Chapter 18
Diego had just turned eighteen and had never been in a fight he hadn’t won.
He was one of the larger of the young Clan members, the Samoan blood running strong in his family line.
He’d grown up in the desert knowing exactly how powerful he was, but he wasn’t arrogant about it.
He was simply confident, and up until now, he’d had every reason to be.
He also wasn’t careless. That was the part that bothered Pax when the news arrived.
Diego had been running an errand, picking up a part from a supplier two towns over, and had stopped at the gas station on the east end of town on his way back.
Two of Hernandez’s foot soldiers had been there.
Not waiting for Diego specifically. Just hanging around, like they’d been doing all week, making their malevolent presence felt around town.
Diego had pulled up to the pump next to their car, and one of them had said something. Diego had answered. Things escalated fast after that, because the soldiers were looking for a fight and Diego was a proud young man who was more capable than they knew.
It had been two against one, and Diego had held his human shape the whole time.
By the time anyone came out of the gas station, it was over.
Three broken ribs. A split lip. His truck blocked in until he handed over the package, a motor part worth almost nothing, which they took anyway. Taking it was the point.
He’d called his uncle, who called Rodrigo, who called the twins.
An hour later, Pax sat in Diego’s mother’s kitchen and examined the young man. He kept his face calm while his jaguar snarled and paced and demanded a response.
“Did you shift?” he asked.
“No.” Diego’s voice was level despite the pain from his ribs. He was hurt, but refusing to be diminished by it. Pax had to admire the kid. “I’m not a cub. I know I’m not supposed to shift in public.”
“Good. You did everything right.”
Diego’s expression said he didn’t believe that for a second. “There were two of them.”
“And if you’d shifted in a public parking lot, we’d have a much bigger problem than your broken ribs.
” Pax leaned forward. “Two against one, and you didn’t shift.
Remember that. You stayed down when staying down was the smart play.
That took more discipline than fighting back would have. That took guts. I mean that, Diego.”
The young man was quiet, absorbing Pax’s words. His mother stood at the counter with her arms crossed, small and fierce and locked down tight for her son’s sake.
“Will there be a response?” she asked, her lips compressed in anger and outrage on her son’s behalf.
“Yes, ma’am,” Pax replied at once. He didn’t elaborate or go into detail. He just promised, “There will definitely be a response.”
Pax then went out to his truck and called Ari.
“I heard,” Ari said, before Pax got a word out. “Rodrigo called me too. He wants us to come over tonight.”
Pax agreed, ending the call, then sat with his hands on the wheel and the desert heat pressing through the glass.
He wanted to growl and let the anger run its course, but he dared not.
He was the adult. He was the example of how the cubs should behave.
He would keep his cool and be strong for the good of the Clan.
That was his role and he was sworn to his duty.
But he kept seeing Diego’s mother’s face in his mind. She’d already lost her mate to the cartels. Now they’d put their hands on her son, in the place she’d brought him to be safe.
Pax put the truck in gear and drove to the hardware store. He needed to see his mate. He needed her calming influence so he could think straight again and plot his next move.
Bree knew something had happened before Pax said a word.
He came through the back at midday, a few hours earlier than usual.
His expression was tightly controlled and he looked angry.
Not at her, but just in general. Something was wrong and she was going to find out what it was.
She put down the stock she was sorting and just walked straight into his arms.
“Tell me,” she invited, hugging him while she looked up into his eyes.
He hesitated briefly, then told her about the attack at the gas station and Diego’s broken ribs. She listened without interrupting, and when he finished, she asked, “How old is he?”
“Just eighteen last week.”
Eighteen years old. Two trained thugs had cornered him in a parking lot because he was a big kid, and because hurting youngsters was how organizations like this marked territory.
They’d taken a motor part worth nothing, just to prove they could.
And that meant the watching phase was definitely over.
“They’re not going to stop with Diego,” she said, dread filling her gut.
“No, they’re not. They’re going to keep pushing until someone stops them.”
She looked at him steadily. “Then stop them.”
Something flashed across his face. Not quite relief, but close.
“We’re working on it,” he said.
“Good.” She stepped away. “You should tell Tomás before he hears it through the grapevine,” she said.
She deliberately kept things as light as she could. If she let herself feel even a fraction of the anger, frustration and sadness that was in her for what had been done to that young man, she would break, and she didn’t want to do that. Not in the middle of a work day.
Pax seemed to understand. He held her gaze for a beat, their eyes saying what she couldn’t express in words right at that moment. Then, he nodded at her.
“Good idea.” He turned toward the back. “I’ll go talk to him.”
She heard him in the supply room a minute later, his voice low and even, Tomás answering in clipped, careful tones.
Then there was a moment of silence, and then the sound of Pax’s boots as he walked away.
She went back to sorting parts and refused to think too hard about Diego’s broken ribs and what came next.
