Chapter 20 Matteo
MATTEO
Iclose the laptop to check on Jennifer.
Santos is still in the corridor, no longer on the floor, standing now with his arms folded and his back against the wall, looking at the closed door with the focused attention of a man listening through it.
"Still sleeping," he says, before I ask.
"Her scent," I say.
He tilts his head slightly, reading the air the way Santos always does, instinctively, before his brain has finished framing the question. Something in his expression shifts. "Settling," he says. "The peak has passed. It's quieter."
I put my hand on the door. Not to open it. Just to feel the warmth of the room through it, to confirm what Santos is telling me. The strawberry is there, softer now, the rose lying flat underneath it with its thorns down.
"The heat has finished," I say.
Santos exhales. Not a long breath. Just the kind that carries something with it.
"Good," he says.
"Go and eat something," I tell him. "You've been here three hours."
“Don’t remind me, that it takes so long. It feels longer when you say it out loud,” he says.
"Santos."
He looks at me with the expression he uses when he knows I'm right and objects to it on principle. Then he pushes off the wall and goes toward the kitchen, one hand dragging through his hair.
I stay.
I stand in the corridor outside her door and I think about Jennifer sitting in that study chair gripping the armrests, telling me this was a professional meeting and she was fine, just warm, and the look on her face when she said the baby, like she was handing over something she'd been carrying alone for a very long time and wasn't sure she trusted us with it.
She was right not to trust us.
I hear Tomas on the shell path before I see him.
His footsteps are recognizable after fifteen years, that particular deliberate pace, faster than usual tonight, which means something has happened that I don't know about yet.
I move to the end of the corridor where the window looks down toward the bay path.
He's coming up the hill in the last of the evening light, jacket on, hands free, which means the supplies are already inside. Carmen must have taken them. He's looking at the ground in front of him with the expression he wears when he's solved one problem and walked directly into another.
I go to the front door and open it.
He stops on the path when he sees me.
"The heat," he says.
"Has passed," I say. "She's still sleeping but the worst of it is done."
Something in his shoulders drops half an inch. "Good." He comes up the last of the path. "I've found her taco truck. I'm going to get it back for her. It's the least we can do."
"Good." I look at him. "There's something else."
He stops on the step below me, which puts us level. His gray eyes are doing the thing where he's choosing his words before he opens his mouth, not because he's uncertain, but because he wants to get it right. "I ran into someone at the bay."
I wait.
"Daniele brought her," he says. "I don't know how she found out we were here."
The evening is quiet around us. Below the hill, the water moves against the dock, indifferent and constant.
I understand him a half second before I see her.
"Tomas," I start.
"I told her tomorrow," he says. "The bay accommodation, talk in the morning. She agreed."
I look at the figure coming up the shell path behind him and understand immediately and completely that she agreed to nothing.
She said what was necessary to get Tomas moving up the hill ahead of her, and now she is twenty meters away and closing, her dark eyes already on the house, reading it, calculating it, the way she always calculated everything before deciding what to do about it.
Chiara.
I step down off the step.
Surprise, surprise. She said one thing and did another. Some things never change.
"Chiara," I say.
She stops on the path, and I recognize the expression immediately.
Rome, five years ago, the night she stood in a hotel corridor and told us she'd found another pack.
A better one. One that could give her the kind of attention three men running a business empire apparently couldn't. Not quite defiance.
Not quite apology. Sitting in the uncomfortable territory between the two, which is where Chiara has always done her most significant damage.
She's dressed for travel, bag over one shoulder, hair down, and she looks tired in the way of someone who has been running on a decision for so long that the decision itself is the only thing still keeping them upright.
"Matteo," she says. "I want to make it work."
"We'll talk tomorrow," I say.
"No." She steps around me. "I'm not happy that I'm in the guest house while you have some omega in there."
"Chiara." My voice drops. "You have been gone for five years."
She's already at the door.
I put my hand flat against it before she reaches it.
She looks at my hand. Then at my face. And I see the exact moment she smells it, the flicker in her expression, the recalibration, the shift from determined to something sharper and considerably less patient.
