14. Aleks
Aleks
Just two years after they started it, Mama’s house was finished.
It was good, because it would put her and Leo and Viktor just that one step away from Grant. Make it harder for him to hurt them on a whim, because they weren’t just a thirty-second walk away. If he did go for them, it would give them a fighting chance to escape.
He had informed me just that morning, however, that I would not be moving with them. He needed me nearby, because of my duties as heir. Never mind that those duties mostly involved sitting around with his goons, and being molested by witches.
But at least my family would be safer.
More than that, I’d talked Grant into letting Cash start on a second house. I was worried he would claim it for himself, but if I nudged Cash into building it on the small side, too small for Grant’s grand ego, he wouldn’t take it.
I was picturing a little cottage, just big enough for Cash and his father, with room for little Evie to stay there.
Fuck knew her father was as useless as men came.
He had slowly become just another of Grant’s goons over the years I’d known him.
When we had first met, his wife had recently gone off into the woods, and he’d been working hard to raise a daughter by himself, haunted and lonely.
Now? He spent all his time at Grant’s side, laughing at the alpha’s terrible jokes and bowing to his wishes.
He had left his older brother to father Evie, and become useless to his family.
Maybe his initial intentions had been good, to become a buffer between his family and the unpredictable alpha whose moods changed with the breeze, but now, that was lost.
It wasn’t a terrible thing, though, because his brother was a better father than he’d ever been. I had no doubt Henry Roberts would defend Evie with the last strength in his body.
The problem was that Henry couldn’t be everywhere, and as a spry, quick now-eleven-year-old, Evie could.
The whole group of us left Grant’s sagging, awful home and headed toward Mama’s new one. The walk took almost fifteen minutes, and longer when Grant and his goons were straggling, stopping to make gross jokes and randomly piss on trees like they were stray dogs.
We could have been helping to carry the remaining things she’d kept in Grant’s house, but no. We couldn’t be expected to do anything to help the pack. We could only be expected to act like the previously mentioned dogs, feral and territorial, rude to everyone, including each other.
And Grant was the worst of them, as he smiled at where two of them stopped to have a scuffle over one suggesting another walked “like a woman.” What kind of insult was that, even? There was nothing wrong with how women walked. It was just some macho bullshit.
Macho bullshit that Grant gloried in.
He wasn’t as violent as my father had been. Not as unsafe as living under Russian rule. But my uncle was just the best of all bad options I’d been offered in life.
No one would call him good, except maybe some of his less intelligent goons.
Even they would struggle with the idea, though, I thought.
We finally arrived at the house just after lunch time, the door hanging open, waiting for us. No doubt the people inside had heard us coming a long time earlier.
The house was . . . well, it was perfect. Enormous and airy, with big open rooms rather than the tiny ones in the current pack houses. As we came into the kitchen, Evie slipped out the kitchen door with the usual picnic basket, no doubt headed back toward her uncle’s house.
I smiled, because it made me happy that she’d continued coming out to have lunch with Cash and Viktor and Leo the whole time they’d been building the house.
It was just Cash and Viktor in the kitchen, well, and Mama.
She looked at Grant like he was a hurdle, as she usually did.
He was the obstacle she had to pass to reach happiness.
I had always tried to copy the attitude, but I wasn’t sure it worked for me.
Mama could avoid Grant in a way I couldn’t. She owed him nothing, and he wanted little to do with her. He didn’t lay any claim to her present or future; she was simply part of the bargain he had made with me. As long as she was cared for, I belonged to him.
Viktor had quietly compared it to slavery, but this wasn’t that. People never declared slaves to be their heirs, did they?
“Well?” Grant asked Mama. “What do you think of my hospitality now?”
“I think your carpenter has the most remarkable skill I’ve ever seen,” she answered, and we all knew she was walking a fine line.
She called Cash Grant’s, which was good for his ego.
But she had also given him credit for his own work, which Grant never liked to hear.
No one should get credit for anything in his presence, except for him.
“I think that kid’s starting to get a remarkable ass,” one of the goons said. Marcus.
It took me a moment to figure out what the fuck he was talking about. Evie, heading off into the woods.
“She’s eleven,” I pointed out.
He shrugged, his expression smug and self-satisfied as he turned to Grant. “Getting on toward time for her to move in with Giselle. Don’t you think, Alpha?”
