but I didn’t want Marcus coming in to listen to what I had to say.

There was no one else in the room, so I turned my attention back to him.

“I do not know how wolves can live in city like this,” was the first thing I said.

Huh. Hadn’t been expecting that to be what came out. It was true, but oddly honest and not related to the subject I’d come to talk to him about. I shook my head, trying to clear it, but instead of the plan to finish Grant, only one thing came to mind. “Cash. Cash is... is alive?”

He cocked his head at me, his whole body relaxing. Odd, but good. It probably meant I wasn’t about to turn into a toad or trip over my own feet.

“Why?” was all he asked.

I swallowed hard and tried to search for the right words. For some reason, English was coming harder than usual. Well, not “some reason.” Stress. Cash was in trouble, Leo and Evie were in trouble, the whole damned pack was in trouble. My pack. It was my responsibility to take care of them, and I didn’t know how to do it.

Instead of trying to explain why Cash had left and what he meant to me, I decided to start simple. I didn’t know what Cash had told them, but I did know he’d left us to find them, and then been attacked over it. “If... if Cash wishes to leave us, then... is his right.” I stopped, frowned, and huffed a sigh. “Right, yes? There are too many rights in English.”

What the fuck was wrong with me? My thoughts were slipping sideways into Russian, and forming sentences was hard. I’d have wondered if the witchwolf had already hexed me, but I couldn’t smell magic in the small, enclosed space. Also, “rights” weren’t something we talked about much, back home. We didn’t really have any of those.

Beside all that, I did this when Grant was stressing me too. Sometimes on purpose, because it made him so irrationally angry when I dropped my articles, and sometimes just because I forgot them.

The witchwolf narrowed his eyes at me, then jerked back a bit and his mouth fell open. He really was a very pretty man when he wasn’t glaring at me.

“Yes. It’s his right if he wants to leave,” he said, nodding, interested in this conversation rather than nervous or angry. “But he didn’t come asking into our pack. He just came to warn us that your people were planning to attack us. But... he’s not well, but he’s alive, and he’s healing. Slowly, but we think he’ll be okay, thanks to some quick work by my mentor.”

I would kill Grant.