Mateo Santiago novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: The Witness
The Hondo Alpha's card was soft from days in my jacket pocket.
I dialed with Chela's hands working behind me and the old man's breath rattling on the table.
He picked up on the first ring.
"It's the coffin," I said.
"Come to Santiago's Rest, now, and don't bring anyone from your pack."
There was a pause the length of a held breath.
"Twenty-five minutes," he said, and hung up.
He made it in nineteen.
By then the kitchen was full to the walls.
Thirty-eight rogues stood in the doorways and on the stairs, in coats over pajamas, and nobody spoke.
The thin man with the gray ponytail came through the door in a frost-white parka and stopped when he saw what lay on Chela's table.
"Is that Aurelio's healer?" he said.
"He is," said Mateo.
"He's here of his own will, and he's dying."
"I'm a Council vote, not a priest," said the Hondo Alpha.
"I'll listen."
He took a chair at the foot of the table, and the old healer lifted a hand off the blanket and let it fall.
"Where do you want me to begin?" he said.
"At the kitchen," I said.
The healer shut his eyes.
"Thirteen years ago in October, your father called me to the lodge at ten at night," he said.
"I thought somebody had a fever."
"Your mother was on the kitchen floor."
The only sound in the room was Chela's spoon, stopped against the rim of a cup.
"Inés had gone through the Alpha's papers," he said.
"The claims on the north ridge, forty families' mineral rights, sold quietly to a company that was really his."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of Mateo Santiago are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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