Chapter 16
The man had been in the hardware store once, earlier in the week. Now, he was back.
Bree was behind the counter doing inventory of the small parts kept back there when the man came through the front door.
She looked up, spotting him immediately.
There was nothing obvious she could have pointed to, but something was seriously wrong about him.
It might be just an instinct, but she’d learned to trust her feelings about people. This guy was trouble.
He was also medium height, wearing unremarkable clothes.
She again noticed the tattoo on his left forearm that was partly visible below his sleeve.
It was black ink only with what looked like words or symbols, but there was too little showing to read.
He moved through the aisles at a deliberate pace, stopping at displays without really seeing them, his attention sweeping the store instead.
He looked at her twice. Once when he came in, and once while she was helping a regular customer near the back. The second time, he didn’t look away right off. He looked at her with an assessing gaze that made her skin crawl.
She held his gaze until he moved on, forgoing the usual inquiry as to whether he needed help. She just hoped he couldn’t see her pulse jumping in her throat.
When he left without buying anything, exactly as she’d suspected he would, she went back to the counter. She just stood there with her hands flat on the cool glass and made herself breathe.
Tomás appeared from the back just then. He’d been up front all morning, closer than his work required, and she understood now that he’d been watching the man too, but covertly.
“You saw him?” she asked.
“Yes.” Tomás came up beside her and stared at the door the man had gone through, his jaw set hard. She’d learned that look. The Rojas family wore it when they were being careful not to betray their inner anger. “He came in the other day, too.”
“You weren’t here for that one,” she said at once.
“I should have been,” he replied flatly. His voice was resolute. This young man was going to be a force to be reckoned with when he finished becoming himself, and Bree suspected that day wasn’t far off.
She grabbed her phone and texted Pax.
“The weird guy was back in the store. Black tattoo, left forearm. Didn’t buy anything. Looked at me but didn’t speak.” She paused, then added, “I’m fine. Tomás is here.”
The reply came in under a minute. “Stay in the store. I’ll be there in ten.”
She put the phone in her pocket and went back to the inventory. She made it three lines down the list before admitting to herself that her hands weren’t entirely steady.
Pax got there in eight minutes. He came through the back and she met him in the aisle and gave him everything before he could ask.
Height, build, what little she’d seen of the tattoo, how the man had moved, and how creepy that second look had felt.
Pax listened without interrupting, completely focused on her words.
When she finished, he went quiet, staring at the distant front door instead of at her.
“Pax?”
He refocused on her.
“Do you know who he is?” she asked.
The pause told her everything. “I have an idea,” he said. “But it’s not confirmed.”
“Tell me.”
She had been patient. She had passed along everything she noticed and asked for nothing in return, and she was done being managed.
“We think he’s one of Hernandez’s men,” Pax said.
“Who is Hernandez?” she demanded.
Pax sighed. “Alexander Hernandez is a mid-level mage who’s been embedded with a Mexican cartel for years.
I think he followed my trail here from Salt Lake City after I was injured.
” He said all of it plainly, watching her face.
“All these new faces in town are most likely cartel foot soldiers doing Hernandez’s bidding. ”
“How long have you known?”
“I got the I.D. a few days ago.”
She turned and walked to the storeroom at the back of the store. He followed. She’d known he would. She stopped in the private room that was away from the front windows and spun to face him. He stopped two feet away and waited.
“You’ve known for a few days?” she asked, her voice rising in pitch.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been texting you descriptions and plate numbers and—” She stopped. Steadied herself. “I’ve been useful to you. You let me be useful to you. And the whole time, you had a name and a background, and you didn’t tell me.”
“I was trying to—”
“Manage me,” she said. “I know. You’ve been managing me.
” She wasn’t shouting. She was being precise, which was worse, and she knew it, and she did it anyway.
“I am not some dumb civilian you’re protecting, Pax.
That man walked through my store today, and you left me guessing about who he was and how dangerous he could be. ” Her tone was outraged.
He went very still. He didn’t defend himself. He didn’t deflect. She’d braced for one or the other, and his silence made it harder to stay angry, and she needed to stay angry for at least another minute.
“You’re right,” he said.
“I know I’m right.”
“I know you know.” His gaze never left hers. “I won’t insult you by claiming it was the right call. I was protecting you. I knew you’d see it differently, and I chose to protect you anyway.” A breath. “I was wrong. You need the full picture. I just didn’t want to worry you. I’m sorry.”
She searched his face. He meant it. He wasn’t giving her an apology just to end the fight. He was owning his mistake.
“I can handle more than you give me credit for, you know,” she said.
“I know.” No hedging. “I knew it before, but I did it anyway. That’s on me.”
She crossed her arms and glared at the shelving unit beside them while she decided what to do with her leftover anger.
It wasn’t going anywhere for a while. She was honest enough with herself to know that some of it was fear dressed up in anger’s clothes, because fear was useless to her right now and anger at least got things done.
“Tell me the rest,” she said. “All of it. What you know, what you think, what you’re planning.”
