28. Aleks
Aleks
I was concerned for a moment, when the witchwolf turned up the night of the duel wearing a fancy suit. I’d warned him. He knew that Grant planned to fight him. So why wasn’t he ready for a fight?
I was already antsy from the whole damned San Francisco pack smelling just slightly like Cash, whom I wanted to see more than anything. Except . . . it had been days. Why was his scent still mingled with blood and pain?
Because Grant was the worst alpha ever, that was why.
Before I could distract myself too much, the witchwolf pulled off a coup with just one motion. Rolling his head all the way to one side, submitting to Fyse.
It was almost laughable, the way he was obviously still in control of the pack, even in the middle of submitting to its alpha, and it put me to mind of Mama and her quiet strength.
The way she took people in when they came looking for advice, and gave them tea and let them talk about their problems. Or of Cash, even more quiet, who was slowly building the pack new homes to replace the old broken-down ones we currently lived in.
The way Evie would just sit with him at his work site, or help him by holding things as he worked on them, without a word.
Another kind of basic support: simply existing in the same space.
There was a healing magic to it. A togetherness that people needed.
I barely remembered my father, but what I did remember about him was violence, quick and hot, in bright flashes of memory that ended with us sneaking away in the night.
Then there had been the absolute rule of my grandfather over his own pack in Russia, until it had been destroyed by the government raids.
No one had ever questioned him, even on tiny things, not even when he was clearly wrong.
He was alpha, and he knew and controlled all, even when he didn’t.
We’d been outsiders in the pack in Russia, because my grandfather thought Mama leaving her violent husband was a failure on her part, not his.
She should have soothed the savage beast, or whatever nonsense it was the older generations thought about abuse.
And now there was Grant, with his pack of goons who enforced his every whim. Even when I could clearly see that he was wrong and everyone in the pack knew it, no one said a word, too afraid of what would happen.
Cash’s scent, mingled with blood and pain.
And here, in front of us, was the San Francisco pack. Crescent, they called themselves. Like the first thin sliver hanging in the night sky after the dark of the moon. Like hope. I couldn’t have stifled my grin at the scene even if Grant had been looking right at me.
This was how a pack should work, I realized with the complete clarity of a bell ringing through my head. This give and take. This trust. The witchwolf—Dakota—being entirely in charge even as he handed authority back to his alpha.
I would have stood there like a dope, staring off into space and grinning, through the whole fight, if my eyes hadn’t snagged on something out of place: Giselle.
Sneaking around the small lake toward the Crescent pack’s house.
What was that awful woman up to now? These wolves didn’t seem to have children for her to abuse, so she could have no purpose there. Not that abusing someone else’s children was a good purpose to begin with.
I glanced around to make sure no one was looking at me, and of course they weren’t. They were all riveted on the scene before them, of Grant fighting for his life. I couldn’t have cared less about the duel if I’d tried. If Grant survived, which seemed quite unlikely, I would kill him myself later.
Or Viktor would. Regardless, Grant would die.
When I came around the water and headed behind the back of the house, it wasn’t hard to tell what Giselle was up to.
She was literally setting the house ablaze, right in that moment.
I saw with my own eyes as she swiped a match, cursing, since apparently she’d had to do it repeatedly—the stink of Dakota’s magic continued to hang around her, and she kept having these problems—and then tossed it onto a bush that reeked of gasoline.
“Giselle,” I hissed, not even sure what the hell I was going to follow that up with. No doubt she was following orders from Grant, doing this. A distraction so he could cheat on the challenge?
Her had snapped up, and instead of responding to me, her eyes went wide, and she turned and ran—right into the building she’d just set alight.
What could she be thinking? Surely no amount of rage in my eyes could warrant running into a burning house.
I had a sudden flash of memory as I stood there. Lights in a few windows of the enormous house. There had been people in the house Giselle was setting on fire. I rushed after her, no longer interested in the awful woman herself, but in the people she might be hurting.
