2. Aleks
Aleks
Cash.
It was not a name I had heard before among the mass of American Davids and Johns and Williams, but that suited him even more, because he was unique among the people in the Wildwood pack.
Oh, they were all frightened and beaten down and most of them were miserable under Grant’s rule. I only believed it had been worse under my father because my mother assured me that was true.
But Cash wasn’t just sad or miserable.
He wasn’t . . . rebellious, exactly, but there was something remote about him. Like he was only present physically, and mentally, he had never entered the building.
I was well familiar with this way of checking out, so to speak. I’d been doing it myself regularly since we had arrived back in America.
Things under Reeve, my own father, had been bad enough that when I was four years old, my mother had taken me and fled back to the land of her birth—Russia.
But by the time Grant had arrived, asking her to return and promising that things were better and my father was dead, that I was still the heir of the Wildwood pack, things had gotten so bad in Russia for werewolves that Mother had barely hesitated.
She had only forced him to agree that “her other sons” also had a place in Wildwood before packing our things and running.
Her other sons, Leo and Viktor, were not technically my brothers, but the twin sons of a friend of hers who had been killed in one of the government’s raids of the pack lands. They were also my best friends, and brothers to me in all but blood.
It still pained me to think of it, because only one of them had made it to America with us. Viktor had been taken in a raid just before we escaped, and despite the time and work Leo and I had put into finding him in the years since the government had kidnapped him, he was still missing.
Fuck only knew what was happening to him in the hands of the Russian government.
So . . . things were better in Wildwood. The American government at least pretended that they didn’t know about werewolves, and I’d heard nothing about us being attacked here, or scooped up out of our pack lands and never heard from again.
The only way in which America was a problem was Grant.
After all his assurances to my mother, he was only a better alpha than my father in that he wasn’t big and strong enough to beat her.
The pack still lived in fear of its alpha and the gang of brutes he used to keep them in line.
They still lived in rotten old huts and barely survived instead of thriving.
The biggest difference was that now, I was as big as the brutes, and if I wasn’t there to defend Mama, then Leo was, and he loved her every bit as much as I did.
Also, we were both easily as good in a fight as any of Grant’s bullies.
Better, probably, since we’d grown up learning to fight soldiers with guns who were trying to kidnap us.
No one would ever lay a hand on my mother again, unless he wanted to die.
And now, Grant had brought in this beautiful, distant man to build Mama a new house.
Apparently he had been away from the pack, learning the trade of carpentry for the entire time I had been back from Russia, and had only returned recently. Grant, unsurprisingly, thought his time and effort learning had been a waste, and no one ever needed an education.
As though men who knew nothing could build houses.
I envied people with educations. Mama had taught me to read, but I didn’t know much more than that, and sometimes I still longed for those answers that children demanded. Why was the sky blue, and where did magic come from, and why didn’t humans have wolves as we did?
I knew those answers existed. I simply didn’t have access to them, and asking questions had only ever gotten me derision in the past, especially from Grant and his ilk.
Sometimes, when we had to go into the human towns nearby, I would steal a book and devour every single page, over and over, until it started to fall apart.
A book about the nearby Yellowstone National Park had taught me so many things I’d never even imagined about geology and wildlife.
A copy of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in English had lasted me years of reading, and taught me so many new words.
I still had those two, tucked under my pillow in the bedroom I inhabited in Grant’s home.
Well, home, if it could be called a home.
It was just as much a ramshackle old hut as every other building in the pack town, just slightly bigger. Sometimes I worried that if I stepped wrong, my foot would go through a floorboard.
So this Cash? He was everything I’d ever hoped for and more. Not only was he going to build Mama the home she deserved, but it was going to allow her, me, and Leo to get a little distance from Grant and his goons. Let me sleep in a place where perhaps I could put my books on a shelf.
I wondered, if I asked very nicely, if he might build a shelf to put in my room.
His eyes were as bright as new spring leaves, and they seemed kind, if unfocused on the world around him.
In fact, they seemed all the kinder for that distance and lack of immediate focus.
Still, nothing was ever going to be accomplished with Grant breathing down everyone’s neck, so I stepped forward. “Come then. We should choose place for Mama’s home.”
“A place,” Grant said, in that grating way he had of constantly correcting my English. “You should choose a place.”
I waved him off because I didn’t care to have my language corrected by a man whose most impressive skill was crushing a beer can against his forehead without cutting himself. Usually. “Yes, yes. Mama will choose.”
