Chapter 10
“Well, it’s been fun, but can we go home now?” Nicolo asked Mateo from across the dining room table.
Mateo raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
The kids were safe. Cat was back where she belonged with her coven.
He was at home in the house his great-grandfather built on the opposite side of Silver Spring.
All was supposedly right with the world, and yet his wolf felt like it was gouging the insides of his brain with its claws in its need to get back to the witch.
He glanced at the much larger man sitting across from him.
Nicolo was younger than him but didn’t look it.
He’d been an MMA fighter for years, which had left scars on skin that healed shifter fast. His wolf looked worse.
He’d come on board as Mateo’s personal security years ago, even though an alpha werewolf needed the opposite of security.
It was a leftover role from much earlier days, where an enforcer wolf protected the alpha.
It was a wolf not dominant enough to challenge for leadership, but the largest and most violent. Nicolo was built for another age.
Mateo was surprised that he wanted to go home so badly. He would’ve thought the woods suited the fighter more. Nicolo spent long hours pumping iron and running enormous distances in New York just to manage the energy of his frenetic wolf.
Mateo snorted. Maybe that was the problem. They’d been cooped up in this house for three days.
“You should get out and run,” Mateo said and took another bite of pancake, reflecting on how much worse it tasted than Cat’s porridge. The thought disturbed him greatly because Maria was one of the best cooks in the world.
He glanced over at the older woman. She was the only one of her generation without a wolf and so had never married and spent her life caretaking the pack.
He tried to get her to do many other things with her life and had gifted her an apartment in the building he owned for the pack, but she claimed that he was taking away her purpose.
When Romeo’s daughter didn’t shift and her mother skedaddled while shouting about false advertising, Maria had found renewed purpose. It doubled when Romeo’s second partner skedaddled before their new son even had a chance to shift.
Gianna was now seven years old and ran straight for Mateo.
“No, don’t!” Romeo said from the door.
The younger man shook his head at his daughter as she clambered onto Mateo’s lap and stole a bite of pancake off his fork.
Romeo had always been wary of the alpha wolf, and Mateo didn’t really know why, but he tried to be respectful of his brother’s desire to shield his daughter.
“G, what did I tell you about accosting strange wolves?” Romeo said hopelessly.
“That’s a rule for you, not a rule for you and me,” Gianna declared happily as her maple sticky fingers ruined his shirt.
Maria shook her head as she helped the one-year-old onto his booster seat.
He still hadn’t shifted. It was early; there was still time.
Mateo knew of one wolf who hadn’t shifted until three.
But Tony was just a roly-poly, cheerful baby with no hint of predator in him at all.
He didn’t like to play hunting games, watch scary movies, or eat meat.
Romeo had done his duty twice and failed twice; thus, he had also been banished to the wilds for fresh air therapy.
He’d also committed the unforgivable sin of raising his own children.
Normally, when kids didn’t shift, they were shuffled off to elderly relatives and barely spoken about, but Romeo would never countenance it.
Nicolo rolled up a pancake and ate it in one bite. “Have we had sufficient altitude sickness to transform our balls into baby-making machines?”
Romeo flinched. “Must you?”
“I like balls,” Gianna said and scrambled off Mateo’s lap, endangering his balls.
Romeo stared at Nico. “What did I just say?”
“Sorry,” the bigger shifter said, looking deceptively meek as he put the rest of his pancake in his mouth.
“I don’t think that’s the cure she was thinking of,” Mateo said carefully and looked down at the maple handprints on his shirt.
He was about to declare the entire project null and void, but the words would not come.
He hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye to Cat. He’d kissed her in the snow, then got the four kids loaded up in the helicopter and directed out of there. He’d tried to go back to her, but the police detained him to ask what the hell happened.
He ended up borrowing their radio to call for a different helicopter to take him home, and now he was here in this gigantic four-story house with thirty rooms meant for an entire pack of werewolves.
Every wall had a nature picture on it. Everything was green and leather and wood, and he felt like he’d fallen back a century in time.
There was a dozen more wolves in Colorado with him.
They’d filled the plane, but they ate in shifts per Maria’s iron schedule so everyone would have hot pancakes.
This was not his house. This was not his life. He should return to his life and take his family with him, but the words would not come.
“I have to work.”
Work solved everything.
He went to the gigantic living room and settled at his laptop next to the three-story fireplace.
It wasn’t the best place to be working with two kids running around, but the wires to the two satellites on the roof ran down the fireplace, so this was the best reception in the house.
It was better than he had any right to expect if he didn’t want to do a million-dollar construction project, but it still was not anywhere near as fast as what he was used to.
