Chapter 17
Mateo was having a hard time controlling his wolf, who was doing a gleeful dance inside of him at the idea of bringing her home.
Calm down, he insisted firmly. For one, this wasn’t home. This wasn’t anywhere close to home. For another, it wasn’t like he could pull her past his pack and up the stairs to the king bed in the master suite made of sturdy logs that never squeaked.
The door swung open, and a cacophony of scents and sounds rolled over him as he stepped inside. It all ground to a halt as various wolves swung toward them.
The heart of the house was a huge living room three stories high with a stone fireplace to match. It was gorgeous and perfect for a huge family, but it also did not give them any time to prepare. They just stepped right into the melee.
He tried to see his family from her point of view. A passel of Italians of various ages and shifter fitness dominated the room, as well as a few partners with other hair and skin colors around the edges.
Tomatoes and peppers blinded his nose, so his wolf was doing attendance by sight alone. Nicolo was still missing, doing loops of the perimeter, but pretty much everyone else was sitting around waiting for dinner.
“Hey all, this is Cat,” he said as the room slowly fell silent, and a bunch of wolves pivoted toward him. “Cat, this is the pack.”
Belatedly, he realized that he wasn’t in the habit of introducing them as a pack. In fact, that was completely forbidden. “Don’t worry. She’s—”
“Tesoro,” a gravelly voice said, and Mateo pivoted, his wolf frozen within him.
Rosino Amato, all five feet of her, stood in the archway to the kitchen on his right with an apron around her tiny waist. She was in her eighties with snow white hair and eyes as sharp as ever.
They stared at each other, she with a wooden spoon the length of her arm, and he with his hand around a witch.
“She’s a, um, local,” he said into the silence. “When did you arrive, Nonna?”
“Lupa?” Nonna asked. Wolf. A shifter could generally spot another, but it was harder if they weren’t related.
“Kind of,” he said, thinking of that spell book and the magic within it and what that implied about how they came to be.
Nonna’s eyes sharpened. “Born without?”
He clenched his teeth. He did not lie to her. He had never lied to her before in his life. He said nothing.
Something shuttered in her eyes, taking his silence for assent. Her face was blank as she said in Italian, “You will only bruise your heart.”
As if it were a foregone conclusion that he could not stay with a wolfless shifter.
“Dinner smells good,” Cat said with a forced smile.
Nobody said anything in response until Gianna tripped forward and took her hand. “You can sit with me so no one else growls at you.”
It was like she broke the damn.
People rushed up to introduce themselves, and Mateo tried to make his way toward Nonna.
Then a phone was shoved into his hand, and he was suddenly dealing with a security issue for a chip manufacturer in Taiwan.
He also never took vacations, and he realized from the helpless questions of his engineering team that he’d made himself more indispensable than he ever wanted to be.
She was quickly surrounded by wolves and was soon standing in front of a fireplace with a fire roaring as high as she stood, and it was totally intolerable.
He wrapped up as quickly as possible and shot the new orders off to his best engineer to try to fix or at least to try to talk them down, when he felt a clawed, anxious hand around his wrist.
He cleared his throat. “Nonna! Did you have a good trip? Did we know you were coming?”
“You can’t,” she said. The fact that she was speaking English, which she was perfectly fluent in but preferred her harangues in Italian, highlighted how serious this was. When she absolutely did not want to be misunderstood, she chose the language of her adopted country.
“Can’t what exactly? Why did you make the journey? Not that it isn’t a delight to see you.”
“You were supposed to be loving, not fighting.”
He closed his eyes. Of course, someone had told her about the fight. It would be a surefire way to end this experiment. “Was it Romeo? Nicolo?”
“The point is to extend the Amato pack, not end it here. We cannot be in a territory dispute. Come home.”
“What about pawing in the dirt, changing my life?”
Nonna looked over at Cat, who was now leaning down to listen to Gianna chatter, and his heart turned over in his chest.
“I forgot that sometimes change does not improve things,” she said quietly.
He could tell her they weren’t serious. He could tell her Cat would never leave Silver Spring, and he could not leave New York. He could tell her she was a witch, far worse than a wolfless shifter, and they weren’t compatible at all, but he could not make his mouth say the words.
Suddenly, Gianna popped up with a squeal and headed straight toward them.