A moment later, as though he could read my mind, Leo was helping me usher Mama and Cash out the door. Perhaps Leo did read my mind. Or more likely, we both wanted to be away from Grant and his hawk eyes, constantly searching for weakness.
We were brothers in every way that mattered, after all.
Mama simply smiled at him as he offered her an arm, and I ushered Cash along, despite the confusion in his clear green eyes. He was beautiful like that as well. Beautiful in all ways, truly.
Perhaps the most beautiful man I had ever seen, with his dark hair and sharp-cut jaw.
And the fact I spent more time noticing that than I had spent paying attention to the young women Grant had been shoving me at was yet another reason it was good we had left Russia, even if Grant wasn’t much kinder about people who didn’t conform to his beliefs.
He didn’t make me nearly as nervous as all of Russia.
“Behind the tree line is fine,” Mama said, giving me a look like I was being terribly silly, making a production out of this.
I just shook my head, stalking deliberately north and west, all the way out of the circle of houses that made up most of the pack village.
“Where are you going, zaychik?” Mama asked as I continued walking, past the edge of the place where the pack homes stopped, continuing into the woods.
“The clearing near the ridge,” Leo said, and there was approval in his voice. He knew where I was going, and what I meant by it.
Mama was frowning a little. “It’s not with the pack.”
“It is inside pack land,” I assured her. “And the government does not attack here. We do not need to all be together. You will be safe apart.”
“The ridge . . . ” Cash murmured, then—well, that was the moment my breath left my body.
He smiled, and his whole face transformed.
He wasn’t just beautiful like that. He was ethereal.
Perfect. The most gorgeous creature I had seen in all my years.
He didn’t notice my astonishment and just continued on.
“I always thought that little clearing there would be a great place for a house or three. It’s got such a stunning view, and it’s . . . quiet.”
Apart from the others, he meant, and he wasn’t wrong.
It wasn’t that I especially wanted to be apart from the others.
Only Grant and his gang. And almost as much, away from the village itself, which seemed to me, a monument to ignorance and failure.
The houses were on the verge of collapse, dingy and ugly and older than any living pack member.
They weren’t suitable for habitation at all.
We should knock them down and use them for firewood next winter, as they were suited to nothing better.
Cash was off on another tangent already, though, and suddenly I wasn’t what was pressing him forward.
No, he was surging ahead with surprising speed of his own.
“I know just the spot. I’ll need . . . well, it’ll need to be leveled a bit.
And I’ll need a lot of materials. Concrete and wood.
I don’t think Grant is—” He cut off and turned to me with wide eyes, clearly worried that I would be offended at any small insult to the alpha, so I snorted and nodded.
“Grant is . . . what is English word? Cheap ass?” I knew the words quite well, but it always seemed to charm Americans when I said things like that, and sometimes they smiled and ignored things they would otherwise find offensive if I pretended there was more of a language barrier than there was.
There was no language barrier at all. I was largely fluent in English.
It simply wasn’t my first language, so sometimes I’d get intricate twists of grammar wrong or words would escape me, particularly when I was angry or excited.
And no matter how I’d tried as a teenager, I couldn’t seem to excise the accent I had.
So I leaned into it and used it to my advantage instead.
Manipulative, probably, but also, it worked. I’d learned young that when a thing worked, you used it all you possibly could.
Cash gave a little snicker at my insulting Grant, and Leo muttered under his breath that “cheap ass” was an understatement. Mama just smiled. She, of all people, saw me. She knew what I was doing.
“I will tell him concrete is needed,” I promised. “The wood, though”—I paused and looked around—“this wood will be fine. Leo and I will cut trees. Make wood for you to build Mama’s house.”
His eyes went round in shock, but he nodded, and his gaze slid down my body in a familiar way.
For the first time in my life, though, that look didn’t make me feel dirty, like Grant was about to tell me I needed to do something I didn’t wish to.
This time, it made every part of me warm, and I met his eye when the perusal came back up to meet mine, his cheeks flushed a beautiful pink.
Then I gave him my best assholish grin, the only thing I’d learned from my father in the few years I’d known him as a child, and motioned to the trees. “Which trees to cut down?”
This was going to be fun, and we didn’t have enough of that in the Wildwood pack.
For a moment, I thought of Viktor, and had a twinge of guilt.
What was I doing, thinking of fun, when my brother was still missing, nearly six years running?
But as much as it still felt like it should, life could not stop because Viktor was missing. We were still looking, and that was all we could do. Life must continue in the meantime.