36. Aleks
Aleks
Bodies, as it turned out, burned . . . grossly. There was a smell pervading the whole clearing that was all charred meat and bone, and frankly, I was glad I didn’t own the land, because I didn’t think I’d ever be able to walk into the area again without smelling human offal.
Frankly, I wanted to get Cash and Viktor away from it as quickly as possible.
It was a little surprising. Of course I was going to take care of Cash. He was sweet and sensitive and not cut out for violence or its results—but he dealt with it well.
Better, in fact, than Viktor, who had apparently crept up on each of Grant’s goons hiding in the woods and slit their throats. He wasn’t heartbroken to have done it, or sad about the deaths or sorry to have taken lives—as he shouldn’t have been. They’d been monsters, to a man.
But he was clearly affected.
He was worried that we—or more specifically that I—would think of him differently for what he’d done.
To some degree, he was right. I’d always known that the five years in government custody had changed him.
Taught him things that I could never understand, and chipped away at parts of him that should never be damaged in any person.
I had known that he was capable of things I didn’t truly fathom, after what he’d been through. I’d just never seen it before.
I didn’t think of him differently, it was simply that I knew I’d been right and had the proof burning to a cinder in front of me, so there could no longer be doubt. Viktor had been through hell. But I’d proven to myself that I was willing to do whatever it took, too.
I hadn’t spared Grant because I’d loved him or not wanted to kill him.
Killing simply wasn’t my immediate instinct.
I had killed Marcus, or the nearest thing, and I was still glad he was dead.
I would never be Jax Fyse, sitting on the ground staring into space with shock and horror that he’d killed someone who had forced him to kill or be killed.
Heck, just watching the guy made me wish I’d gone through with it and torn Grant’s throat out, to spare him the stress of it.
Not that I thought we would ever be best friends, but he seemed like a decent guy, and my asshole uncle had traumatized him.
Viktor, it turned out, had an instinct to kill people now. And in doing so, he’d protected the pack, and me, and even Fyse, in a way I hadn’t. Part of me wondered if he would make a better alpha than me.
For the first time, when he saw me looking at him, he didn’t seem to read my mind and assure me that no, he wasn’t alpha material and I was. He ducked his head, not meeting my eye, and his voice was barely audible when he asked, “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I agreed. “I was just trying to decide which truck we should take home. I don’t want to split up and drive separate.”
His head snapped up and he looked at me, confusion in his eyes, but I could see the moment his mind snagged on the issue. “Grant’s. It’s from last year, and the other is practically made of rust, it’s so old.”
I nodded. “I can report him missing before we leave. Tell them we were on vacation in the city and he went for a walk one night and never came back to the house.”
Viktor glanced back at the fire before looking at me again, and there, that was the moment I could give him what he really needed.
I waved a dismissive hand at the fire. “No need to report the lot of them gone. They don’t matter.
They didn’t own any part of the pack, and if anyone ever asks, which they won’t, we can just say they moved on when my uncle went missing, because they were only there for him.
It’s practically the truth. We’d have never let them be a part of the pack we need to build now. ”
He nodded at that, breathing deep and taking that strange military stance he took sometimes, back straight as a board and hands pulled behind him. Like he was waiting for me to inspect him and tell him what he was doing right and wrong.
I wondered if he actually wanted that, or if the pose was just instinct. What he’d do if someone told him to stand straighter or polish his shoes better. Considering he was wearing the world’s oldest combat boots and none of us gave a single damn about polishing shoes, I hoped he would laugh.
Instead of any of that, though, I left one arm around Cash, tugging him along with me as I went to put my free arm around my brother and squeeze them both tight against me.
“The future starts now. We go home, and we build the pack again. Better than before. Stronger. Smarter. No more rotted foundation.”
We waited till the next morning to report Grant missing.
First, we went back for one last night in the house Grant had borrowed, and instead of splitting up and going to three different rooms there, we all went into the one Viktor and I’d been using, all sitting with our backs to the headboard and watching TV until we fell asleep just like that, all together, with the lights still on.
It was some show about some people hunting down supernatural creatures, and we all laughed about the inaccuracies together, almost .
. . almost hysterical, at times. So many other emotions were going into those moments, it almost didn’t have anything to do with how no, silver bullets weren’t the only way to kill a wolf.
We all knew that from ugly firsthand experience that very night.
I froze when one of the wolves on the show was almost gutted by someone, and looked over at Cash, who didn’t seem even remotely affected by the gory scene, rolling his eyes at the lack of realism. He didn’t turn serious until he realized I was looking at him.
“Are you okay?” We both asked the question at the same time.
A moment later, his eyes widened. “Aleks. I’m fine. I promise. The others took good care of me. It’s only a”—he pulled up his shirt to show me the scar I’d already seen, and we both froze—“scar,” he finished, but now he sounded confused.
Because there was no scar.
Just smooth, perfect skin where only weeks earlier, Grant had tried to murder him.
I stared for a second, then ran my fingers over the unblemished skin. Cash breathed shakily, and next to us, Viktor snorted.
“You didn’t know.”
“You did?” I demanded.
He reached down and pulled his own T-shirt off, revealing a completely unscarred body. Odd. I thought he’d had scars when we had brought him home from Vladivostok. Nothing that truly showed what he’d been through, since wolves healed damn well, but something.
“Four years,” he said, poking at his own chest. “Used to be a bullet scar here. A knife there. One from claws on my thigh.”
Cash gave a little whimper, like he could see, or feel the wounds that had caused the scars. But there were no scars.
Viktor looked up at me, a tiny smirk on his lips. “They disappeared the day I accepted you as my alpha.”
For a moment, all I could do was stare at him. Four years?
I’d been someone’s alpha for four years?
