3. Cash
Cash
Once we’d walked the clearing, we had to go back and get supplies. There was the matter of gathering materials. While I was sure Grant didn’t think I could build an entire house without spending any money, I knew the budget for this was going to be tight.
We’d have to make do with what we had.
I explained the kinds of trees that would work for our purposes, and the sizes and shapes they needed to be. We needed tall pines with straight trunks, all about the same diameter.
While I left the guys to finding them and marking the ones that worked off with bright orange tape, I sat down with Miss Katie on a nearby fallen log.
I flipped to a clean sheet on the little yellow legal pad I’d grabbed from Pa’s place before coming back.
“So let’s talk about what you’d imagine your dream home to look like,” I said with a smile.
She returned it, and that—that was the first time I realized who she was.
She’d smiled at me like that when I was just a little boy, sneaking over to the big house because she’d made tea cakes and I knew that she’d give me one. She wasn’t “Miss Katie” at all, but Katya.
That was what she’d told me to call her back then.
My breath rushed out of me and the side of my hand fell hard against the paper, pencil gripped loose in my fingers. “Hi.”
She laughed. “Hello, lapochka. It has been a while, yes?”
That was an understatement. I’d never seen Reeve mad like he’d been when Katya had taken their child and fled. I’d been scared to come out of Pa’s cabin for a week, and I’d . . . I’d missed her.
There weren’t many in the pack who were kind like she was. We didn’t have the luxury or—or the ferocity required to be kind no matter what.
She’d had that. It was why she couldn’t stay, but seeing her now . . .
“I’m sorry,” I stammered, “I didn’t realize—”
She shook her head before I could finish. “You have been away, and the last time I saw you, you were still very young.”
“Twelve.” And her son had been even smaller. “Your son . . . Aleks?” I glanced in the direction they left.
“Yes, and Leo. He is ours.”
“Right.” Okay, good. I could handle that. I’d rather think about the number of bedrooms than the fact that she’d come back here.
Why was she back here?
At least Reeve was dead. And Grant wanted me to build her a place of her own.
A house that required rooms to sleep in. For her sons.
“So you’ll need at least two extra bedrooms—one for each of them.”
“Three,” she corrected. “Another brother. Viktor. He is—he will need a place too.”
“Right, okay.” I made notes. “Obviously, in addition to those, you’ll need standard things—a living area, kitchen, pantry, restroom—a couple of those.
” As far as Wildwood went, having multiple restrooms was pure indulgence, but I hadn’t spent the last few years making houses for werewolves, but for humans.
I’d rather bring us up to standard than keep us all living with the bare minimum.
“And I’d like to give you some space to yourself, if that’s all right. ”
I wrote everything down. As much as I wanted to think I could remember everything we talked about, it was better to be safe than sorry. Obviously, Grant meant to make Katya happy, and I’d be a fool to disappoint her.
I made notes as I talked, but she said very little. She agreed with me when I looked to her for input, but when I asked her directly what else she might like—a place to do crafts or an extra shed or anything—she shrugged and said, “I will be happy with whatever you make.”
“Really? I mean . . . we can do anything.”
“And I’m happy with anything.”
I bit my lip. She wasn’t like Reeve or Grant, so I didn’t think she was lying, but it was still a tall order to figure out what might make her happy on my own.
But maybe making her happy didn’t have anything to do with specific spaces in her future home, if she was stuck living with Grant and his goons.
“Okay, so if you had to choose between a perfect house and like . . . getting into your new home as quickly as possible . . . ”
Her smile twisted, and I thought we understood one another. “Some speed would be appreciated.”
“Right, then I can focus on the livable parts of the home first and if you don’t mind, anything complicated or any additions, I can continue working on while you’re living there.”
Since I’d be doing the primary building, presumably, any future work, it’d be easy enough to plan out ahead of time, just in case her family grew or she needed more space.
“Of course.”
I flipped a page and sketched out the shape I was thinking—a larger space on one side of the house with two stories and a living area, and on the other side, a more private suite for her without a second story.
The roof of that could serve as a deck for the second-floor bedrooms, and I could wrap a porch around her side of the house to take advantage of the views.
When I explained it all to her, Katya looked at me with staggering fondness. She tipped her head to the side and smiled at me, and fuck, I didn’t know why that look made my breath catch or my eyes start to sting, but it did.
I swallowed with a tight click and turned back to my sketch, but all I was doing was retracing a line I’d already drawn.
She leaned over and put her hand on my forearm. It took everything I had not to flinch away, but logically, I knew Katya only meant to offer support and comfort. Logic rarely came into the way my mind worked, though.
