Page 13 of Pack Ruin
I shrugged at Brand. “The only reason I’d need to know who killed them is if I planned to send some flowers of my own to whoever took care of those bastards. But we need to get back to Southern.”
He nodded once. “To save Luke.”
“To save Luke, which means saving Flor.”
Brand shook his head, those odd, white eyes filled with wisdom and pain. “First, we need to convince my dad to go to war with the Council.”
“You mean, to let me out of this room. Let me live.”
“Exactly.”
7
Ancient History
FLOR
Still in the long nightgown, I sat with a book on the table in front of me, one so old it was handbound and handwritten, staring at a picture of a wolf I knew. Brand’sothergrandmother—his mother’s mother—stood behind me, her baleful glare burning a hole in the back of my head.
Samuel had escorted me into the library, introduced me to his mother-in-law, asked her to allow me free run of the space, and fled like a coward. She’d introduced herself as Verona Prestwick, warned me that she would tear off my hands if I so much as wrinkled a page of any book in the room, and then gone utterly silent.
Watching. Lurking, more like a dragon guarding its hoard than a wolf.
To be fair, she looked like a tall, skinny, older female version of my Mountain mate, her eyes the exact shade of brown his had been. She had a few wrinkles on her neck, but none around her eyes, like she’d stopped smiling a good long while back.
She’d sniffed at my gown and peered at the dangling tag on my ear, but said nothing about the still-present odors of Brand’s and my morning activities. I would have excused myself to change and shower, but for some reason, this felt similar to the time I’d come upon a mountain lion in the woods of Southern. Like it was smarter not to attract attention to myself for the moment.
After a few minutes of reading the book she’d given me, one that was all about my mysterious black wolf, I figured how I looked or even smelled was the last thing that mattered. My Grigor was famous. Well, infamous. He’d killed more shifters and humans than I was comfortable thinking about, especially since the phrase “wiped out whole villages” popped up a few times in reference to what they called his Reign of Terror.
In the 1500s.
Fuck a damned duck.
If it was my Grigor, he really was too old for me, by a few hundred years at least. I peered at the illustration of the original Grigor in human form, which was identical to the man I’d seen naked in the woods in Ontario, wondering why the eyes on the page seemed to follow me. The words beneath him were simple, but I read them again, my gut twisting.
After killing his father in retribution for the death of his mate Anya, Grigor Dimitrivich rained down terror on both shifter and humankind, often slaughtering entire villages in a berserker rage. Born of a sorceress and an Alpha, he was as powerful as he was corrupt. The first War Council was established to defeat him, but when the European shifter army assembled, Grigor rendered ten thousand shifters unconscious in a burst of power, then vanished.
I knew the important part was about the War Council, and the whole sorceress mother thing, but my eyes kept returning to the name: Anya.
He had a mate. Had she been a true mate? Had he loved her? It had been over five hundred years since she’d died. Shit, could he still love her?
Ugh, I was pathetic. I glared at his picture, wondering how the hell I’d ended up mooning over the world’s most evil witch wolf.
“Do you even know how to read?” Brand’s grandmother snapped at last from behind me, each word icy.
That terrible flush of shame rushed through me, like it always had whenever I was teased about not knowing as much as others. Back at Southern, I would have stayed quiet, or maybe apologized. But I was Brand’s mate—which might have been the problem, come to think of it. She didn’t think I was worthy of him.
I wasn’t. But he’d claimed me anyway.
I looked up from the illustration of Grigor. “I do know how to read, Granny Verona,” I said, liking her flinch at the word Granny. “Not very well, to be honest. They kicked me out of school after ninth grade.”
“What?” Her eyes narrowed, and I knew I was flushing red, but I held her gaze.
“After I turned fifteen, I had to work if I wanted to eat. I didn’t get to go to school, or have books of my own. Well, I had a few. Old paperbacks, moldy ones that the other shifters had finished.” I gently closed the cover of the book, stood, and carried it back to the shelf. “I would have given an arm for the chance to read all these. A chance to learn the history of our kind, to be able to learn firsthand what the pack law really said, and not just the parts Alpha Callaway read out loud.” I thought about the library back at Glen’s pack, the sheer number of books there. “If I was ever rich, I’d probably spend as much money on books as food.”
“You weren’t allowed to have books? You didn’t have a library at your pack?” She sounded as shocked as Margarette had been when she learned about the unranked not having food privileges.
“Of course not. Can you imagine what would have happened if we’d had this?” I waved at the rows of books, all neatly shelved, filling the room from floor to ceiling, then rested a hand on the stack that Verona had been reading when I came in. She’d told me she was hunting for information about shifters with white eyes, and the topmost book was titledLegends of the Moonblessed. I itched to read it, and all the rest. I needed the knowledge that was collected in this place. “These aren’t just books, Verona. They’re power.”
