3. Leo
Leo
The pack takeover had been surprisingly seamless, considering how long the Wildwood wolves had been held under the thumb of the horrible men in Aleks’s family.
Sometimes, in the deep quiet of my mind, I wondered if perhaps Mama had found another man in the States.
One from another pack or a stranger passing through, and he had fathered Aleks, because my brother?
He was nothing like his father or his uncle, or any other member of his family the pack had ever spoken of.
He was soft-spoken and kind and a solid, dependable leader, rather than an arrogant blowhard who constantly needed all attention to be on him.
But Mama had shown us the pictures once, of her first time in the States.
Of a very young version of her with a man who looked almost exactly like Aleks.
Maybe even taller than Aleks, and certainly redder and .
. . well, even in pictures, there had been something unsettling about Reeve.
A deadness behind his eyes. Standing next to one of the most beautiful women in the world, his chosen mate, and there was no visible emotion on his face.
That wasn’t right.
It was possible, of course, that the camera had caught a moment of distraction or disturbance, but I didn’t believe it.
No, the picture was an exact microcosm of the reality of the Wildwood pack during his reign.
He was like a shark, with his dead eyes, always swimming, always looking for new prey.
No feelings about the damage he left in his wake, because who cried for the feelings of their lunch?
No, Aleks had turned out different, better, simply because Mama had taught him better.
She had taught all of us. We were pack, family, and we were supposed to take care of each other.
If we didn’t want to take care of someone, then perhaps help was needed, or perhaps, that someone was in the wrong pack.
We didn’t have to always get along, or always see eye to eye, but the moment we stopped caring? That was a serious problem.
It was with that rolling around in my head that I went to visit Henry for breakfast.
Not that Henry and I had a problem, quite the opposite, but Henry, more than anyone else in the Wildwood pack, deserved a little attention and consideration.
Mama had spent our youth teaching us that we should always care for those in need, and Henry, while as strong and independent as anyone, had sacrificed more for his pack than most people would ever consider.
It was an open secret that when the Crescent pack had broken away from Wildwood, Reeve had blamed Cash, who’d been their friend. And instead of letting his teenage son be punished for something that no one had done wrong, Henry had accepted Reeve’s unjust punishment himself.
I didn’t even want to know how, but Reeve had taken Henry’s leg.
I couldn’t imagine being in a situation like that, where all I could do was accept abuse and hope it was something I could survive, rather than fighting for myself, but again, Mama’s raising.
Mama, and before her death my biological mother, had always taught me that I should fight injustice.
Someone accusing my innocent child of a crime and threatening bodily injury?
I’d have challenged Reeve then and there.
But Henry wasn’t me. He’d never been a fighter, and even then, he’d been forty-ish and barely Mama’s height, with a slender, almost fragile build.
The same as Cash. It was easy for me to think I would fight back.
I was six feet tall and had never met a foe I knew with certainty that I couldn’t defeat.
I might not be the Wildwood alpha like my brother was, but I was without question an apex predator. Large and strong, but more importantly, almost always the largest and strongest in every room. Technically, I was taller than Aleks, and had more obvious muscles than Viktor.
No, I’d never fooled myself into thinking I could handle either of them in a fight, but . . . they were my brothers. Why would I ever fight them?
When I walked by the chicken coop and knocked on the back door of Henry’s little house, he didn’t come and open it, but simply called out that it was open, and to come in.
We didn’t lock houses in Wildwood, like they did in the city.
With Reeve long gone and Grant and his assholes dead, there was no reason at all to bother.
I went in, and Henry looked up from the kitchen table with a smile. “Thought you might drop by this morning. Made enough to feed a growing boy.”
Evie, who was already sitting at the table, snorted. “The real question is whether he’ll ever stop growing. One day you’ll stop fitting inside the houses.”
I stuck my tongue out at her and crossed my eyes at the same time, and she giggled before stuffing another bite of syrup-covered sausage into her mouth.
Syrup. Given the smell of cinnamon in the kitchen, that could only mean one thing.
Henry had made his French toast, which was one of my favorite things in the entire world.
The man made sourdough bread, and when it started to get stale, there was always French toast. Soaked overnight in heavy milk and eggs and cinnamon, it was one of the most decadent things I’d ever eaten in my entire life, and after the first time I’d eaten it, I’d started dreaming of Henry’s kitchen.
