Page 43 of Wolfsbane

Aleks sighed and rubbed a hand down his face. When he dropped his arms, he looked older. “We’re building a pack where no one carries the weight of their struggles alone, Vitya. We want you to be a part of that. That’s all. I wish you would have told us what was going on.”

Viktor inclined his head minutely. He . . . he hadn’t been exaggerating, when he explained the way that he was—that he kept everything inside. He hadn’t said as much, but it was clear now, around his family, that he held them apart too.

His mother turned and looked me over. At first, I couldn’t tell if she was angry I was there or not. Her lips were pursed, her eyes slightly narrowed. Then, she took in what must’ve been my embarrassingly splotchy face and softened.

“I am Katya,” she said, her hands falling from her hips.

“Daire,” I whispered back.

“Well, come in. You must be exhausted. We have solyanka.” She ushered us to the large dining table.

Drew bounced on the balls of his feet. “That smells great!”

Solyanka turned out to be a tangy, salty soup, but it was thick and filling. The sourness on my tongue helped reset my mind and give me something to focus on other than . . . everything wrong in the universe?

Viktor ate on one side of me. Drew, on the other, lifted the bowl and simply drank. He set it down with wet lips and a grin on his face. “That’s so good, Mama, thank you.”

Okay, she definitely wasn’t his mother, but Katya at the head of the table wore a charmed smile and motioned to the pot in the middle. “Eat as much as you want, darling.”

There was soft brown bread to drag through the stew, and by the time my belly was full, I’d come around to the candlelight. Proper lighting would’ve felt overstimulating right then, but I could handle this.

Aleks was at the other end of the table, Cash had settled right beside him, and Leo and Altair were across from us. Tristan had stayed on the couch, bent over his legs with his elbows on his knees. I thought I maybe understood how he felt—seeing him now was . . . weird.

He’d changed, and I had too, and neither one of us knew how to reconcile what had happened with the people we’d been, both very much in Mother’s pocket but for very different reasons.

Leo was the first to interrupt dinner. “So, how screwed are we?”

Drew tilted his head curiously.

“I mean,” Leo went on, “we handled Grant, and we handled Ivan, so . . . how bad is this?”

Pair after pair of eyes turned on me, and there were only remnants of my stew against the side of the bowl where I’d scraped the last of it up with my bread, so I set my spoon down and shrugged.

“Mother’s determined to get a witchwolf one way or another, and this is the closest she’s gotten so far. She won’t give up, but . . . if the coven were confident about attacking your pack, they would’ve done it earlier today when they had the element of surprise, when you weren’t organized. Since Tristan and Kate didn’t come back, and . . . after Ivan? Too many witches have died. They’re hesitant. Tristan might have a better idea about how everyone feels. No one would tell me if they were pissed at Mother.”

From the couch, he sighed. “There’s . . . unrest. Ermengarde has always promised power, but after you let Altair out—well, everything crumbled pretty fast. Maybe Daire doing something against her will was the first time anyone realized that was even an option. But then people started dying, and . . . nobody wants magic at the expense of their lives.”

“That is why you never tried the bite?” Aleks asked, turning so he could look between me and Tristan.

Cash’s nose flared, and he stared hard at the wall over Viktor’s head.

I shrugged. “I don’t know the others’ particular reasoning, but yeah, I’d guess no one wanted to risk it. Dakota Morris is one in seven billion. There hasn’t been anyone like him in . . . ” I remembered the books Mother had pulled off the shelves, the old stories, and couldn’t properly put a date to the phenomenon. “It’s been centuries since one was recorded. Most people didn’t think there could even be a witchwolf until him.”

“And your mother’s willing to sacrifice you to get one?” Aleks asked, point-blank.

Katya made a small sound of protest at the head of the table.

I swallowed hard, staring down at my empty bowl. I was still parsing that. It was hard to say it aloud.

Viktor had no such hesitation. He squeezed my leg under the table.

“She is,” he said. “She came at us both with a knife.”

“She thinks I betrayed her when—” My gaze slipped to Altair, and I smiled weakly.

His expression twisted. “Sorry.”

“I’m not,” I said immediately. “I mean, I’m sorry I didn’t do anything sooner, but . . . I guess I just . . . stopped being useful to her.”