Oakheart (Wolves of the Wildwood #1)

1. Cash

Cash

Even after seven years away, I knew this forest better than I knew my own mind.

Some of the trees were thicker, the brush had changed, but the scents were all the same. The way the creek ran through to the west had hardly changed. The sounds of toads and crickets sang in the air beneath the sharp crunch of dry leaves under the girl’s feet.

She was running from me, fast as she could, her jet-black hair swinging behind her. I didn’t want to catch her yet. The point wasn’t if I could get her the fastest, but drawing out the chase.

The hunt.

Sometimes, we did it on four legs, streaking through the trees as fast as we could. Today, we were upright, and her feet were as sure over the leaves and roots as her paws had been.

We’d been at it for more than an hour when I was ready to stop. I pushed my legs—longer than hers. She was only nine, but what I had in height, she made up in energy.

When I sprang at her, she darted around the wide trunk of a tree. I zipped to the other side, thinking I’d catch her off guard, but she’d let out her claws and was scrambling straight up the side of a thick oak trunk.

Damn. I thought about following her, but before I could make up my mind, she had pulled herself up onto one of the lower branches and ran along it, tracking back the way we came, hopping from one tree to the next more like a monkey than a wolf.

She sped along branches that would never hold my weight, leaping nimbly between them, leaving me on the ground with a curse on my lips.

I streaked off, but even on solid ground, it was hard to keep up with her. She ran and ran, and the branches bent under her steps, but Evie was fearless. They didn’t break, and she adjusted her sense of balance as naturally as breathing, like she was certain she could fly.

We kept up our chase for ten minutes before I doubled over. “Okay,” I shouted. “Okay, I give.”

A high-pitched laugh tinkled above me. A few seconds later, Evie dropped out of the tree. She crouched to absorb the shock of hitting the ground and straightened with a broad grin.

Something in me lightened at that smile. I’d never tire of letting her beat me, but this time, she’d earned it.

“Christ on a cracker, Evie, that was something else.”

Evie looked at me like I was batshit crazy. To be fair, werewolves didn’t typically go in for the whole mainstream monotheistic thing, but I’d spent seven years out in the human world, apprenticing and working under a carpenter.

It’d been tempting to stay out there, hiding who I was and disappearing into the modern world.

I wasn’t going to ever be somebody, not like Jax and Jillian had become out west. When my friends had left the Wildwood pack, they’d challenged the alpha directly, then gone off and founded their own company.

I wasn’t anybody, so it would’ve been easy enough to get away, turn off my mind and the guilt piling up on me, and disappear.

I wouldn’t have ever had anything—no family, nobody who’d know who I was—but I would’ve been safe.

I’d come back for two reasons: my father, who got around as well as a man could on one leg but needed help, and the girl standing in front of me, who was just starting to grow into the heap load of sass she’d been born with.

Her mama had taken off to the woods; that’s what Pa said in the letter he’d sent my way. I’d quit without notice and come back, because no matter how much I liked Mr. Edwards, that wasn’t the real world.

It wasn’t my real world, anyway, and I was needed back home.

I wasn’t under any illusion that a cousin she hardly knew coming home made up for losing her ma, but Evie seemed to like the company anyway.

And I liked her—she was the brightest spot in the bleak hovel we lived in, and I’d do anything I could to keep her safe.

“I’ve been practicing,” she announced, hands on her hips.

As much as I didn’t like the idea of her on her own, unsupervised, out here in the middle of the woods was about as safe as she was ever going to get. Furthermore, there was a reason we didn’t take the same route every time we ran—I wanted her scent on every inch of this goddamn forest.

Maybe she’d never have reason to run away from Wildwood, but if she did, I was going to give her the best shot at getting out that I could, and that meant making sure there wasn’t a clear trail to follow.

“You’re amazing, kid.” I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and ruffled her hair. She wasn’t even winded, but a young wolf wouldn’t be.

We made our way back toward the center of—well, it was hard to call Wildwood a town. It was a collection of rundown cabins all huddled together out in the middle of nowhere.

“You want to come over for dinner?” I asked when it was time for her to turn her way and me to go mine.

Uncle Tommy’s place was across the . . .

what might’ve been a square, if anything were arranged with any foresight or intention.

“Pa put on a roast. I’m sure there’s plenty. For you and Uncle Tommy too.”

Evie bit her lip and nodded. Good. I didn’t think it was good for Uncle Tommy to stay holed up in his cabin, or for the only people he heard from to be Grant and his gang, who had an awful lot to say about the kind of woman Evie’s mother was.

