Chapter 23
Mateo sat in his office fidgeting. It had been a week since Nico’s intervention. He’d wanted to rush to the airport and get on a plane right then, but cage bars weren’t that easy to snap. Still, they were proving far easier than he expected.
He thought he had to spend the week fighting his wolf, but it was more eager than he to go back to her. More proof, as if he needed it, that she was everything to all parts of him.
He had not expected the grief. No, he didn’t want this life anymore but losing it still hurt.
“Planes exist,” he told himself angrily.
His wolf perked up, confused, and insisted it was aware of the tiny metal tubes hurling through the air.
He pushed the beast away.
She could not live here. He knew that, and neither could he, not really, not after experiencing his wolf in the woods and knowing the difference between the frenzy of defending indefensible territory and the freedom of his own land. But they could visit.
He’d made some very important phone calls to various real estate agents before dismissing them all and resorting to his own hacking skills, because he didn’t want to take her home to the Double Thirteen house.
It seemed he wasn’t the only wolf in his pack that had fallen in love with the woods, and he wanted it there for the others who would choose to come as well.
Besides, he had a better place in mind.
There was a sharp knock on the door he recognized. He shouted, “Come in,” seconds before the door opened.
Matt was not really his brother but had become closer than one—his right-hand man and confidant—until a few weeks ago, when Mateo sent him to Colorado first, and Matt had disappeared. Tracking him down had also taken a moment.
He opened his mouth to say hello when a compact woman, tough and built, trailed in after Matt. He closed his mouth.
“This is Tori,” Matt said with an edge in his voice.
“Hello, Tori,” he said automatically as several things clicked into place. “Tori Griffin?”
“How the hell did you know that?” Matt asked and then threw up his hands. “I don’t know why I asked that.”
“Yes,” Tori said coolly, squinting at him. His wolf wanted to soothe her; her pulse was racing
Mateo sighed. “I sent you to Silver Spring. You disappeared and now show up with a woman. If it had been literally anyone else in that town, you would not have hidden her from me.”
“She could’ve been human.”
“I would have been happy for you. You know that. I am happy for you. Congratulations.”
“So what do you want from me?” Matt asked. “So badly that you would send a private car and plane to fetch me from the joint I was housesitting, where my name did not appear on any lease or any official document whatsoever.”
Mateo was suddenly aware of how high-handed and inconvenient that must have been.
“I’m sorry.”
Matt looked shocked. The woman smiled.
“What do you want, Mattie?” Matt asked, using the old nickname they shared.
Mateo still wasn’t sure why he’d rescued the scrappy teenager who kept getting into dominance fights because he didn’t understand how various packs shared the city peacefully.
Mateo had seen something in the young man in his willingness to take on a fight he knew he would lose rather than walk away, and the smarts he employed to take down someone stronger than him.
He never regretted that decision. He hoped it would pay off now.
“How attached are you to your, um, house stay?”
“Mateo, damnit, I swear if this is you asking me to come back and run your life because you keep running out of Boba…” Matt paused and looked around the office. “Or the opposite, and you’ve accidentally ordered a restaurant’s worth of food for lunch every day.”
Mateo followed his gaze and winced. He hadn’t realized how many takeout containers he’d accumulated trying to soak in the flavors of New York.
“What the hell is going on?” Matt asked.
“Are you hungry?” Mateo asked, suddenly worried there was a secret question in that declaration.
“What do you want?” Matt asked.
“I want to hire you.”
“I already work for you. Mostly.”
“I want you to run Amato Enterprises.”
Matt blinked three times, and Mateo could see him gathering himself. He knew well that the younger man ran out of patience with him regularly. Voicing the fifth thing that came into his mind, and not the first four, was one reason Mateo had picked him for the role.
“You run Amato Enterprises,” Matt said.
“Not anymore.”
Matt stopped breathing, and Tori made her first move, stepping closer to him and running a hand over his shoulder. Mateo could feel the connection between them, how his wolf responded to her, and sighed. “This is apparently a common thing.”
“You handing over CEO duties? That’s not a common thing!” Matt said, exploding into movement. He paced to the window and stared out at the rain.
“No, I mean that witches and shifters are connected,” Mateo said.
Matt froze again, and Tori stared at Mateo. He watched out of the corner of his eye as one of his visitor’s chairs hovered in the air.
