Page 60 of Wolfsbane

“No. I haven’t given you a chance, but I know you didn’t . . . the worst thing you’ve done to Aleks is not fix injustice you didn’t know how to fix, and we have experience with that here.”

Yeah, they did. They had a good alpha now, but I’d known Grant well enough to know he was a piece of shit, and it sounded like the one before him was even worse.

It wasn’t the coven alone that was capable of poisoning a well. Anyone could do it, but the wolves were building something better now, while the coven continued to poison itself.

I smiled at Cash. “So maybe we fix it now. All of us.”

Cash held my eye for a few seconds. His nose flared when he breathed in, and he nodded. “Yeah. We can do that.”

CHAPTER 33

Viktor

It didn’t take long to wash my hands, but as it turned out, when I felt like taking ten minutes for it, no one really noticed.

I’d known from the start that Daire and Cash could be friends, but getting through the tension created by Grant and Ermengarde was going to take time and work.

It turned out that it didn’t require that at all, just a near-tragedy that made Cash realize Daire wasn’t the enemy. Not something I’d have chosen, but since it was already done, I decided to be grateful in the moment, and listen in silence while I took extra time to clean up.

It was always easy to see how you or your loved ones had been mistreated, and sometimes not as easy to see how others had also suffered.

When I’d entirely finished washing my hands all the way to the elbow, I leaned against the outside wall of the cabin and waited, letting Cash and Daire continue to talk. I couldn’t make out the words without my wolf to improve my hearing, but the tone was soft and not unhappy, so I wanted them to have all the time possible to make up and maybe, if I was lucky, even bond.

I thought that maybe Daire needed a friend or two very badly, and Cash seemed like the perfect person for that.

He’d changed my life for the better when I’d first come home.

Daire needed that too.

More, he deserved it. I was starting to think he’d never had a friend who didn’t want anything from him before, and since frankly, I wanted things from him, I hoped other people in the pack would fulfill that need.

“Are you reading Evie and Altair’s books now? Stalking people like a creeper?” Aleks’s voice startled me, and that was annoying, because I’d never been easily startled before. Without my wolf, though, I couldn’t hear or smell danger coming, and it was fucking off-putting.

No, Aleks wasn’t danger, but if he had been, I still wouldn’t have noticed him.

I smothered my annoyance, since it wasn’t aimed at my brother. Instead, I rolled my eyes at him. “Are you trying to copy Evie’s slang words now? What’s a creeper?”

He shrugged, but there was a grin on his face, and that was something of a relief. I glanced down at his hand, not trying to hide it, since he would be expecting us all to worry over him. No reason to pretend I wasn’t as worried as anyone. “Have to keep learning, always. This is why they call it a living language, yes?”

I scoffed at him. “Don’t go faking your Russian accent on me, littlest brother. I don’t find you charming at all.”

He laughed aloud at that, which was . . . well, it was good. For too long, his spirit had been constricted within him, pushed down and made smaller by Grant and the shame of not doing something about the abusive alpha. That annoyed me almost more than Grant himself, the fact that anyone had convinced my victimized baby brother that he’d been the one in the wrong while being abused.

“I might not be as big as Leo, but I’m bigger than you,” he said, leaning on the wall next to me and nudging my shoulder with his.

The truth was that Aleks was bigger than Leo, if only muscles counted for anything. I was the smallest of my brothers. Normally, it didn’t bother me at all, because size was irrelevant to usefulness.

These days, though? It was another piece of annoyance on top of other frustrations.

I needed my damned wolf back.

Daire’s magic was impressive, and probably overall more powerful than my wolf, but it wasn’t mine. It belonged with him, and I wanted him to have it.

And more than anything else, I wanted to feel like myself again.

I’d been born a wolf, and that had always been a part of me. The loss of my wolf had left me feeling scooped out and raw on the inside, missing so many things that I had always taken for granted.

I smothered all that in myself for the moment, and scoffed at him. “Please. Size is nothing. You’re just the biggest pastry in the kitchen, full of nothing but hot air and sugar.”