"She's a guest," I say. "She's unwell and she needed somewhere safe to sleep."
"She's in pre-heat," Chiara says. "So you expect me to step back and let you knot her?"
Is she serious right now?
I look at her and think that she must be, to swan back here after five years and expect open arms. Petite, blonde, blue-eyed, and absolutely certain of herself.
Everything Jennifer isn't. Jennifer, who showed up on this island with two bags and a secret and has not asked for a single thing she hasn't earned.
The contrast does not work in Chiara's favor.
She pushes the door open and walks in. I let her, because stopping her now will only make this worse, and there is a small, cold part of me that thinks seeing Jennifer might make Chiara understand something words won't convey.
Tomas and I follow her in. Her scent spikes sharp, like she's ready to start something.
If she tries anything, she'll have both of us to deal with.
The hallway is warm and lit low, the smell of dinner Carmen arranged earlier still faint in the air.
Jennifer's strawberry scent is there underneath everything, soft and sleeping.
The scent of someone who has finally let their guard down and is resting properly for the first time in what I suspect is a very long time.
Chiara stops in the hallway.
Jennifer is not in the guest room.
She is in the doorway of it, wrapped in the oversized shirt she apparently sleeps in, hair loose, one hand on the doorframe and the other pressed flat against her stomach, the look of someone who has just woken up, assessed the situation in approximately four seconds, and is already forming an opinion about it.
She looks at Chiara.
Chiara looks at her.
I watch both of them and feel, with the particular sensation of a man watching an avalanche he cannot outrun, that this is going to be a significant conversation.
"Hi," Jennifer says. Her voice is careful. The careful she does when she has not yet decided how to play something. "I don't think we've met."
"We haven't," Chiara says. Her voice is the opposite of careful. "I'm Chiara."
Jennifer waits.
"Their omega," Chiara says.
"Right," Jennifer says. "Well." Her eyes move across all of us. "You can have them."
Chiara stares at her.
"I have had them," Chiara says, her voice going thin and sharp. "For five years. Before you arrived here with your scent and your—"
"My what," Jennifer says, and the pleasantness has left her voice entirely.
"Chiara," Tomas says.
But the tears are already coming. Jennifer can hardly hold herself upright in the doorway, one hand white-knuckled on the frame, and I know better than to cross the room right now. She wouldn't want that. She would hate that more than anything.
"You have an omega," she says, looking directly at me. "You had one all along and you said nothing."
"No," I say.
"Yes," Chiara says, with a smile I want to remove from her face permanently.
Jennifer pushes off the doorframe. "You're liars. All three of you. I want off this island." She looks at Tomas. "Tonight. I want a boat tonight."
"Jennifer." Tomas steps forward. "I found your taco truck."
She stops.
"So you want a medal?" Her voice breaks on the edge of it. "You're rich. You can find anything you want. You could have found me three months ago."
The hallway goes very quiet.
"Marcos called an hour ago," Tomas says, steady. "I know where your truck is." He holds her gaze. "Some bastard knocked you up and walked away and left you to manage all of it alone, and what we did in Vegas was wrong. I want you to trust us."
"The baby is not your problem," she says through her teeth. "I'm going to my sister. In the morning. I want a boat first thing."
"There's a storm coming in," I say. "It's been building since this afternoon. The crossing won't be safe until it passes. Two days, maybe three." I hold her gaze. "When it clears, I'll arrange the boat personally and get you wherever you need to go."
"Fine," she says. Flat. Final. Completely exhausted. "Two days." She looks at all of us in sequence, me, then Santos, then Tomas, and last of all Chiara, with an expression that delivers her full verdict without requiring another word.
"And stay away from me," she says. "All of you."
She goes back into the guest room and closes the door. Not slammed. That would take energy she doesn't have. Just shut, firmly, with the specific click of a lock being turned that lands in the hallway louder than anything she said in the last ten minutes.
We could go after her.
But we have a problem standing in our hallway that Tomas should have dealt with the moment he found her at the bay, and that gets handled first.