“What is it?” he asked as all the wolves in the room went on red alert.
“She’s never had Cacciatore!” Gianna said on the way past him to the kitchen, Cat trailing behind.
“What?” he asked, totally thrown, but then his wolf pushed after his niece, and he realized it didn’t matter what she was saying; it was a way out of this conversation.
“It has tomatoes and peppers and chicken and onions…” Gianna said as she led the way into the industrial kitchen.
Cat stopped short, and reality crashed in.
“I’m a vegetarian,” she said softly, but this was a house full of shifters.
Everyone stopped.
Gianna pivoted. “How are you still alive?”
“You know vegetarians at school!” Mateo said, appalled by her manners.
“Yeah, but they’re not…” she frowned.
“No wonder she never got a wolf,” someone muttered from the back of the crowd. Mateo’s eyes jerked toward his wolves, but Cat would not have heard him.
“There’s no dish without meat?” Cat asked brightly.
Gianna shook her head, and Nonna snorted.
“In all of Italy?” Cat coaxed.
He wanted her. That had been true from the first moment he smelled her.
It was more true once he had gotten her into bed, but a part of his brain had always skipped when he contemplated reality.
What would his pack think? How would his work suffer?
How could she fit in his world with her crystals and cross-country skis?
Watching Cat coax Gianna and his great aunt into the kitchen to dig up a dish she could eat, he realized he didn’t just want her in his bed.
He wanted her to be holding their children.
The vision was so intense, he wondered if this was what her real visions were like.
He could feel the weight of a child in his arms.
That had been the real problem in New York.
He met every female shifter there was to meet, and could have his pick of them, frankly.
He was not a man that most women refused.
All of them would fit seamlessly into his pack, his business, and his life.
They knew how the game was played, and they ate their Chicken Cacciatore whether they liked it or not.
His wolf, and frankly, he, did not want any of them.
He didn’t want someone who could fit seamlessly into that life.
Gianna dragged Cat out of the kitchen holding a plate full of pastries and a smile. He couldn’t help smiling, too. It was the dinner he would have chosen at seven years old, too.
A traitorous voice in his head insisted that she represented something different more than something good, and keeping them for novelty was a shitty thing to do to a person, too.
But even that fell away in the force of his vision.
He saw a baby girl like Gianna, only with darker hair and luminous eyes.
She’d have a laugh like Cat and a brain like his, and he wouldn’t try to monetize any crazy invention she came up with the moment she came up with it.
She could play and play with endless resources and with a mother to make her go outside and put her paws in the dirt regularly and teach her magic that defied physics and the laws of the space-time continuum.
He felt his aunt’s presence beside him. She didn’t touch him this time. In fact, a pool of space was forming around him as all the wolves floated in and out of the kitchen to get their chicken.
“It’s time to come home now,” Nonna whispered.
He rounded on his aunt with almost a snarl, and the circle around them got a lot bigger a lot faster.
Maria shuffled Gianna and Cat closer to the fireplace and started loudly listing every Italian vegetarian food she could think of, as if anyone on earth ate olive oil, olives, and lemons for a meal.
“Why did you send me here, truly, Nonna?”
“Because wolves in the city—”
“What? Lose their sperm count? Lose their wolf? You don’t know why some kids have wolves and some kids don’t. No one knows that.”
Finally, she did touch him, gripping his hand. “Not a single child has shifted, Mateo. And you spend your days worried about the security of strangers’ money on the other side of the world while your own pack dies.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, understanding for the first time what she thought was going to happen to him in Colorado.
“That’s why you sent me here and not to Italy. You thought I couldn’t get online here. You thought I would work less and somehow mind the pack more.”
“You do hate your job,” Nonna said with confusion.
“I don’t.”
“You work all the time, tesoro, and you’re so exhausted. All you do is complain. All you do is see problems.”
“That’s the job. Literally, my job is to see the problems. And fix them. Do you like the money well enough? You spend enough. The one doesn’t come without the other.” He regretted his words the moment they left his tongue, but it didn’t stop him.
“There are one thousand rich assholes who can do that job to talk to China and solve their problems.”
“Wow, so Taiwan and China are different places, and a thousand?”
“A thousand. A dozen. One. Your pack needs you.”