He told her about Hernandez’s background and methods.
And he had to explain a bit about the ancient Order known as the Venifucus.
He described the cartel infrastructure going up around town as cover, and she listened without interrupting.
By the time he finished, her arms had come uncrossed and she was leaning against the shelving with her hands loose at her sides.
“He doesn’t know about the Clan on the reservation?”
“We don’t think so.”
“So the thing protecting all of you right now is his own mistake.” She chewed on that. “And the thing that could destroy that protection is anything that makes him look harder at this store.”
“Yeah.” He watched her work it through, and something that might have been pride flickered across his face. “Which is why I need you to keep running the store exactly the way you have been. Nothing changes. No variations.”
“Should we resume the workshops?”
He hesitated.
“A dozen young Clan members moving through the middle of town on a Saturday morning is a variable I can’t control right now. If Hernandez is watching the store—”
“He’s watching the store. We both know he is.”
“Then twelve strong young people with jaguar blood is going to update his count.” He held her gaze. “I’d still like to pause the workshops after Saturday’s session. It’s already announced, and canceling would be its own kind of signal. But after that, nothing new until we know more.”
She thought about her father and the way his face had lit up last Saturday when Emilio asked a follow-up question from the week before.
Emilio had made her dad’s day when he wrote the answer down in the notebook he’d started carrying to the workshops.
That notebook had put ten years back on her dad’s life.
“Two weeks,” she said.
“At most. I think it’ll be resolved before then, one way or the other.”
“So, we restart in two weeks. Regardless of what happens.”
“I can live with that,” he agreed.
She nodded once. The anger had cooled into something she could work with. She pushed off the shelving unit.
He looked tired. He’d been tired for a while now, carrying all of this on his broad shoulders. She wanted to ease his burden just a bit, if she could. And she just missed him.
“Come to dinner tonight,” she said. “Not to talk about any of this. Just dinner.”
“Bree—”
“I’m not fragile, and I’m not asking because I need comforting.” She met his eyes. “I’m asking because I’d like to have dinner with you and talk about literally anything other than what’s going on with tattoo guy.”
The tightness around his eyes eased, just a little.
“What time do you want me to come over?”
“Seven.” She reached up and kissed him quickly, on the lips. She wanted more, but this wasn’t the time or place.
She walked back out front. Tomás was restocking near the door. The afternoon light slanted through the front windows, and behind her, she heard Pax let out one long breath before his footsteps followed hers.
Pax brought wine to dinner, showing up at seven that night. He stayed until eleven, and they talked about everything except Hernandez.
Mr. Leeland told a story about the worst roofing job he’d ever overseen.
It involved a chain of decisions, each perfectly reasonable on its own, that had somehow ended with an emergency tarp going up at midnight in a July thunderstorm.
Pax laughed and Bree supplied further details adding to the humorous story.
After dinner, her father settled into his chair with a book, and Pax and Bree sat at the kitchen table with the last of the wine and talked about happy memories.
Somehow they got on the topic of a piece of land on the north side of the reservation that Rodrigo had been trying to buy back for years.
It had been Clan land a generation ago, but had somehow been sold off under circumstances nobody liked to discuss.
“Can it be bought back?” Bree asked.
“Maybe. If the Clan had more capital.” Pax turned his glass slowly on the table. “That’s always been the problem. The drug wars took most of the men who would’ve been building that capital.”
“At least the workshops are a step in the right direction,” she said. “Dad’s teaching the youngsters skills that can turn into paying work. Construction, electrical, plumbing. Tomás already has two people asking him about doing small jobs.”
“You’ve been thinking about this.”
“Someone has to. You and Ari have been thinking about the threats to your people. I’ve been thinking about what comes after.” She picked up her glass. “The Clan needs income that doesn’t require anyone to leave home for long stretches of time to earn it.”
He thought about that. He hadn’t let himself project that far ahead.
It had seemed too distant from where they stood right now, with cartel soldiers in the diner and a mage circling the wards.
She was thinking about a Clan that stayed home and built a more prosperous future, and a new generation that could put down economic roots alongside the territorial ones.
Bree had been quietly working out the Clan’s future while he’d been chasing license plates, and she was right. Someone had to.
“You should tell Rodrigo,” he said.
“I figured you could tell him. You have the relationship. I just have the ideas.”
“The ideas are the hard part, babe.”
She ducked her head, but he caught the smile before she hid it.
The kitchen was warm around them. The desert outside was peaceful.
And Pax finally understood, all the way, what Pedro had been trying to tell him about rare things.
This. A warm kitchen, a shared bottle of wine, and a woman who had been planning his Clan’s future on her own time simply because she’d decided it was worth doing.
Because she cared. Not just about him, but about his people. That was precious to him. As precious as she was.
His mate. His jaguar had no doubts at all, and the man had run out of arguments.
He reached across the table and covered her hand with his. She turned her hand over and held on, and they stayed that way while her father’s reading lamp glowed in the next room and the night carried on around them, soft and unhurried.