Grant turned to stare out the window too, but Cash, sweet, innocent Cash, stepped in front of the window. “She’s a child.”
Grant lifted a single brow at him, unimpressed. “Hardly.”
A pressure started to build in my chest.
Eleven. She was a child. Not that I’d spent any time looking at her body, but she was still skinny and wiry, in the way every prepubescent wolf child was.
She had long legs that were muscular from running and jumping, but even I, with a libido Grant had once suggested was “broken,” knew that she wasn’t a woman. She was nowhere near it.
The room around me went a little fuzzy, like it was on a television screen during a storm, and I couldn’t focus on—
“Breathe,” the word was whispered in Russian, almost entirely inaudible, against the shell of my ear, and I whipped around to find Viktor behind me. Viktor, holding my arm like a vise, like he had to stop me from running away. Or falling down.
Breathe.
I gasped in a deep breath and . . . when had I stopped breathing?
“—a kid,” Cash was saying somewhere behind me. “She’s not an adult. She’s not going to live with Giselle.”
“Oh?” Grant asked, his own voice taunting. “You get to make that decision?”
Viktor shook me, and I realized I had started to turn toward them, and I was . . . I was losing control of myself. My teeth had come out, and my whole body was buzzing with a subvocal growl.
Viktor met my eye, his own steel-gray irises hard as flint. Slowly, he shook his head, then took a deep breath. Somehow, I forced myself to follow suit. It was poorly done, but I breathed.
And again.
The goons around me laughed, and I started to turn again, but Viktor tightened his grip.
He cleared his throat and said, “It should be Aleks. He’s the heir.
” It was strange, how perfect his English was, without the trace of an accent I had never been able to shake off.
“With him as your second, and the whole pack yours, that means that through him, everything he touches is yours.”
The room went silent around us, and I froze, because I had no idea what Viktor had just volunteered me for.
I hadn’t heard most of the conversation.
But this was Viktor, and I’d have trusted him if he’d suggested I go off to war, so I forced down another deep breath and turned back to Grant and the goons.
“I agree. I am always happy to stamp the alpha’s claim. ”
If he’d suggested I was supposed to have sex with Evie, we were going to have a problem, because there was no way that was going to happen, and it wasn’t a thing you could fake. I could lie to anyone with ease, even Mama, after years of practice. But you couldn’t fake sex in a pack of werewolves.
And I would die fighting every goon in the kitchen rather than hurt a child like that.
I looked to where Tommy was standing, motionless, like a deer in the sights of a predator. But he wasn’t looking at his daughter, or even his alpha, who had suggested maybe it was time for his child to be used. He was looking at me.
Like he thought I was about to lunge forward and tear his throat out.
For a moment, I considered doing it.
Grant drew my attention away, though, with a broad grin and a smack on my shoulder that was meant to be hard enough to jar me. He’d taken to doing that over the last year, thinking to use his strength against me the way bigger men sometimes did when they were bullies.
But Grant wasn’t bigger than me, and his hardest hit wasn’t likely to budge me. I weighed almost twice what he did.
I wasn’t sure why he continued to try.
In this case, though, the words were what hit me like a blow.
“Well then. You break our shy little carpenter in. I’m sure your mother won’t begrudge the afternoon’s use of her lovely new home.
Make sure to do a . . . thorough job of it.
” Then he turned back to Cash, face gone entirely serious.
“I expect you back to work first thing in the morning, though. You’ve got more houses to build. ”
The goons laughed as though they were the backing track to a previous-century sitcom, and then as one, they headed toward the front door, following Grant.
Cash stood there, frozen, in front of a huge butcherblock countertop island he’d built by hand, his green eyes wide and almost terrified.
I stood facing him, Viktor still holding my arms so tight I couldn’t possibly move, until the lot of them had left the house. I turned to look back at Viktor and hissed in Russian, “What did you just offer me up to do?”
His lips quirked in a tiny smirk. “Just what you’ve been dying to do for years.
Take the adorable carpenter to bed. Convincingly, since Grant wants it to be a punishment for Cash denying him the right to have a child raped.
” He glanced between me and Cash for a moment, his smile slowly fading.
“So go. Spend the night with your carpenter. Enjoy it. Tomorrow, we begin to discuss how to end your uncle.”