Page 75 of Oakheart

Because there was no scar.

Just smooth, perfect skin where only weeks earlier, Grant had tried to murder him.

I stared for a second, then ran my fingers over the unblemished skin. Cash breathed shakily, and next to us, Viktor snorted.

“You didn’t know.”

“You did?” I demanded.

He reached down and pulled his own T-shirt off, revealing a completely unscarred body. Odd. I thought he’d had scars whenwe had brought him home from Vladivostok. Nothing that truly showed what he’d been through, since wolves healed damn well, but something.

“Four years,” he said, poking at his own chest. “Used to be a bullet scar here. A knife there. One from claws on my thigh.”

Cash gave a little whimper, like he could see, or feel the wounds that had caused the scars. But there were no scars.

Viktor looked up at me, a tiny smirk on his lips. “They disappeared the day I accepted you as my alpha.”

For a moment, all I could do was stare at him. Four years?

I’d been someone’s alpha for four years?

More than that, he’d accepted it? Had he never once been a member of the Wildwood pack.

Fuck, no wonder Grant had never wanted him around. Maybe he’d thought Viktor so broken that he was unable to join a pack at all, because Viktor had never accepted him as his alpha.

Incredible.

After that, there were no boundaries with any of us. Maybe Cash and Viktor didn’t have the same love for each other that Cash and I did, but they were brothers now too, in a new way.

We all slept together in a heap and took comfort from the closeness of pack.

The cops in San Francisco were deeply unenthused about looking for my uncle. They didn’t even want to take the report initially, since it hadn’t been forty-eight hours and Grant was a grown man, but I stressed that he’d gone for a walk, and hadn’t even taken his truck or his bags, so they relented and took a report, but assured me that sometimes, people just left.Especially when those someones didn’t have close, direct family, and were unhappy in their lives.

It was strange, that I could still get offended on Grant’s behalf, even though he was dead and I was glad of it. The man was, by our accounts, missing in their city, and they could barely be bothered to contact local hospitals looking for him to have turned up in a morgue.

Of course, they didn’t find him, but we’d never expected that, since we knew right where he was.

The Crescent pack was never mentioned, nor their land, nor our connection to them or the fact that it was why we’d come to begin with. No, I just told them we’d come to visit, and Grant had gone.

All it really meant was that eventually, we’d be able to declare him dead, and all the things he’d owned would legally revert to me. I wouldn’t have bothered, but someone needed to have a legal claim on pack lands, or we’d be a little screwed.

Once we were finished, we packed up all of our things, threw them in the back cab of Grant’s truck, and headed back to Idaho, where we belonged.

It felt like we were leaving behind a huge burden, driving out of the city without Grant or his asshole minions.

No offense to the Crescent wolves, but in that moment, I’d have been happy to never return. Maybe that would change as we got time and healing after Grant, but for now, I wanted nothing more than to be home.

We made the whole drive in one day, none of us willing to stop. Cash, sitting between Viktor and me in the front cab, tapped his foot the whole last hour of the drive. He was so desperate to see Evie, he almost climbed over Viktor and jumped out when I drew the truck to a stop next to Grant’s old house.

Viktor and I followed close behind, Viktor because his protective instincts were clearly in overdrive and me... well,basically same. I wasn’t going to let Cash out of my sight anytime soon. Not willingly.

He had almost died.

We spilled into the central area between the old pack houses in time to hear an argument between Leo and... one of the older pack members, Walter. He was in his seventies, and he’d gone through my father and uncle as alphas, and never really made much fuss about either of them. About... well, anything.

Until now.

“—betraying our pack alpha,” he was near-shouting at Leo. “Why would any of us ever trust you lot? You’re not even American. You’re Russians. You don’t belong here. You aren’t pack. And you just march in and decide to take over?”