Rodrigo convened the council at his house at seven that night.
It was a fuller meeting than the previous ones.
Not just Pax and Ari, but six of the senior Clan members, men and women who had been in this territory since before the current generation was born and who carried the Clan’s history in their bones.
Rodrigo went over everything his Betas and Pedro had told him and everything they’d speculated about.
He explained the likelihood that this was an establishing move rather than a targeted one.
Most thought the thugs had picked Diego to make an example of, simply because he was there and he was big, not because they knew he was a shifter.
The cartel guys probably didn’t even know about the existence of shifters.
All they cared about was their drug pipeline.
The magical stuff was Hernandez’s purview and it appeared that the cartel foot soldiers were just muscle that he borrowed from time to time to accomplish his own ends.
“The bottom line is, we are reasonably sure that the men in the gas station didn’t realize Diego was a shifter, much less that he was part of a Clan,” Rodrigo concluded his part of the briefing.
“Yet,” said Elena, one of the senior women and the sharpest strategic mind in the Clan after Pedro. “They don’t know about the Clan yet. The next of our kin they choose to pick on might reveal more than we want them to know.”
“The next one they pick won’t be alone,” said one of the men.
“That’s not a sustainable solution,” Elena shot back.
“Elena’s right,” Rodrigo said. “This escalates whether we respond or not. What can we do to regain control of the action?”
Pax had been thinking about exactly that since the attack on Diego. Their one real advantage was Hernandez’s incomplete picture, and that advantage held only as long as Hernandez believed he was dealing with a small, isolated family, or at most, a small group. It wouldn’t hold much longer.
“He’s going to move soon,” Pax said. “The cartel soldiers being here is preparation, not the main event. Once he has them in place as cover, he’ll go after his true objective.”
“Which is you,” Elena said.
“Which is me,” Pax agreed, nodding. “But the town has been dragged into this whether I meant it to happen, or not. A cartel presence takes on a life of its own once it gets a foothold.”
Rodrigo’s attention went to Pedro.
The old shaman had been silent, sitting a little apart, present and elsewhere at the same time. He looked up when Rodrigo’s eyes found him.
“The wards can be adjusted,” Pedro said. “What the enemy sees through them is my choice, not his.” He paused. “If we decide it’s time to change what he sees, I can do that.”
“A controlled reveal,” Ari said, his tone calculating.
“If that’s the decision.” Pedro met Rodrigo’s gaze again. “I would need to know what we want him to see, and when.”
Rodrigo seemed to consider, then responded.
“Not yet. We answer the Diego situation first. Quietly. Proportionately. In a way that makes clear this territory is not available, without revealing what this territory actually is.” He looked around the room.
“Pax, Ari, I want options. Elena, work with them. Pedro, be ready.”
The old shaman nodded.
The meeting broke up quickly after that. These were people who had done this before. Pax and Ari stayed while the others left, and Rodrigo stood at the window, looking out at the dark desert night.
“Diego’s mother came to see me this afternoon,” he said.
“I figured she would,” Pax said.
“She didn’t ask me to do anything. She just sat with me for a while.
” He looked down, then over at Pax and Ari.
“She has been here since her father brought them north. She lost her husband to the cartels in Mexico. She brought her son here to be safe.” He slammed one fist into his other palm in an outward show of frustrated anger.
It was the only crack Pax had ever seen in the man’s stillness in a very long time.
Pax said nothing. There was nothing to say. They all felt similar emotions when it came to someone hurting one of their own.
“We need to send a message to the cartel, but it can’t look like it came from shifters,” Rodrigo said.
“Leave it with us,” Ari responded, his voice hard as granite. Rodrigo met their gazes and nodded once, giving his permission and sending them on their way.
The twins drove back to their parents’ house in the dark. Ari was still, likely plotting his next move. Pax left him to it. He would circle back with his twin tomorrow. Pax dropped his brother at home and kept going, into town for the night.
He pulled up behind the hardware store a short while later.
The light was on in the apartment above.
Pax spent a few minutes thinking about everything that had happened, then sighed and went up to the back door and knocked.
Bree opened the door, took one look at his face, and stepped back to let him in.
After going upstairs with her, he sat at her kitchen table and told her everything that had been decided.
She listened and asked a few questions, and when they were done, she made him eat something because she discovered he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He ate.
It helped. The anger was still there, but it had settled now that he was with his mate.
“Are you certain Diego’s going to be all right?” Bree asked as they were sitting together after he’d eaten his fill.
“Yeah, he’s a tough kid.”
“His poor mother must be upset.”
“Yeah,” he said. He’d been carrying Diego’s mother’s face in his mind all afternoon.
She reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. He turned his hand over and held on, and they stayed like that while the night went on outside and the town lay quiet around them, and somewhere across town, Hernandez was planning.
Tomorrow, they would plan better.