I groaned and dropped into a chair in time for him to finish pouring a glass of milk and then push it in front of me.
Then he motioned to a stack in the middle of the table.
“I don’t think we’re in danger of Leo not fitting inside the house anytime soon,” he said, shooting an amused glance at Evie and then picking up the syrup from beside her and setting it closer to me as well.
“Anything interesting on the schedule for today?”
I shook my head, picking up the plate that had already been sitting at the place I’d taken at the table and loading it full of French toast. Mama had always taught us not to take more than we could eat, but honestly, I could pack away a fair amount of French toast. Besides, I’d probably be cutting and carrying lumber in the near future, so I’d work most of it off.
Being able to start the day with a stack of Henry’s French toast made any work well worth it.
I was focused on building my plate, so I barely noticed when he got up and went to the stove, until a thunk grabbed my attention. My eyes instantly found his face, and the expression of undisguised pain there.
Evie was half out of her chair, like he might fall and she would catch him, but he wasn’t falling, just leaning heavily on the table.
He’d dropped a cast iron pan that still had a half dozen sausages in it onto the table when the pain had hit him, hence the noise.
Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be any spilled grease to burn anyone, but then . . . his leg, of course.
He sat heavily in the chair he’d been in before going to get the pan, grimacing, and pushed off the most recent prosthetic Cash had made him, rubbing the stump of his leg.
I wondered, not for the first time, if maybe we should find a way to get him a professional prosthetic.
Not that Cash’s efforts weren’t incredible, but the humans had a whole industry based around making better ones, and my understanding was that they were quite advanced.
On the other hand, I’d also heard that a good leg might cost as much as a car, and while Aleks was now in control of Wildwood’s accounts, and our taxes were paid up and we weren’t in danger of getting tossed off our own land . . . we couldn’t just spend that kind of money, even for a good reason.
On the other hand . . . an image swam up in my mind from a life long behind me.
Wrinkled hands, reaching down to pluck an entire small purple-flowering plant from the dirt, and a crisp feminine voice that reminded me of clean sheets and lavender-scented air.
“This one helps with the arthritis,” she said to me, shaking the plant a little to dislodge dirt from the roots.
“It numbs the area well enough to last, even for a wolf. Mustn’t give it to humans, though, too strong for them. Doesn’t do much for fae.”
We’d had humans in the enclave territory back in Russia.
I had forgotten that, living in Wildwood with only wolves.
In Russia, the camps we’d lived in had been more than one kind of supernatural creature, living together, helping each other, because the government hated us all. Raided and killed us all.
Polina, her name had been. The oldest wolf I’d known even then, well over a hundred, bent and gnarled, living on the outskirts of the village. The morning after the last attack, the one that had taken Viktor and eventually sent us all fleeing Russia, her shack had been missing.
Not just destroyed, leaving rubble where it should have been, but entirely absent, like someone had scooped it up and taken it elsewhere.
It had reminded me of old stories I’d been told about houses with chicken legs, and though I’d never seen Polina again, I hoped she’d taken her house away and was safe somewhere.
Regardless, the information was useful, and like setting the truck keys down and trying to visualize where they had gone later, I was convinced I’d seen those little purple flowers again, much more recently.
Near the grove where we were building, maybe?
Had it been a specific time of year, or did they grow all the time?
I wanted to go back and give my preteen self a smack, and tell him to listen to Polina better, but . . . well, I could handle this. I just needed to go look, didn’t I?
I wouldn’t tell Henry yet, though. Also, I wasn’t going to draw attention to his pain or weakness. For too long, things like that had been used against Wildwood wolves. We weren’t ready for honest conversations about them yet.
For the moment, I just smiled at him and reached over with my fork to grab a few sausages from the pan. “Thank you, Henry. This is delicious. I appreciate all your effort to feed someone you don’t have to.”
He smiled at me, ducking his head as the pain seemed to recede, his body slowly relaxing. “Always happy to have your company, kiddo. Me and Evie get bored in the quiet sometimes.”
I grinned around a bite of food as Evie rolled her eyes and muttered something about it being a good thing I never shut up, then, and everything slowly went back to normal.
Well, normal for now.
Someday, I was determined, Wildwood would be a better community. One that didn’t make Henry want to hide what he perceived as a weakness.