It wasn’t like he needed massive computing power. There were emails to answer, a meeting with marketing, and a meeting with one of the CEOs of the companies they were protecting to explain again how encryption worked. Then maybe they’d get out and see more of the town…
Except they couldn’t do that because there was a coven there. And they couldn’t go out wandering in the woods because there was another pack that didn’t seem to live by the rule of “Don’t confront each other.”
So he was stuck in this house with inferior internet.
He wanted to get lost in the numbers. It was the only time he felt truly calm and could completely ignore the wolf within him, but two days away from his inbox had left him horrifically behind, and the CEO’s job wasn’t to wrangle numbers; it was to wrangle everything else.
He empowered his teams to adjust quickly.
He had to in the world of cybersecurity.
They couldn’t even wait to call him to give the go-ahead to put through a patch sometimes.
Fortunately, the vast majority of thieves were stupid, no matter how much computing power they thought they had, but the code was the simplest part.
If only there were a way to get the rest of his business to run without him.
He tried to imagine it. Being a CEO was very much like being an alpha wolf.
You didn’t do any work. You contributed nothing to the company, but if you stopped, everything broke.
It was a stupid way of organizing anything.
For the first time in his life, he closed his computer with his inbox still full.
Maybe he could do another loop, even though he was crossing two territories, and it would be suicide. Maybe if he headed in the opposite direction into the true wilderness, he could bother some real wolves instead.
“What happened out there?” a quiet voice asked, and he turned to see Maria bouncing the baby on her hip. She looked like his grandmother with her hair shot through with silver at the very beginning of old age.
He flashed through the insane events of the last few days, back to his fight with the wolf.
Dear god, he’d forgotten about that. He’d have to tell them.
Not only was there a pack on the other side of Silver Spring, but he killed one of them.
Well, technically, the avalanche had killed one of them, but somebody was going to find the body eventually. Then he thought of the witch.
“We found some kids.”
“We?”
He winced. Of course, she would pick up on that.
“Did you ever want to date?” he asked and then met her eyes, horrified. “I’m so sorry. That is none of my business.”
“Of course, I wanted a family, but I couldn’t dilute the Amato line.”
He shuddered. The older generations had some very particular ideas of strength that made him a little sick to his stomach.
“You would’ve been a great mom,” he settled on saying because he couldn’t say anything he wanted to.
She bounced the boy, cooing at him as he sucked on his entire fist. “Things were different back then.”
He took that as the acknowledgement it was, that if this generation refrained from having kids if they didn’t have a wolf, there wouldn’t be any Amato left of any kind.
“So who are ‘we’?” she asked. Her head was still pointed toward the baby, but her eyes slanted toward him. She also kept to the old ways and never met his eyes. When he said nothing, she jostled the boy. “He doesn’t want to say, does he, Tony?”
To Nonna’s eternal consternation, Romeo had named the baby Anthony, not Antonio, insisting that they didn’t have to live like they were pretending to be in Italy.
“It was just somebody I met trying to find those kids.”
“And yet you want to see her again.”
“I didn’t say her.”
“Angry, impatient, lacking interest in previous passions, and slacking off work? Mateo Amato, of all people.”
Bizarrely, she said all of this to the baby, who gazed at her with big brown eyes.
“Maria! Papa says we can go outdoors if we dress warm enough!” Gianna said, tearing through the forest of chairs like a whirlwind.
Maria gasped as Gianna plowed into her leg but didn’t take her focus off Mateo. “Have you never wanted one of your own?”
“Our priorities are not the same,” he said bitterly.
“Aren’t they?” she said. “If there is a woman you can picture with a child, that is not one to let get away.”
He could not ask that of Cat.
But he couldn’t go home without saying goodbye, right? That wouldn’t be polite. It’s not like he wanted forever with a witch or, heaven forbid, magic children. What on earth would that look like?
But he could not leave without saying goodbye.
“Whatever put that smile on your face, keep thinking it,” she said, amused, and then frog-walked out of the living room with Gianna wrapped around her leg.
It was impossible. Maybe some wolf somewhere could settle down with a witch, but he was a New York alpha.
He couldn’t uproot his pack, nor could he traipse through the city with a witch on his arm.
And that was just the pack. He had an international company that he couldn’t run off of two satellites.
He was trapped in a hair’s nest of obligations that a woman would inevitably have to fit into, not the other way around.
Cat fit here, with her snowshoes and s’mores and a town that used her as their entire police department, causing her to risk her life. She really needed someone to watch out for her since apparently no one thought it was their job to do that…
His head bumped against the laptop.
He could not do that either, but he could at least say goodbye.