Work solved everything.
He went to the gigantic living room and settled at his laptop next to the three-story fireplace. It wasn’t the best place to be working with two kids running around, but the wires to the two satellites on the roof ran down the fireplace, so this was the best reception in the house. It was better than he had any right to expect if he didn’t want to do a million-dollar construction project, but it still was not anywhere near as fast as what he was used to.
It wasn’t like he needed massive computing power. There were emails to answer, a meeting with marketing, and a meeting with one of the CEOs of the companies they were protecting to explain again how encryption worked. Then maybe they’d get out and see more of the town…
Except they couldn’t do that because there was a coven there. And they couldn’t go out wandering in the woods because there was another pack that didn’t seem to live by the rule of “Don’t confront each other.”
So he was stuck in this house with inferior internet.
He wanted to get lost in the numbers. It was the only time he felt truly calm and could completely ignore the wolf within him, but two days away from his inbox had left him horrifically behind, and the CEO’s job wasn’t to wrangle numbers; it was to wrangle everything else.
He empowered his teams to adjust quickly. He had to in the world of cybersecurity. They couldn’t even wait to call him to give the go-ahead to put through a patch sometimes. Fortunately, the vast majority of thieves were stupid, no matter how much computing power they thought they had, but the code was the simplest part. If only there were a way to get the rest of his business to run without him.
He tried to imagine it.Being a CEO was very much like being an alpha wolf. You didn’t do any work. You contributed nothing to the company, but if you stopped, everything broke. It was a stupid way of organizing anything. For the first time in his life, he closed his computer with his inbox still full.
Maybe he could do another loop, even though he was crossing two territories, and it would be suicide. Maybe if he headed in the opposite direction into the true wilderness, he could bother some real wolves instead.
“What happened out there?” a quiet voice asked, and he turned to see Maria bouncing the baby on her hip. She looked like his grandmother with her hair shot through with silver at the very beginning of old age.
He flashed through the insane events of the last few days, back to his fight with the wolf. Dear god, he’d forgotten about that. He’d have to tell them. Not only was there a pack on the other side of Silver Spring, but he killed one of them. Well, technically, the avalanche had killed one of them, but somebody was going to find the body eventually. Then he thought of the witch.
“We found some kids.”
“We?”
He winced. Of course, she would pick up on that.
“Did you ever want to date?” he asked and then met her eyes, horrified. “I’m so sorry. That is none of my business.”
“Of course, I wanted a family, but I couldn’t dilute the Amato line.”
He shuddered. The older generations had some very particular ideas of strength that made him a little sick to his stomach.
“You would’ve been a great mom,” he settled on saying because he couldn’t say anything he wanted to.
She bounced the boy, cooing at him as he sucked on his entire fist. “Things were different back then.”
He took that as the acknowledgement it was, that if this generation refrained from having kids if they didn’t have a wolf, there wouldn’t be any Amato left of any kind.
“So who are ‘we’?” she asked. Her head was still pointed toward the baby, but her eyes slanted toward him. She also kept to the old ways and never met his eyes. When he said nothing, she jostled the boy. “He doesn’t want to say, does he, Tony?”
To Nonna’s eternal consternation, Romeo had named the baby Anthony, not Antonio, insisting that they didn’t have to live like they were pretending to be in Italy.
“It was just somebody I met trying to find those kids.”
“And yet you want to see her again.”
“I didn’t say her.”
“Angry, impatient, lacking interest in previous passions, and slacking off work? Mateo Amato, of all people.”
Bizarrely, she said all of this to the baby, who gazed at her with big brown eyes.
“Maria! Papa says we can go outdoors if we dress warm enough!” Gianna said, tearing through the forest of chairs like a whirlwind.
Maria gasped as Gianna plowed into her leg but didn’t take her focus off Mateo. “Have you never wanted one of your own?”
“Our priorities are not the same,” he said bitterly.
