Page 2 of Calling Chaos (Demon Bound #3)

1

Cooper

T he upside of not showering for five days was just how amazingly clean Cooper felt now as he stepped outside of the steam-filled cubicle in his overly large bathroom.

The downside was, of course, the shame in remembering he’d just…forgotten to bathe for five days in a row. Not that it was the first time that had happened.

Nor would it be the last…

Cooper grabbed blindly for his towel, scrubbing at his hair and face first so he could snag his glasses from the counter and shove them on before he tackled the rest. He supposed it was a good thing Ivan had called, demanding Cooper’s presence today. Cooper had gotten way too invested in this little challenge he was working on. He was close to breaking it, he knew, and it had been all too tempting to just keep at it until he cracked it.

But not tempting enough to risk Ivan’s wrath; that was for sure—he may have been Cooper’s cousin as well as his employer, but family ties didn’t mean much to a man like Ivan when he was displeased.

Cooper made a point of never displeasing him.

Working as the main tech guy for a branch of the Russian Mafia wasn’t the career path Cooper would have chosen if left to his own devices, he was pretty sure, but it was hard to know at this point. His dad had reluctantly signed him up to work for Dimitri—Ivan’s late father and the old head of the family business—when Cooper was still a teenager.

Cooper hadn’t had a chance to know anything else.

Luckily, now that Ivan was in charge, Cooper was able to do most of his work remotely. Gone were the days of him gofering between lieutenants at all hours, gut twisting as he tried to interact with hardened mobsters without drawing attention to himself.

But now Ivan wanted Cooper there in person.

It made Cooper’s throat go all dry and tight, the thought of facing him in that cold office building, nothing between them except Ivan’s admittedly massive desk.

Then again, leaving the house at all these days made Cooper feel all kinds of ways.

His dad would be so disappointed. Cooper could hear him now. I don’t want to see you become a recluse, umnitsa .

Cooper frowned at the thought as he rifled through his dresser for clean clothes, his towel wrapped haphazardly around his hips. Then you shouldn’t have left me all alone, old man.

He settled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt he was mostly sure he’d washed recently, throwing one of his well-worn hoodies over it. He ignored his mirror—he wasn’t going to be able to do anything with his not-sure-if-it’s-wavy-or-straight tawny hair, anyway—and headed back to his workroom.

To get to his computer, he had to wade through the mess on the floor: a sea of empty energy drink cans and takeout containers. It’d be embarrassing if there was ever another human over to see it.

Whatever. At least the takeout containers were a sign he hadn’t been forgetting to eat. He’d clean when he got home from his meeting.

Cooper opened the encrypted chat he’d had minimized on his laptop. There was a message from RedRabbit waiting for him.

R: You’re close, aren’t you? I can tell.

Cooper nibbled on his thumbnail as he stared at the message, then realized what he was doing and shoved his hoodie string in his mouth to chew on instead.

Rabbit was the one who’d set up the challenge Cooper was working on: infiltrating the servers of what was supposedly a dummy corporation in Norway. It was most definitely something the guy—at least, Cooper was mostly sure at this point that Rabbit was a guy—had created to size up the competition in the hacker world.

It wasn’t the sort of thing Cooper would have normally entertained, but he and Rabbit had gotten to chatting in various other forums a while ago. The guy was less awkward than most of the people Cooper connected with online, and he never tried to push or trick Cooper into giving away his secrets like some did. So Cooper hadn’t minded giving Rabbit’s little game a go. It was a way to pass the time, if nothing else.

But he left the message waiting for now. There wasn’t any sense in bragging before the thing was done. Plus, if he waited until tonight to respond, when he wasn’t about to run out the door, they could get a chat going, maybe connect in real time.

Just admit you’re lonely as fuck.

Please. Like that was any sort of secret. Lonely and now getting to the point of being seriously touch-starved. How long had it been since he’d even had a hookup?

Maybe Cooper would venture into the apps tonight, see if he could find someone to fuck him out of his head. But that would mean either inviting someone to his apartment—Cooper wrinkled his nose at the mess surrounding him—or going to some unknown location instead.

