“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 anappropriatenumber 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.