A second later I realized my mistake. Giselle hadn’t been getting started when I’d found her. She’d been finishing up. The house was already ablaze on the inside.
It made her actions, running in, make even less sense. It also made my immediate job more urgent.
“Fire!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, not because I thought it was likeliest to get attention, but because it was the only damned thing I could bring to mind in English in the moment. It wouldn’t help anyone if I reverted to Russian in the stress of the disaster.
I drew a breath to shout again, and was almost immediately overcome by hot, ashy smoke, filling my lungs, burning and choking. I’d never been in a fire before, never realized . . . no wonder people panicked.
I was doubled over, coughing, even as my lungs healed, and then immediately filled with damaging smoke again.
I tried to recall how I’d been told to deal with this: by Viktor, of course, who was prepared for all things. I crouched low, able to get a clean breath from down there, and shouted again.
The room I was in, some kind of mudroom, wasn’t accessible anymore.
Everything around it was on fire. I had to find another way into the house.
I went back out, and circled the place, looking for the most convenient route inside.
The others had noticed the fire and started moving toward the house, so I had to push past them when I finally spotted a door that wasn’t enveloped in flames.
This part of the house wasn’t in such bad shape yet, so I took a moment to shout again, trying to get a response, to see if someone could let me know where they were, so I could help.
There was a scream off to my left, and I recognized Giselle’s voice.
I turned and went into that room, and found that the floor above had already collapsed into the room.
A huge beam pinned Giselle to the floor.
She was panicking, scrabbling at the wood but only managing to loosen splinters of it with her claws.
She turned and saw me there, meeting my eye with desperate hope, but when she tried to draw a breath to call to me, she started to cough.
I had considered her for only a second when I heard another voice, farther away, calling out. Another woman.
Well, that was no longer any kind of choice.
I immediately turned and loped off in the direction of that second voice, keeping myself hunched over so that I could properly breathe.
The house was too fucking big, and I didn’t know how, but the fire had spread so fast that parts of it were engulfed already. Behind me, I heard another strangled scream from Giselle, then a loud crack, and a crash, as the central wall in the house started to collapse.
Then no more screams.
I hurried forward, worrying about the person I could save.
The person whose life was almost certainly more worth saving than Giselle’s had ever been.
It was a horrible cutthroat way to think in the moment, but really, it was likely the fire Giselle had set herself had saved me the trouble of having to swallow down my distaste for the act and kill her.
People who did what Giselle did deserved no better.
There was a rumble ahead of me, and I realized it was pounding. Weak, but pounding. Someone was locked into a room—a kitchen pantry, I realized, which would be the only room in a house owned by people like this that had a lock on the outside.
No doubt Ajax Fyse felt no need to lock his wolves into rooms to teach them lessons.
I flipped the lock and tore the door open, only to have a tiny woman with honey-blonde hair fall into me, coughing weakly. She was followed out by a billow of smoke, and I grabbed her and reared back.
I hefted her up into my arms, and even as I did so, she went lax against me.
Fuck.
Fuck Grant and fuck Giselle. If I hadn’t been here, this woman would have died. This completely innocent woman.
And beside that, how had she gotten locked into the pantry?
Giselle again, no doubt. Likely this woman was one of the original Wildwood wolves who had left the pack after Ajax’s fight with my father, and Giselle bore her some personal grudge.
I was even more glad she was probably dead.
The way I’d come in was blocked, an inferno of flames, so I turned toward the only kitchen exit that wasn’t on fire, and pushed forward.
Turning forward and back, rushing through, but trying not to run straight into the fire, I finally found an exit that wasn’t blocked: somehow, it was the same door I’d come in, and the flames almost seemed like they were holding back from this single room.
Thank fuck, because otherwise I wasn’t sure how we’d have gotten out.
I tried twice to get the damn door open.