Cooper didn’t have that in him after shutting himself off to the outside world for the past week. He’d need to do baby steps to get used to strange people and strange places again. He’d go to Ivan’s office and get the meeting over with. Ivan always sent a driver, so Cooper wouldn’t have to deal with the subway crowds or a chatty taxi driver. When he got home, he’d clean his apartment so it looked like an actual human lived there and not a garbage raccoon in a human suit. And tomorrow he’d make himself go out for a bagel.

Then he’d work his way up to getting fucked by a stranger.

In the meantime, there was always porn. Because, sure, porn was definitely a replacement for real human touch.

Cooper shook his head, annoyed at himself. He didn’t need human touch to get off—that was what toys were for.

But first, he had to actually leave his apartment and see what Ivan wanted.

The driver Ivan sent didn’t speak, beyond the initial mumbled greeting, for which Cooper was incredibly grateful. Same with the security guard that manned the entrance to Ivan’s office building, who knew the sight of Cooper well enough to give him one of those manly nods as he passed by, but not well enough to attempt a conversation.

That was two hurdles passed. See? This was fine. Cooper was fine . So Ivan wanted to talk to him. So what? He wasn’t going to kill Cooper or anything.

At least, probably not.

Cooper just hoped Sergei wasn’t there today. Ivan’s right-hand man was a mean, scary asshole in the same way Ivan’s father, Dimitri, had been. Sergei seemed to think Cooper mainly played video games on the family’s dime, and he loved to let him know how much that idea pissed him off.

Which was only half-true. Cooper did play a lot of video games, but he did work stuff too, when Ivan remembered to give him any to do. And part of the reason Cooper didn’t want to catch sight of Sergei today was the work Ivan had asked him to do after Sascha’s stabbing by a rival family two months ago: Cooper had been tasked to look into Sergei’s finances. Finances that were definitely not on the up-and-up.

Sergei was taking money from someone who wasn’t Ivan. He hid it well but not nearly well enough, given Cooper’s skills. Ivan had shattered a full bottle of vodka by throwing it at the wall when Cooper had told him.

Cooper was hoping for less broken glass this visit.

He pressed the elevator button, fiddling with his hoodie strings and repeatedly reminding himself not to put them in his mouth when in public.

“Going up?”

Cooper didn’t jump exactly, but it was a near thing. He shot a startled glance to the right, clocking the bearer of the smooth, flirty voice. No big deal. Just an inhumanly beautiful man with long, wavy red hair in a high ponytail now standing next to him. One who apparently moved like a ninja, since Cooper hadn’t heard him coming.

He saw the guy do a double take as he caught sight of Cooper’s eyes. Cooper was used to people staring. He’d been born with heterochromia, with one brown eye and one green. He didn’t like the extra attention it brought him—hated it with a fucking passion, really. But it was hard to mind as much because this guy had freaky eyes too. They were purple.

“Well, aren’t you lovely?” the guy crooned, like Cooper wasn’t an out-of-shape nerd in desperate need of a haircut, wearing clothes that were only probably clean.

“Uh…” Cooper turned his gaze to his feet immediately. He was barely equipped for human interaction of any kind today, let alone beautiful men flirting with him. Especially because this seemed to be the kind of flirting attractive people like that did by habit. There wasn’t any real intent behind it, and Cooper never knew how to respond.

What would it be like to be effortlessly charming like that? Cooper wouldn’t have to be trawling through apps for dick; he knew that much.

They got into the elevator together, and Cooper did his best to breathe normally, trapped in the small space with a stranger. How did someone breathe normally? Like, two seconds in, two seconds out? He’d forgotten somehow, but he hoped he was doing it right.

What was a guy like this doing at Ivan’s office, anyway? He was dressed in a flouncy blouse and extremely tight leather pants and had just been openly flirtatious with another man. Basically the opposite sort of presence Ivan usually allowed at his side. Cooper could see the guy being Sascha’s friend—Cooper’s other cousin had always ventured toward the flamboyant, those few instances he’d been able to get away with it—but not Ivan’s.

