Mateo Santiago novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Envoy

Her ex-fiance demands her back for theft, and she answers him in front of the ranch.

I was down the stairs and across the yard before anyone could tell me not to.

Emilio stood in the headlights with six hunters fanned out behind him, and the big one from the culvert had a limp.

Mateo was already at the gate, and he had not hurried.

He leaned on the post with his arms crossed and waited for them to finish shouting.

"The Alpha of Black Lake sends his regards," Emilio said, and he held up a paper.

"Sofia Maldonado took a pack heirloom when she left, the Moonstone ring."

"A theft is a pack matter, and she belongs to the pack until the Council says otherwise."

"Hand her over, Santiago, and we'll forget the culvert."

Forty rogues had come out of the house behind me, quiet as deer.

I walked past Mateo and stopped at the gate, close enough to see the silver Beta cuff on his wrist.

"Ask me about the ring," I said.

Emilio smiled at the rogues instead of me.

"She stole it," he said.

"Her father said so himself."

I pulled the ring off my finger and held it up in the headlights.

"Read the inside of the band," I said.

I tossed it, and he caught it out of reflex.

He squinted and turned it, and I watched his face while he read it.

"It says Inés," he said at last.

"And the date she and my father married, which I wasn't there for," I said.

"It was her ring, and she gave it to me on the night she died."

"I wore it at your engagement party, Emilio.

"I wore it every day you knew me."

"You asked me to take it off for the photos once, and I said no."

A rogue behind me let out a short laugh.

Emilio's jaw flexed.

"Then your father gave it to you as a loan," he said.

"Then ask the men standing behind you," I said.

"I'd like to hear one of them call me a thief."

The hunters shifted their feet.

One of them looked at Emilio, and another looked at the ground.

They were Black Lake men, and they had heard my father say it too.

"Give it back," I said.

"Make me," Emilio said, and he closed his hand.

I put my hand on the gate latch, a long steel bar with a spring in it.

"Sofia," Mateo said, a low warning.

"I'm not going to hurt him," I said.

That was true when I said it.

I lifted the bar, swung the gate open, and walked out to Emilio with my palm held out.

Emilio laughed at me and grabbed my jacket in his fist.

He shoved me back hard.

I hit the dirt on my hip, and the whole yard drew breath.

Mateo moved, but I was faster, because I had grown up in a house where the loud men were slow.

I came up with the latch bar in both hands and hit Emilio across the face with it.

There was a crack, and he went down on one knee with his hands over his nose and blood running between his fingers.

Nobody breathed.

"That's for the engagement," I said.

The hunters did not move.

"Get up," I said, "and take your hand off my mother's ring."

Emilio looked at his bloody palm, and at me, and at the forty rogues who would not look away.

Then he opened his fist and set the ring down in the dirt.

I picked it up and put it on.

"Sofia Maldonado is my lieutenant," Mateo said.

His voice carried to the road without effort.

"She sat at my table tonight and she took my vote."

"If Black Lake has a charge against her, the Council can hear it at the Winter Moon."

"If you come on my land again, you'll be carried off it."

Emilio hauled himself upright with a rag held to his face.

"You brought a wolfless girl in," he said through the blood.

"You don't even know what you're holding."

"I know," said Mateo.

"Everybody digs, Santiago," Emilio said.

"Healers, the old women, the Waking, every pack there is."

"They dig and they dig and there's nothing at the bottom.

"Wait until you try it yourself."

Mateo said nothing at first.

Then he came forward until he was an arm's length from Emilio's ruined face.

"I don't dig," he said.

It was so quiet and so flat that two of the hunters took a step back.

Emilio spat blood onto the dirt and walked to his truck.

The engine roared, and the white truck threw gravel and was gone.

The yard stayed silent.

I stood with the latch bar hanging from my hand and my hip aching, wondering what I had just started.

Then Nico let out a whoop and the whole ranch exploded.

They pounded my back and shouted over each other, and somebody put a plate of sopaipillas in my hand.

Chela took the iron bar away from me.

"A cut lip would've done," she grumbled.

"He earned the nose," I said.

"He did," she agreed, with a crooked smile.

When the yard emptied, Mateo was still at the gate.

He was looking down the road where the taillights had gone.

"What did he mean," I said, "that nobody finds anything at the bottom?"

He did not answer right away.

"Go to bed, Sofia," he said.

"We start early."

He didn't answer the question, and he didn't have to.

I had heard the rule at dinner and I'd heard it again in the dirt, and my throat went tight.

I did not know why a stranger had put his whole ranch between me and a question about my own body.

I only knew that no one in my life had ever done it before.

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