“I mean you no harm,” he said carefully, his wolf bowing to the woman with magic. It had newly grown respect for magic.
“Which one of my sisters?” Tori ground out through gritted teeth.
“I mean her no harm.”
“Which one what?” Matt asked, finally facing them again. “You two are both terrible. You leave out two-thirds of a conversation.”
“Catarina,” Mateo said, and internally added, Patchouli.
Tori burst out laughing. “Cat went for a wolf? You have to be kidding me.”
“He doesn’t kid,” Matt said.
Mateo’s gaze bounced between the two of them as a new idea came to him.
It would solve the one problem he could not square with his request. The role he took in this company was a seven-day-a-week, twelve-hour-a-day gig when he wasn’t randomly abandoning it to go running through the woods.
It was more than any one person should ever have taken on or been able to do.
He just didn’t have anything better to do at the time, or so he thought. Or so he told himself.
“I would like both of you to run Amato Enterprises.”
“You just met me,” Tori said.
“You are not like Cat. You do not smell of the woods.”
“It’s not polite to smell other people’s witches,” Matt said.
“And it’s not sane to hire me based on what I don’t smell like!”
“Not like that,” Mateo said and wished they were all sitting down, but Matt never sat down when he was in this office. “Your scent is made of some kind of motor oil beneath the forest. You could be happy here.”
“I spent the first decade of my life in Philly,” Tori said.
“See?” he said triumphantly.
Tori crossed her arms. “It wasn’t a fun decade.”
Mateo winced, but he wasn’t wrong about this.
“You’re going back to her,” Tori said.
“Guys. Talk out loud!” Matt insisted.
Oh, he liked Matt’s witch, and they both would be in his life this way.
He wanted to go back to the days when computers were new and delicious and not an endless burden.
He already had a few ideas for products, mostly because he spent his days and his nights coding instead of sleeping, trying to keep himself from leaving.
“Okay,” Tori said with a smile as if he’d explained all that and not stared down wordlessly into leftover Pho.
“I hate both of you,” Matt said.
“He’s going back to Colorado to be with Cat. He doesn’t want to run the company. He’s offering us the job instead. Probably because it’s more than any three people could do, but two is better than one.”
“I can’t run a company,” Matt said.
“You were already mostly running the company,” Tori said. “He’s never wanted to run the company.”
“That’s not true,” Mateo said. “I did when I started.”
Matt laughed. “Sorry, buddy, even I know you never wanted to run this company after a week of running this company.”
Mateo grimaced. He thought he had hidden that deep until Cat ferreted out the secret. Turns out, the only person he’d hidden it from was himself.
“I would still work here except not here,” Mateo said.
“I can’t run a company,” Matt repeated.
“Matt, it’s just solving problems,” he said, trying to tamp down his impatience. “That’s what you’re good at. I never was.”
Matt looked at him with something other than bafflement and anger for the first time. “It’s because you let every problem hurt. They’re never that deep.”
“Was that my problem?” Mateo said with half a smile.
Matt stared at his shoulder rather than meet his eyes.
“Will you do it?” Mateo asked when nothing else happened.
“For a couple of months,” Tori said.
Mateo automatically shook his head. “This isn’t the try-it-out sort of—”
She held up a hand. “I will not let Matt make the mistake you did. We will give it more than a week, but if we hate it, this becomes your problem again. I will not let him hurt.”
This was a better plan. This was definitely a better plan.
He nodded once. It was a risk, and it could leave the company in an even worse state in three months, but every instinct he had told him they would not hate this, especially the feisty witch.
He nodded once. “I will make the announcement.”
“Whoa, you’re not getting on a plane and leaving us here!”
Objections roared within him, but they were right. His dream had to be delayed another week or two.
Or three.
It had been a grinding, exhausting three weeks of onboarding both of them, no matter what talent they had for the role.
Mateo was fiercely glad that they had a project worthy of that talent now.
Tori was acting Chief Executive Officer, and Matt was acting Chief Operating Officer, ostensibly beneath her, but they put two chairs behind Mateo’s giant desk together.
His ratty old chair was on his private plane.
It and his computer were the only things from this office to make the cut.
Matt had wanted him to stay another week, but Tori hardly needed him now, and he’d put his foot down. If he had to spend more than a month away from Cat and the woods, he was going to go insane.