“We owe your son one,” I told her. When she met my eye with a lifted brow, I tipped my head toward Maia. “He saved a member of our pack.”
She smiled at that and inclined her head to me. “And perhaps in saving your Maia instead of that monster Giselle, he saved many other members of our pack in the same moment.”
“I’ve got a better point, if Grant is offended,” I said, letting myself fall back in the grass, ignoring the fact that I might be doing permanent damage to my suit. It was going to take a miracle to save it from smoke damage anyway. She turned and looked at me, one brow lifted, waiting. “There was no reason Giselle should have been in our house. She shouldn’t have been in there to save to begin with. So what was she up to?”
We both knew what she’d been doing.
She’d been starting a fucking fire. Maybe it’d gotten ahead of her and she’d been trapped in it herself, but I wasn’t taking credit for that because of one little spell. It was so things went a little bad—you threw out some LEGOs on the floor, and you stepped on one. Presumably, Giselle wouldn’t have gotten trapped in a flaming building if she hadn’t committed arson.
Instead of pointing that Giselle’s culpability, though, the blonde woman nodded, like she was considering my words and agreeing with them. “This is a question we should ask Grant, I think, if he has questions about no one saving her. How could wehave known where she was, when she was not where she should be?”
“Exactly,” I agreed. Then I frowned at my bad manners and turned toward her, brushing my hand off on my slacks. “I’m Dakota, by the way.”
She laughed, and it was beautiful. Musical, almost. “Everyone knows you, witchwolf. Control of you is half of why Grant is here. I am Ekaterina.”
“It’s nice to meet you Ekaterina. You should know that if by some fluke of rule fuckery Grant manages to take control of my pack, I’ll kill him. Pack laws be damned. I won’t ever work for him.” I met her eyes as I said it, and neither of us so much as flinched. She nodded, and I thought there was something pleased in her.
“You may call me Katya,” she said. “And Grant has forgotten that not all wolves follow. Some of us would like not to, but do not yet have the power to stop. You? You do not need anyone to follow. You do not need a pack, or wolves, or help. He forgets that not everyone is controllable, because he has too long been among followers.”
“What power does someone need to stop him? Couldn’t they just challenge him the way Jax challenged his brother?”
She looked at me for a long time after I said it, but just as I was starting to think maybe it was a silly question and somehow I should already know the answer, she nodded and looked away, toward her pack members. Then she started speaking. “It is not always so easy. Your alpha, he is a strong man who saw injustice and had to fix it. Some of us have been raised to think that injustice is the way of things.” She looked over at the man I was almost certain was her son, and gave a little smile. “Sometimes, what we need is to see a strong alpha who refuses injustice, to realize this is a choice that can be made.”
Us. Jax. She meant that seeing the Crescent pack might help her son stop following Grant.
That very moment, he was staring at Grant, who was having a tantrum about how important Giselle had been, and how the young wolf was a failure to his entire pack for allowing a member to come to harm.
In the middle of his rant, the man turned his back on him, coming over to stand in front of us. “You are well, Mother?”
“I am fine, Aleks. This is Dakota. He is witchwolf. Very nice young man.”
Aleks nodded to me, then gave a tiny little smirk as he looked up and met Jax’s eye, then looked back at me, and winked.
Brazen asshole.
I kinda liked him.
He held a hand out to first his mother, then me, helping us up off the ground. Jax, of course, couldn’t let that be, and came up to wrap his arms around me from behind, marking his territory like a dog pissing on my legs. Somewhere behind me, Kosuke muttered something about damned disgusting dogs. I smiled. “Thank you for saving Maia, Aleks. She’s a cherished part of our pack, and we appreciate it.”
He inclined his head and shoulders. “I would never see an innocent hurt in pack power games.” Then he paused, glanced over his shoulder and said, “Any who would, should perhaps not be in charge of a pack.”
“Damned right,” Jax agreed. I wasn’t sure if he knew exactly the conversation he was having, but the exclamation lit something in Aleks’s eyes as he took his mother’s arm and turned away from us.
19
Jax
Another fucking month of this shit.
I didn’t know if I could take it.
The moon would be full for two more days, and every petty, impatient thought in my wolfish hindbrain wanted me to demand we handle this the next night, or the night after.
I had no doubts as to precisely how the fire had started. It’d burned too fast and too big to be anything but intentional. Grant or his pack were responsible, and I wanted vengeance for the threat they’d posed—not to me, but to my pack and the people I loved.
But someone had died. No, I was never going to mourn Giselle’s absence from this planet, but there were probably people who cared.
Probably.