Why had I closed it behind me, dammit? My hands were full of the woman, slippery with sweat, and clumsy with the lack of air to breathe, so I finally gave up and turned my shoulder into it, crashing into it with all my weight until it broke outward, and then, we were free.
I stumbled out into the clean air and was almost immediately accosted by Ajax Fyse, demanding to know if the woman was breathing.
I blinked at him a moment, my brain refusing to form sentences even in Russian, let alone English. Finally, I managed to muster the ever eloquent, “Is alive,” as we both went to our knees and I laid the woman out on the dirt to confirm that she was still breathing.
She was.
I had gotten her out alive.
That was when Grant stalked up next to us, naked as the day he was born and not nearly as ashamed as he ought to be, and demanded, “Where is Giselle?”
All I could do for a moment was cough as my lungs tried again and again to heal, but the overwhelming heat and smoke continued to burn inside me.
“You were supposed to protect her!” he shouted at me, and what? No one had told me to protect the monstrous old woman, and even if they had, it wouldn’t have been within my power to protect someone who set a house on fire and then ran into it.
I ignored him and coughed, my head suddenly filled with splitting pain. Too long without enough air, probably. When I finally got the cough under control, I put a hand to my head, gingerly, and shook it, just the tiniest bit. “Dead. She was trapped when center wall fell down. I didn’t get to her.”
Grant started shouting about loyalty, which was something he did damned often, so I ignored him and just tried to fucking breathe.
He stomped off to yell at the others, who were apparently also at fault for Giselle’s death.
I had bad news for him. No one but him and his goons would be sad about her dying in her own mess.
Maybe not even all of them. I doubted Tommy would cry to hear of her passing.
Somewhere nearby, I heard Mama speaking, and while she wasn’t speaking to me, and I couldn’t even make out the words, the sound of her soothed me.
Even when Grant came thundering back to screech at me some more, I .
. . I heard the words. The tirade about Giselle and how she’d been a loyal packmate, and how in failing to save her, I had become a disloyal pack member.
But none of it penetrated. Like suddenly, I was immune to sound waves, and they just bounced off me.
He was telling me about how I was going to have to work to regain his trust, when I decided I was finished with this.
I turned around, looking at the surrounding area until I found Mama, sitting in the grass next to Dakota, and walked over to them, ignoring Grant’s hissy fit. “You are well, Mother?”
“I am fine, Aleks,” she told me with her serene smile. Then she waved to her companion. “This is Dakota. He is witchwolf. Very nice young man.”
I nodded to him, then up at his alpha towering over him, posturing, trying to look frightening.
I could have told him that at this point in my life, very little frightened me, let alone some soft, kind alpha who was clearly more care and affection than violence and anger.
Not that those were bad things, but I would never be intimidated by Ajax Fyse.
So I told him so. Not with words, but by looking down at his adorable mate, sprawled in the grass next to Mama, and winking at him. Then I helped both of them up out of the grass.
The alpha laid his claim by wrapping his arms tight around Dakota from behind as soon as he was standing, but Dakota ignored it, smiling at me. “Thank you for saving Maia, Aleks. She’s a cherished part of our pack, and we appreciate it.”
I gave him a short bow, head and shoulders, to show my respect for him and his position.
“I would never see an innocent hurt in pack power games.” Then I turned and looked at the still-ranting Grant, who seemed not to have noticed that I’d walked away from him.
“Any who would, should perhaps not be in charge of a pack.”
“Damned right,” Fyse agreed.
Everyone agreed.
No one believed in Grant but Grant and his goons, and perhaps his witch allies. Or perhaps even they didn’t believe, so much as they were willing to use him while he succeeded.
Maybe even the goons weren’t as strong in their belief as I thought. Tommy might be willing to walk away from him. Who was to say others might not?
It was time for all of Wildwood to walk away from Grant.
So I took my mama and walked away from the house on fire. From Grant’s tantrum. From the goons who still stood around and waited for him. We took Viktor, and one of the trucks, and went back to the house, to wait and see what happened next.