There wasn’t time to dwell on it, though, not when Cooper was about to face Ivan himself. He headed straight out of the elevator, toward Ivan’s office, the only occupied room on the floor, glancing behind his shoulder every now and then to confirm the stranger really was going to the same destination.

At the last minute, the guy slid in front of him to enter the office first, announcing to Ivan, “You have a visitor.”

Cooper stepped in after him, just in time to catch Ivan glaring at the guy from behind his desk. But as he caught sight of Cooper, his expression smoothed in an instant, back to his usual emotionless mask.

“Cooper.”

Ivan looked the same as ever, in the brief glance Cooper caught before he looked to his own feet again. Handsome in a scary, icy way, all white-blond hair and pale-blue eyes. He looked just like his father, whereas Cooper was connected to him by his mother’s side. She and Cooper’s father had been siblings.

Now they were both dead and gone, and somehow Cooper was still here, working for mobsters.

“You needed me?”

“We have two people who need identification,” Ivan told him, tapping at his desk.

“Fake IDs?” Cooper asked, a little disappointed. That was quick, boring work and could have easily been a phone call.

“Not enough. We need thorough documentation of their existence. Enough for travel, residency…whatever they might require. And it needs to come from nothing.”

Now that was more interesting. A lot of paperwork was required to create a whole legal human out of nothing. Cooper looked up from his feet. “Social security cards, even?”

Ivan nodded at him. “Can you do it?”

“Uh…sure.” Of course he could. Cooper nibbled at his lip, already going through the logistics in his head. “I need approximate ages,” he told Ivan. “Photos.”

“I can get you those.” Ivan pushed a fat stack of old-fashioned ledgers on his desk toward Cooper. “And I need these digitized.”

There was the boring busywork he’d feared. But Cooper didn’t mind so much now—creating the false identities would be kind of fun, at least. And he needed to earn his spacious apartment and ample salary somehow. He stepped forward to the side of the desk and gathered the ledgers.

He was startled to find the pretty stranger at his side in the next instant, knocking his hip against an open desk drawer Cooper had missed, revealing another book. “You missed one.”

“Oh. Um, thank you.” Cooper grabbed for the thing blindly, trying not to flinch at the stranger’s close proximity. He held all the ledgers close to his chest as Ivan cleared his throat, for some reason radiating disapproval.

“This is Nix, my new assistant. He’s one of the ones needing ID.”

Surprise had Cooper glancing up and meeting Nix’s purple eyes. Assistant? Surely not. But Cooper wasn’t going to go around contradicting Ivan. “You, um, have a preference for your birthday?” he asked Nix instead.

Nix winked at him. Cooper had never met anyone who winked at people in real life. “Whatever you think best, Cooper, darling.”

“Don’t flirt with Coop,” Ivan reprimanded. But it was weird, because even though his voice was harsh, he sounded almost…fond? “He can’t handle your teasing.”

Nix’s voice lowered into a croon. “Not like you, Vanya.”

Okay, so that was real flirting, not the flirting-on-automatic Nix had been doing with Cooper. Cooper’s eyes widened as he glanced between the two of them. What the fuck was going on? Was Ivan involved with this guy? With a man?

It was the most unlikely thing Cooper had ever heard, considering Ivan’s history, but then Ivan actually tugged Nix into his side, pulling him onto the arm of his chair. It was an act of intimacy if Cooper had ever seen one.

Everyone’s getting laid but you, loser.

Thank you, brain, that’s very helpful.

Ivan cocked his head pointedly toward the door. “That’ll be all, Coop.”

Nix waved at him. “Bye, Coop. So lovely to make your acquaintance.”

If Cooper kept staring at them like this, Ivan was going to give him something to stare at, he was sure. Like a gun in his face. So Cooper pulled his hoodie up and walked out of the room quickly, the ledgers tucked against him, feeling more than a little dazed.

He’d thought he was going to be acclimating himself back into the real world slowly after a week locked in his apartment, but instead he felt like he’d just entered topsy-turvy land.

If Ivan—one of the most emotionally repressed representatives of toxic masculinity Cooper knew—was experimenting with bisexuality with what might just be a literal supermodel…

Well, what other strange things might the world have in store for Cooper today?