Page 92 of Oakheart

There was a spark of something there, and a moment later, he was smearing it into me. Ownership, in a way, if not the way I’d been raised to think of it.

We might go bathe in the river later, but the claim would never leave me. Every wolf in the pack would smell him on me the next time I went out among them.

And nothing in the world could have made me happier.

CHAPTER 45

Cash

I’d never been moreexhausted in my life, but it was worth it.

No, it wasn’t the work of building new homes. That work was familiar to me, even alone or with minimal help.

The change was that the whole pack was helping now. Everyone needed guidance, they had questions, they wanted to help.

It was wonderful, but I’d never been called on to speak so much, to guide so many people.

Standing at Aleks’s side, helping him build a new community—I wouldn’t change anything, but standing in the spotlight for any amount of time was overwhelming, and building our new community required me to step up.

I could do it. Iwoulddo it.

But damn if it weren’t outside of my comfort zone of working alone and keeping to myself.

We were still working on the big house. It wasn’t going to be the alpha’s house anymore. It’d already been absurdly large for any one man, at Grant’s insistence, and Aleks wasn’t interested in that kind of showiness.

Instead, it’d be for the women and children of the pack. Yes, they were welcome to have their own homes, to stay with the families that they loved.

Some of them had lost mates and fathers in the fallout of this change. Some had died back in San Francisco, and some had left voluntarily rather than stay and risk the new alpha’s wrath.

In most cases, they weren’t men worth mourning, but the worthiness of the dead didn’t stop the people they mattered to from having feelings. Most of them felt complicated. Many passings were bittersweet. A few of those left behind were jubilant.

But one of Aleks’s first decisions as alpha was to create a safe space for women and children.

Every day, I walked the house and helped raise the walls and directed the efforts for the day.

Around lunchtime, once the flow for the day had been set and I was thoroughly overwhelmed by the amount of socializing I’d done, I’d leave Aleks working with the others and slip away to the small clearing behind Katya’s house and Pa’s. You had to walk between the corner their homes formed to get to our future place.

It was about the size of the house Pa and Evie lived in. I figured the second bedroom made sense for emergencies, or if a member of the pack was in desperate need of somewhere to stay. Mostly, I wanted to protect our privacy, and had determined to fill it with shelves of books for Aleks and the comfiest chair I could make.

We didn’t need much once Katya had offered her home up as a central hub for pack business. The living area was large enough for most things, and I doubted Aleks would ever hold court the way his uncle and father had.

Katya endured being at the center of things far better than I did, but on those afternoons I snuck off to work on our futurehome, even while Aleks continued to throw his all into what the pack needed, Leo and Viktor would often find their ways back to that little clearing to help me.

Viktor was as quiet as he’d always been, simply doing the work that needed doing. Leo chatted happily, but there was something so familiar and light about the sound of his voice that it didn’t tire me out the way that bigger crowds did.

Sometimes, Evie would come, but more and more, she stayed at the big house. She’d made friends, real friends, for the first time.

I’d even seen her passing a chinking knife over to Uncle Tommy the other day, when they were working on the walls together. While I wasn’t sure things would ever be the same between them, I hoped she’d find some forgiveness and peace with him. Whatever the case, I was following her lead.

As long as she was safe and happy, nothing else mattered.

The day before, Viktor and I had finished the slanting roof of the cabin. It was only one story, so compared to Katya’s home and the big house, it was relatively easy. With that, there was little else to do, and Leo had brought home a guest—avampire—who needed Katya’s third bedroom. We were close enough to finished with Aleks and my new house that it made sense for us to leave.

We’d spent the day installing the doors and windows, but by afternoon, all that was left was furniture. I was building our bed, and it was the only piece of furniture wehadto have to move in here, but there was no sense in keeping Viktor and Leo away from the pack for one relatively simple piece of furniture. Four legs, a headboard, and a footboard. Enough support to keep us off the ground.

Still, it felt more significant than that, and I obsessed over making the lines just right, the support enough that it’d stay comfortable for us.

I thought about Aleks and all the work he had to do, how he’d need good rest. It had to be perfect.