He nodded once. “I will make the announcement.”
“Whoa, you’re not getting on a plane and leaving us here!”
Objections roared within him, but they were right. His dream had to be delayed another week or two.
Or three.
It had been a grinding, exhausting three weeks of onboarding both of them, no matter what talent they had for the role. Mateo was fiercely glad that they had a project worthy of that talent now. Tori was acting Chief Executive Officer, and Matt was acting Chief Operating Officer, ostensibly beneath her, but they put two chairs behind Mateo’s giant desk together. His ratty old chair was on his private plane. It and his computer were the only things from this office to make the cut.
Matt had wanted him to stay another week, but Tori hardly needed him now, and he’d put his foot down. If he had to spend more than a month away from Cat and the woods, he was going to go insane.
The jet was packed; his purchases were made, and the wolves all knew. All except one.
The pack had been supportive and confused, but no one had died. Many of the wolves hadn’t even blinked because Nico was right; they already had an alpha.
It was almost funny. Almost. He’d nailed his feet to the floor for this pack, thinking that was the only way his wolf was going to be okay. When in reality, it had always had another alpha. She had so thoroughly convinced herself of the proprieties that even she didn’t believe it.
He knocked softly on the door of her penthouse. “Nonna?”
He could both smell and hear her. There was no pretending not to be home in a wolf pack, but she didn’t walk toward the door.
“Nonna, I know you’re there, and you know I’m here. Open the door.” He kept his voice soft. If they started at the volume they both could reach, they’d bring down the house by the end of this. “Nonna,per favore.”
Finally, she shuffled closer and swung the door open. “Cosa vuoi?”
“I want to talk to you.” He really wanted to do it in English. This was going to be hard enough without trying to translate on top of it.
She opened the door wide, and he walked in, seeing all over again how tiny she was. She was from the part of the pack that had stayed in Italy when Jacomo came over to build his silver mine.
They called her Nonna and great aunt, because she was the sister of somebody in his direct line, and it seemed the most accurate in his twisted family tree.
She’d told him the story only once. She’d never been able to have children, and rather than accept the increasing irrelevance of a childless wolf, she’d come to visit relatives here and never left, slowly working her way into the heart of the pack.
She sat him down and poured him a plain espresso, the only thing she drank or served, even though to him it tasted like motor oil and sent his wolf jittering out of his skin. He took the smallest sip humanly possible, gasped at the taste, and put it down. This was their ritual. He would miss it.
She drained her own cup, set it down, and said, “No.”
Mateo blinked. “I haven’t said anything?—”
“I am also not stupid.”
Mateo knew that was true. He was the one who always felt a little stupid in this apartment.
“There is no other alpha,” she said. “The next in line is a teenager. You have always done your duty. There is nothing to change in that.”
He smiled with a brief, humorless grin. Like all of her mistakes, Colorado was banished from the house, never to be spoken of again.
“I’m leaving,” he said as simply as possible. He’d practiced several speeches in his mind over the last week to justify that and soften the blow. He even thought he could explain the interesting things he’d learned from the shifter he bought the land from, that there did really seem to be a destined mate for every wolf, that he had one, and every child born so far had both magic and a wolf as they reunited magic long divided.
“Hah,” she said imperiously, and he felt his wolf yank within him to stop baiting the alpha.
You could have told me she was your alpha!
It ignored him.
“You are not stupid,” he said slowly and calmly, “but maybe you don’t see everything.”
She gasped.
