“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 patiencewith 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.”