More than that, he’d accepted it? Had he never once been a member of the Wildwood pack.
Fuck, no wonder Grant had never wanted him around. Maybe he’d thought Viktor so broken that he was unable to join a pack at all, because Viktor had never accepted him as his alpha.
Incredible.
After that, there were no boundaries with any of us. Maybe Cash and Viktor didn’t have the same love for each other that Cash and I did, but they were brothers now too, in a new way.
We all slept together in a heap and took comfort from the closeness of pack.
The cops in San Francisco were deeply unenthused about looking for my uncle.
They didn’t even want to take the report initially, since it hadn’t been forty-eight hours and Grant was a grown man, but I stressed that he’d gone for a walk, and hadn’t even taken his truck or his bags, so they relented and took a report, but assured me that sometimes, people just left.
Especially when those someones didn’t have close, direct family, and were unhappy in their lives.
It was strange, that I could still get offended on Grant’s behalf, even though he was dead and I was glad of it. The man was, by our accounts, missing in their city, and they could barely be bothered to contact local hospitals looking for him to have turned up in a morgue.
Of course, they didn’t find him, but we’d never expected that, since we knew right where he was.
The Crescent pack was never mentioned, nor their land, nor our connection to them or the fact that it was why we’d come to begin with. No, I just told them we’d come to visit, and Grant had gone.
All it really meant was that eventually, we’d be able to declare him dead, and all the things he’d owned would legally revert to me. I wouldn’t have bothered, but someone needed to have a legal claim on pack lands, or we’d be a little screwed.
Once we were finished, we packed up all of our things, threw them in the back cab of Grant’s truck, and headed back to Idaho, where we belonged.
It felt like we were leaving behind a huge burden, driving out of the city without Grant or his asshole minions.
No offense to the Crescent wolves, but in that moment, I’d have been happy to never return. Maybe that would change as we got time and healing after Grant, but for now, I wanted nothing more than to be home.
We made the whole drive in one day, none of us willing to stop.
Cash, sitting between Viktor and me in the front cab, tapped his foot the whole last hour of the drive.
He was so desperate to see Evie, he almost climbed over Viktor and jumped out when I drew the truck to a stop next to Grant’s old house.
Viktor and I followed close behind, Viktor because his protective instincts were clearly in overdrive and me . . . well, basically same. I wasn’t going to let Cash out of my sight anytime soon. Not willingly.
He had almost died.
We spilled into the central area between the old pack houses in time to hear an argument between Leo and .
. . one of the older pack members, Walter.
He was in his seventies, and he’d gone through my father and uncle as alphas, and never really made much fuss about either of them. About . . . well, anything.
Until now.
“—betraying our pack alpha,” he was near-shouting at Leo. “Why would any of us ever trust you lot? You’re not even American. You’re Russians. You don’t belong here. You aren’t pack. And you just march in and decide to take over?”
Cash had paused at this, drawing up short, and was staring at Walter like he was the one speaking a foreign language.
“What would ever make you say Leo wasn’t pack?
” he asked. “Leo cut all your firewood last year. You’d have died of the cold if not for him.
Katya made you soup and nursed you back to health when you got sick, and Grant said if you got sick, you were barely a real werewolf and didn’t deserve help. But they’re traitors? Are you insane?”
Walter paused, stammering, and stared at Cash like he’d started growing extra limbs. I supposed in a way, he had grown something new: a shiny backbone, unwilling to let anyone step on him or people he cared about.
For a moment, Walter looked between Cash, Leo, and finally me, blinking. “Where . . . where’s your uncle? Where’s our pack alpha?”
I lifted a brow at him, unimpressed. “Where do you think? He went to San Francisco to challenge a pack alpha ten years younger and a hundred pounds stronger than him. Fyse killed him.”
The change that came over the old man’s face at that, the sheer outrage, was almost comical. I barely repressed laughter as he planted his fists on his hips and started to turn red. “Killed? That monster killed your uncle, and you’re . . . you just left? Walked away and left him alive?”
I just stared at him a moment, letting silence fall heavy in the square. People had started coming out onto porches and leaning in windows—almost the whole pack was there, listening to me.
Good.
“Yes, I left Fyse alive. This is how challenges work. Grant made a ridiculous challenge to another pack’s self-rule, stretching wolf laws in ways they were never meant to stretch.
Trying to manipulate things to his advantage.
Fyse still beat him, fairly. Grant tried to cheat.
To attack from behind with his interfering followers, who also died for their treachery.
Fyse still won. Did you wish us all to die? ”
Walter just stood there a moment, turning redder and redder as he realized the whole pack was watching him, waiting for his answer. “You abandoned your own uncle,” he shouted back. “You should have defended his honor. The pack’s honor. You—”
“My uncle had no honor,” I told him. I didn’t raise my voice, but the whole square went deathly silent in the wake of the words.
“He died with no honor, trying to attack Fyse from behind, after he had been beaten. If you want to be in my uncle’s pack, or any pack that runs like it, you are free to leave. ”
“Runs like it?” Maggie asked, where she was leaning against the side of her own shack, her voice soft, like she was both hopeful and frightened of the answer.
“Runs like it,” I reiterated. “My uncle is dead, and I am his heir. This makes me alpha. And I will not be like him, or like my father. I will have no Giselle. I will not sell our children for witches’ perversions.
Any man who touches a child in my pack will die like he deserves to.
Children are not property. Women are not property.
All wolves are free. We will rebuild a pack.
A community. Not a dictatorship where you will fear to speak.
We will cut out the rot and start over.” I turned back and met Walter’s eye steadily.
“If you are part of the rot, and you wish to have power over others, then you will leave. Today, of your own will, or tomorrow, when you make trouble and we make you leave. It is your choice.”