Pa understood it better than them, anyway. He sure as fuck understood better than me. He said I ought not be mad at Mama for leaving back when—they’d talked it through and he had too many roots, and she’d wanted to burn those roots and salt the earth they grew in.

She’d asked me to come with her, but all I saw was her leaving. Her breaking us up. I’d been a little older than Evie when it happened, but I hadn’t understood it then either, and I still struggled to.

But Uncle Tommy didn’t need to go getting all bitter and talking shit on Evie’s ma. She didn’t need to hear that.

It was different anyway. My mama had walked away on her own two legs—a conscious choice. Evie’s ma had gone on a pack run one night, and she’d been stuck on four. Something in her had broken, and the wolf was easier than facing it.

That wasn’t a choice; it was a tragedy.

“I’ll tell Dad,” she promised, bouncing away on the balls of her feet.

I got back to Pa’s cabin, where I still lived and would continue to until I took a mate—which I was pretty damn sure wasn’t going to happen in a pack like this, where everyone looked at me sidelong and I was far from the alpha’s favorite person.

Even before I’d lived with humans, Reeve had seen me as a traitor. It was my friends who’d left the Wildwood pack, who’d embarrassed him in front of the rest of us. I’d known it was coming, and I hadn’t done a damn thing to stop it.

Pa was in the kitchen, his bad leg stretched out. The cooking pot was over the fire in the hearth, and it smelled damn good in there, so I didn’t know what he was looking at me so seriously for.

His frown drew me up short. I pushed the door shut with my heel, but only half managed to shrug out of my jacket. “Something the matter?”

“Alpha Grant wants to see you,” Pa said, his jaw set firm.

He didn’t like attention from the alpha any more than I did. It never led to anything good. It was Reeve that’d taken his leg, and I’d never been sad to see that fucker dead.

But the current alpha, Reeve’s brother, wasn’t any better.

I swallowed my nerves and met my father’s eye. The last thing I wanted was for him to see I was scared. He didn’t need to worry about me.

“He say what it was about?”

Pa shook his head. “Just wants you at the big house.”

I nodded. “All right. I’ll go now. I told Evie she could come for dinner with Uncle Tommy. That okay?”

Pa cracked a smile at that, and it made me hope this might not be so bad. I’d only been home a little while, and there were plenty of reasons Grant might want to talk to me that didn’t necessarily involve me getting my ass kicked.

Not that I’d ever been so lucky before.

“Good,” Pa said. “I’d have had you bring some over for them anyway. It’ll be nicer to have company.”

All I could do was nod again, because my heart was jumping right up into my throat. It pinched my words when I told him I’d be back, and I slipped out the door rather than linger and give myself away.

The big house was . . . all right, it was slightly bigger than the rest of our cabins. It had a couple more rooms, and a long kitchen table. A pack alpha had to make plans, after all. He kept some of the men close by to enforce his rules and make sure nobody got out of line.

It still wasn’t anything that impressive, and I was half expecting for him to ask me to build him something new, something better. Of course, asking me to make something for himself would mean Grant respected my craft, which wasn’t possible.

I walked up the rough wood porch and took a deep breath before I knocked on the door. Uncle Tommy opened it for me, smiling.

“There you are, Cash.” He clapped me on the shoulder and gave it a little shake. “Come in, come in.”

But when I stepped deeper into the room, Grant had a beady glint to his eyes that I didn’t like one bit. “Took you long enough.”

I dropped my gaze to the floor. “I’m sorry, alpha. I just got back and came right over.”

He narrowed his eyes. I could just say I’d gone for a run; there was no reason for me to explain to him or anybody else why I wanted Evie to know how to run and get damn good at it.

In the end, I didn’t need an excuse. Grant didn’t really give a damn.

“Well, Miss Katie and her sons have been staying with us for a while, and they need somewhere to live. Somewhere nice. So I’m gonna have to see you putting all that practice you needed to work. You were gone long enough, so it ought to be good, yeah?”

I glanced up, and Miss Katie, she was the only woman in the room. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. I’d never known a Miss Katie before, so she must’ve joined the pack while I’d been gone.

She was a strikingly beautiful blond woman, standing by a young man who looked exactly like her, and another who was his shadow. The dark-haired man glared at the back of Grant’s head, and Miss Katie’s smile was tight even when she looked at me, so I thought I was missing something.

The blond man with the eyes blue as the sky? He was just staring at me, and that was the most disconcerting of all, so I looked back at his mother and offered my best smile.

It trembled nervously on my face. “I’ll do my very best for you, ma’am.”

Grant scoffed. “You’d better.”