1. Leo #2
Funny, I hadn’t summoned mine up yet, even though I’d known I was starting a fight.
But . . . it was just Barry. He was middle-aged, out of shape, and almost paunchy.
I was half his age and in the best shape I’d ever been, from long years of helping Cash build houses.
Maybe I wasn’t much of a fighter, but neither was Barry.
“I’m taking her back to Grant.”
I grinned at him, letting every bit of the malice that lived in my soul show in that moment.
Everyone thought I was weak. Soft. Viktor was the soldier, and Aleks was the leader, and what was I?
Just little Leo, the tagalong. The one who smiled easily and talked too much and always had a kind thing to say to anyone in need of it.
None of them knew that under it all, I was the one most like my mother. Ekaterina Ilyina wasn’t a tiger like Viktor or a lion like Aleks. She was a wolverine. Small and unassuming and absolutely lethal when provoked.
“You are not,” I told him, each word calm and measured.
My accent had been mostly smoothed over by more than a decade living in America, but for some reason, that hint of Russian seemed to make everyone hesitate.
Made them think twice before truly stepping in front of me, even if they underestimated me in every other way.
“Evie will be coming with me. Whether you walk back to the front to tell Grant, or he follows the scent of your blood to find you back here and guess what happened, is up to you.”
Barry took half a step back, but then he visibly steeled himself, drawing himself up to his full height—almost a foot shorter than me and easily fifty pounds lighter.
I’d have given him credit for the fortitude, but it wasn’t courage; it was lack of intelligence.
Because I’d always been just Leo, the sweet happy kid no one paid attention to, he thought I was bluffing.
He lunged toward me, claws out, stretched toward my vulnerable belly, seeking to gut me before I could defend myself.
Barry couldn’t know that I’d fought for my life before.
On the night my father died. Again on the night my mother died.
A third time, when they had taken my brother.
It didn’t make me terribly experienced with combat, but it meant that I knew this feeling.
The metallic tang on the back of my tongue, followed by a moment when everything seemed to slow as my body reacted to the immediate threat.
I crouched down slightly, not to make myself smaller, but to gather energy in my legs.
To make a lunge of my own as he reached me, my own claws growing in the instant they were needed as I pushed up and forward, punching my hand out and hitting him in the same sensitive spot he’d been aiming for on me.
My aim was better.
I punched a hole right into his gut, then pulled my hand back, slashing as I went, letting his guts spill out onto the ground between us as he stumbled back, stunned, uncertain of what had just happened.
Pressed against the stucco wall of the motel building, Evie whispered breathlessly, “Bad ass.”
Barry turned to look at her, still confused.
His hands were no longer ready for a fight, held in front of himself, his intestines hanging on his fingers like some kind of macabre decorative garland.
I remembered how it felt, to be in a situation like that.
Losing blood as fast as your body could make more.
The way things seemed to happen in spurts, without rhyme or reason.
Wondering if you were dreaming, or perhaps already dead.
“Grant will—” Barry managed to say, before the words cut off, interrupted by bubbling blood from his lips, which seemed to confuse him even more.
It would have been merciful to kill him, then.
Wolves could heal from a lot, but this? It wasn’t likely any wolf could heal from this, let alone one who drank too much and smoked cigarettes and hadn’t once in his life met a form of exercise he enjoyed.
Barry was a dead man, his brain just hadn’t caught up to that fact yet.
Instead of worrying about leaving him confused and dying, I turned and reached out to Evie with a blood-covered hand. “We have to go. Grant’s got a squad of ass monkeys around the front, and I can’t fight them all.”
She looked up at the window, clearly thinking about Cash, which was also where my mind had gone, but I couldn’t help Cash now, least of all by dying.
Grant and his assholes would likely beat him half to death and take him back to Idaho, but if I let them get to Evie .
. . well, Cash would never forgive me. I would never forgive myself.
And Evie wouldn’t recover from what Grant had planned like Cash could recover from a beating.
Apparently having come to the same conclusion, Evie grabbed my hand, completely ignoring the slick blood that covered it, and we both turned and ran.
Toward the bay, at first, where I knew we’d be able to lose some of the scent Grant could track us by, and more importantly, pick up new, stronger smells that covered ours up.
Ocean and fish and fuck only knew what kind of horrible machinery the humans had down near the water for their businesses.
Once we got to the water, and I managed to wash the blood off my hands, I pulled out my phone and texted the family group.
I killed Barry.
Evie’s little body crashed into me, pushing me against a cement wall that ran all the way into the water, and I tensed, ready for an attack from Grant or his assholes, but there was nothing.
“The truck,” she whispered. “I saw—”
I nodded and wrapped my damp arms around her, pulling her close and waiting, hoping that they hadn’t followed our scent, and were just searching the area, or better yet, leaving. She convulsed in my arms, and after a moment, I felt a new wet patch start to form on my shirt.
Understandable. Evie might be inappropriately mature for a fourteen-year-old, but she was still fucking fourteen.
She shouldn’t be dealing with any of this.
The fact that she’d watched me kill Barry should be the most horrifying thing in her world, but instead, that was a good thing in a long line of nightmares she’d been offered.
I clenched my jaw and held her, finally pulling my phone back out and trying to explain to Aleks what had happened. It took forever, and was too long and too much to text, but he needed to know it.
And, I supposed, I needed him to know it. I needed my brothers, Viktor’s steady strength and Aleks’s solid, quiet leadership. To get that, I needed to start by telling them what had happened.
They went to a motel that smelled like Cash and Evie.
I went around back, found Evie climbing out a window.
Barry was there and tried to grab her. I had to stop him.
I couldn’t wait for Cash. Got Evie, and we got away, but .
. . what do I do now? I can’t go back. Definitely can’t take Evie back, even if I’m willing to go myself.
I sent the text, and it didn’t even take Aleks a minute to respond.
Go back to Wildwood. Start with Henry. Prepare the pack. Tell them when we return, Grant will not be with us. Whatever it takes, Viktor and I will make sure of it. I will send Mama as soon as she can come.
And that was it. In an instant that had been almost fifteen years in the making, the whole of Wildwood’s future changed.