Chapter 22 #2
Nico was not his employee. Mateo didn’t know what he did. As his alpha, he could’ve insisted, but it always seemed to cross a line with one of his closest friends. Well, they were as close as an alpha wolf could be with anyone.
Except her.
Don’t think about it.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Nico asked.
Mateo blinked.
He had been expecting a joke or a question, but never about his actions. That just wasn’t done.
“I work here?” Mateo said, feeling absurd.
“Why aren’t you in Colorado?”
His wolf howled in longing, but the human half of his soul felt a spark of genuine anger. “Not you too. There’s nothing magical about a forest.”
This was the biggest lie he’d ever told. There was something magical about the forest in Colorado. She had dark hair and piercing blue eyes and smelled like a rose.
“In the last two days, you’ve snapped at every single wolf in the pack, and when you’re not exploding, you’re staring into the middle distance with a look on your face like you just ate a lemon.”
“I have not.” Had he?
“Jackson hid under the dining room table until you left this morning.”
His mouth gaped. He didn’t know. He would’ve smelled him, right?
Did you know? He queried his wolf.
His wolf shrugged. Mateo didn’t know if that meant it knew and didn’t care or if it hadn’t noticed either.
“I will get it together,” Mateo said stubbornly.
“You hate this,” Nico said.
“I love Jackson,” Mateo said and had to spend another second pushing the wolf down in outrage at the idea that he could be bad for his nephew. Okay, maybe his wolf was a little trigger-happy right now.
Nico waved that away with a flick of a huge hand. “You love the family, we know. But you hate this. You haven’t been happy in years.”
“Bullshit,” Mateo said. It came out as a snarl.
“You’re this genius guy who just wants to see how the world works, and instead you spend your life bossing people around and coming home and bossing us around.”
“And just what should I do instead?” Mateo asked. He meant to sound self-righteous, but even he could hear the longing in his voice. “My wolf is just going to step, um, away?”
He tried to tread delicately to avoid rousing the beast. It didn’t always follow complicated conversations about the future, but it would revolt at any hint of losing power.
“Hell, I don’t know,” Nico said with a sigh and collapsed into a chair across from Mateo. “All I know is that something is wrong, and it’s been wrong for a while, but now it’s breaking you.”
Broken. It already happened.
“I am handling it.”
Niko shook his head. “Do you think that’s what we want for you or us? To be handled?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Yes, you did. It’s her, isn’t it?”
“It can’t be a witch.”
Nico took a sharp breath and then let it out slowly. “What if it can’t be anyone else?”
Mateo felt that deep in his bones. Hadn’t he just been saying that?
“It doesn’t happen like that,” he insisted. “Your life changes in a week? I barely know her. I can’t rip my life apart.”
Nico crossed his arms and smiled.
Mateo sat back. This was the first time he’d seen Nico smile since before they left the mountains.
“How long is it supposed to take?” Nico asked. “You wait an appropriate number of months before declaring she’s your soulmate?”
Mateo’s head shook automatically even as his wolf surged with joy. “That’s not a thing.”
“Which part? Souls or mates?”
“That there’s one perfect person meant for you, destined to be together with a connection like no other.” He trailed off, thinking of the magic surging between them, thinking of that smell that seemed designed by the universe to entice him like nothing else.
But she couldn’t have been more different from him. Nothing in their lives overlapped. She wasn’t a mate, already a memory.
“We don’t share anything in common.”
But wasn’t that what made them stronger? She was honest and smart in all the ways he was stupid. Wood smart, if that was a thing. He would make it a thing.
They had one thing in common. They both loved their families to the point that they would sacrifice everything for them.
His head bumped his desk. She’d thought she was doing the right thing.
No family, if they truly loved them, would ask this of him or her.
“Fate has got you by the balls, my man,” Niko said, looking extremely pleased with himself.
“What happens to the pack? What happens to this company? I can’t walk away.”
“You don’t want this job either. And the pack’s fine.”
“Wait, is this a challenge?”
His wolf went still within him. It had been nothing but happy at the thought of seeing its mate again, and strangely indifferent to leaving its family behind, but that was an abstract concept, not a direct challenge.
“No one would follow me anywhere,” Nico said. It sounded like a statement of fact, but it also sounded like it hurt.
“So what, a series of fights to the death as the family rips itself apart?”
Nico smiled again. “Nonna.”
Mateo looked at him as if he were truly insane. “She’s eighty-five or somewhere around there.” There were several birthdays when her age hadn’t changed, so now everyone was confused.
“And she’s led the pack the whole time. Oh, she’s given up the power to your wolf. She thinks that’s how things should be—a man at the top—but it’s always been her. It’s the twenty-first century. A woman can lead a pack. A woman always has.”
Mateo felt like someone had stolen his chair from under him. Nonna had always been alpha? It was true, she always had the last word and his wolf had let her. Mateo had never questioned why. Who but her could have sent him off to the wilds of Colorado like that was a sane thing to do?
“She’s got another decade in her, and by that point Jackson will be of age or somebody else will have stepped up,” Nico said.
Jackson was almost a teenager, the last child born with a wolf, and an insanely strong one.
Mateo shuddered.
“What?”
“The Amato pack is going to be led by a guy named Jackson?”
Nico snickered. “I told Rosie she was an idiot.”
Mateo shook his head, in love with his family again. “And my lone wolf sits in the middle of the woods? You think that’s not going to send it stark raving insane?”
“With the love of your life? And little wolf babies running around?”
A bolt of longing struck him so hard he couldn’t breathe.
“What about the business?” the stubborn, idiot part of his brain insisted.
Nico held up his hands. “Do you think Nonna could learn how to use a computer?”
Mateo burst out laughing, the first time since long before he got back. It felt jarring and deeply good.
“This isn’t about the woman in the woods,” Nico said.
“I mean, you can make it about her. I don’t care.
If she is the excuse you need to break the bars of this cage you built around yourself out of some weird-ass combination of love and loyalty, I’ll take it.
But it’s not about her. It’s time to get out. We did not want this for you.”
Mateo picked up his phone.
“Meeting is over?” Niko said.
“Get out of my office.”
Nico stood up and headed for the door with a self-satisfied smirk on his face.
“Nico,” Mateo called.
The larger man turned, one eyebrow raised.
“Thank you.”
“Never needed. Let me know when the jet is leaving.”
“Why?” Mateo blinked. “Wait, you’re coming?”
Of course, he was coming. Mateo had never seen such a transformation. Nico’s wolf was happy in the woods.
He had a sudden vision of that house full of wolves and her walking so tentatively down the stairs.
“I’m not going out there to play alpha.”
“I know.”
An idea came to him. “I need to make some calls.”
“Let me know—” Nico said, sounding surprisingly desperate and firm.
Mateo met his eyes. “I will. I promise.”
He had several promises to make.