“I am sure it will be beautiful,” she said in her soft, lilting accent.
I nodded, desperately hoping that it would be.
I wanted to make her something beautiful—the perfect home.
Maybe it would’ve been better if my first project for the pack had been for someone I didn’t so desperately want to impress.
Then, I wouldn’t have felt the weight of making something truly special, when I wasn’t even sure that I could do this on my own.
I thought I’d manage. I had the skills and the training and a werewolf’s strength to see the job done. But I’d never done it on my own before, and I wished that my proof of concept wouldn’t play out in front of good people.
Of course, disappointing Grant wouldn’t be much better. I doubted that Katya would start taking bits of me if I didn’t execute her home precisely as she’d envisioned, to the point of anticipating her shifting thoughts and intuiting desires she hadn’t even voiced.
When she told me she trusted me, I believed it.
While I was staring at her, she glanced past my shoulder. A moment later, she stood.
“I think the boys have finished marking what they can and need your input,” she said. She turned her smile down on me again, and all the air rushed out of my lungs.
“Absolutely. If you need them—”
She shook her head. “You need the extra hands more than I do. They’re good boys. They’ll listen to you.”
Oh shit. I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone taking orders from me. But . . . maybe I could direct them. We were working together—a team, just like the crew of humans I’d learned with had been. Sure, Freddie had taught me a lot, but he’d never treated me or anybody on his crew like we were beneath him.
“Thanks.” I stood up, wiping my hands on my jeans. “I mean, thank you, Katya. Really. Feel free to come see how work is going any time. I’m always happy to adjust if you think of something you’d like.”
Katya smiled at me softly and patted my cheek.
I spun to find Aleks and Leo standing behind me, off across the clearing, waiting patiently. Leo had a broad grin on his face and Aleks looked somewhat uncomfortable, but whatever the reason was, I didn’t know it.
He shook himself when I looked his way. When he smiled, it was more smug than Leo’s, but it lacked the sharp bite I would’ve expected from the alpha’s heir.
“We have found much wood,” Aleks said.
I didn’t think he meant it the way it sounded, but heat rushed into my face nonetheless.
“That’s great!” My voice pitched high. Leo hid a laugh behind a cough. “Really, that’s”—I stepped around the log I’d been sitting on with Katya—“that’s really helpful. Let’s go look at what you found.”
It turned out, they’d listened well. Almost all the trees they’d marked were usable, all approximately the same diameter, and the one or two that didn’t work, well, they asked me why. They weren’t derisive about it either, but curious and eager to learn.
The less we had to shape the wood, the faster this would go, and from what Katya had said, speed was her primary concern.
She wanted out of Grant’s house, and I could hardly blame her, so I’d strip the full logs and treat them, and build her cabin out of that, rather than carve down individual boards.
This wasn’t a house for humans, after all. We didn’t even have proper electricity out here, just generators that ran on propane for emergencies.
I wanted Katya to like it, and I meant to make it as nice as I could, but no one was going to be out here trying to one-up their neighbor with their ostentatious entryways or perfectly manicured lawns.
When we went through the last tree, I nodded at the pair of them. “You did great. Thank you, really. Not having to go through this alone makes my job a heck of a lot easier.”
“And we will take them down,” Aleks said seriously.
I let out a little sigh, because yeah, that’d make my life a hell of a lot easier too. With Freddie, we’d just gone out and bought supplies. Providing them ourselves would be a lot.
“Thank you. Pa has a chainsaw we can borrow. It’s been a while since anyone used it, I think, but I’ll make sure it’s in working condition and gassed up for tomorrow. We can start after breakfast.”
“Breakfast,” Aleks echoed. “Come to the big house and we will feed you and go from there, yes?”
Part of me wanted to say no. I didn’t want to risk getting any closer to Grant than I had to.
But then, he was looking at me all stable and serious, and I thought I was being a fool and an asshole to turn him down. If Grant had brought Katya and Aleks back, it stood to reason that Aleks would be alpha of the pack one day. We might even get along. And he was—
Okay, he didn’t look anything like Grant or Reeve. He looked like his ma, beautiful and golden. His smile didn’t make my skin crawl the way his pa’s and uncle’s did.
It wouldn’t be fair to lump him in with them, right? And it had absolutely nothing to do with the way he’d smirked when he caught me looking him over.
Nothing.
“How about you come over to Pa’s place instead?” I suggested. “We’ll have breakfast, but all my tools are there, so you can help me carry them.”
Aleks beamed like I’d handed him a gift rather than asked him to carry toolboxes. “Yes, perfect. We will be there first thing.”