Page 56 of Oakheart

Well, that was no longer any kind of choice.

I immediately turned and loped off in the direction of that second voice, keeping myself hunched over so that I could properly breathe.

The house was too fucking big, and I didn’t know how, but the fire had spread so fast that parts of it were engulfed already. Behind me, I heard another strangled scream from Giselle, then a loud crack, and a crash, as the central wall in the house started to collapse.

Then no more screams.

I hurried forward, worrying about the person I could save. The person whose life was almost certainly more worth saving than Giselle’s had ever been. It was a horrible cutthroat way to think in the moment, but really, it was likely the fire Giselle had set herself had saved me the trouble of having to swallow down my distaste for the act and kill her.

People who did what Giselle did deserved no better.

There was a rumble ahead of me, and I realized it was pounding. Weak, but pounding. Someone was locked into a room—a kitchen pantry, I realized, which would be the only room in a house owned by people like this that had a lock on the outside.

No doubt Ajax Fyse felt no need to lock his wolves into rooms to teach them lessons.

I flipped the lock and tore the door open, only to have a tiny woman with honey-blonde hair fall into me, coughing weakly. She was followed out by a billow of smoke, and I grabbed her and reared back.

I hefted her up into my arms, and even as I did so, she went lax against me.

Fuck.

Fuck Grant and fuck Giselle. If I hadn’t been here, this woman would have died. This completely innocent woman.

And beside that, how had she gotten locked into the pantry?

Giselle again, no doubt. Likely this woman was one of the original Wildwood wolves who had left the pack after Ajax’s fight with my father, and Giselle bore her some personal grudge.

I was even more glad she was probably dead.

The way I’d come in was blocked, an inferno of flames, so I turned toward the only kitchen exit that wasn’t on fire, and pushed forward. Turning forward and back, rushing through, but trying not to run straight into the fire, I finally found an exit that wasn’t blocked: somehow, it was the same door I’d come in, and the flames almost seemed like they were holding back from this single room. Thank fuck, because otherwise I wasn’t sure how we’d have gotten out.

I tried twice to get the damn door open. Why had I closed it behind me, dammit? My hands were full of the woman, slippery with sweat, and clumsy with the lack of air to breathe, so I finally gave up and turned my shoulder into it, crashing into it with all my weight until it broke outward, and then, we were free.

I stumbled out into the clean air and was almost immediately accosted by Ajax Fyse, demanding to know if the woman was breathing.

I blinked at him a moment, my brain refusing to form sentences even in Russian, let alone English. Finally, I managed to muster the ever eloquent, “Is alive,” as we both went to ourknees and I laid the woman out on the dirt to confirm that she was still breathing.

She was.

I had gotten her out alive.

That was when Grant stalked up next to us, naked as the day he was born and not nearly as ashamed as he ought to be, and demanded, “Where is Giselle?”

All I could do for a moment was cough as my lungs tried again and again to heal, but the overwhelming heat and smoke continued to burn inside me.

“You were supposed to protect her!” he shouted at me, and what? No one had told me to protect the monstrous old woman, and even if they had, it wouldn’t have been within my power to protect someone who set a house on fire and then ran into it.

I ignored him and coughed, my head suddenly filled with splitting pain. Too long without enough air, probably. When I finally got the cough under control, I put a hand to my head, gingerly, and shook it, just the tiniest bit. “Dead. She was trapped when center wall fell down. I didn’t get to her.”

Grant started shouting about loyalty, which was something he did damned often, so I ignored him and just tried to fucking breathe. He stomped off to yell at the others, who were apparently also at fault for Giselle’s death. I had bad news for him. No one but him and his goons would be sad about her dying in her own mess. Maybe not even all of them. I doubted Tommy would cry to hear of her passing.

Somewhere nearby, I heard Mama speaking, and while she wasn’t speaking to me, and I couldn’t even make out the words, the sound of her soothed me.

Even when Grant came thundering back to screech at me some more, I... I heard the words. The tirade about Giselle and how she’d been a loyal packmate, and how in failing to save her, I had become a disloyal pack member. But none of it penetrated.Like suddenly, I was immune to sound waves, and they just bounced off me.

He was telling me about how I was going to have to work to regain his trust, when I decided I was finished with this. I turned around, looking at the surrounding area until I found Mama, sitting in the grass next to Dakota, and walked over to them, ignoring Grant’s hissy fit. “You are well, Mother?”

“I am fine, Aleks,” she told me with her serene smile. Then she waved to her companion. “This is Dakota. He is witchwolf. Very nice young man.”