Page 13

Chapter 13

Atlas/Fluffy

M y Aiden was exhausted. I knew that Liam had news for him—I could tell by his hyper focus when he’d set up the computer, but I also knew now wasn’t the time. I wasn’t sure why Quinton was all fiery, either, but I was glad he realized Aiden was done for the day.

We ate without any more drama, then Aiden went in for a shower. Liam shot me a meaningful glance, and I nodded my head. I’d listen to whatever info he had.

Quinton looked back and forth at us, sighed dramatically, and said, “I’m bringing Aiden in to cuddle with me. You guys can go do your hacking and murdering while we’re in bed.”

Liam kissed him, which turned into a bit of a make-out session.

I wondered if Aiden would want to kiss me at some point? I certainly wouldn’t rush him, but I thought I would enjoy it. I didn’t have much experience with sex. I’d had an encounter or two in bars and clubs, but nothing stood out. Survival had taken up my younger years, and sex had just never seemed important. I took care of myself when my needs arose, and I was fine with continuing that.

I had meant what I’d told Aiden, though. The thought of giving him pleasure was… exciting to me. I felt myself harden a bit at the thought. I wanted to sniff him and lick him and kiss him all over. If he didn’t want to touch me, that was fine. I knew how to take care of my own pleasure. I would like to be responsible for his pleasure, though. It didn’t seem like his captor had touched his body much, so I wondered if being pleasured with no expectations would be ok with him.

I also wondered if Aiden would ever want to have anal sex. He had seemed to express some interest in the idea of it. Maybe I needed to find out more about giving pleasure to others. Surely humans had how-to manuals for things like that. I’d have to ask Liam.

The bathroom door opened, and Aiden came out. Quinton walked over and dragged him off to his bedroom, insisting he needed cuddles after a long day. Aiden shot me a look, and I nodded my head at him. We’d join him later. He seemed to understand, because he let Quinton lead him the rest of the way, and they pulled the door partly closed, but not all the way.

My Aiden didn’t like closed doors. It was why the bedroom in the cabin didn’t have a door at all. I never wanted him to feel trapped anywhere.

Liam walked over and sat on the couch next to me, his computer in his lap.

“I think they were upset over something,” Liam commented.

I gave him a look—it didn’t take a genius to know they were upset.

Liam sighed. “I knew the whole you being a human thing was still bothering my little hellcat, but he seemed upset about the mate thing. I don’t understand why that would upset him. Aiden is pack now. He should be pleased.”

I shrugged. I didn’t get it. Honestly, I had no idea why no one else had realized we were mates. It was obvious, or at least it should have been to hellhounds. Humans were sometimes weirdly clueless about things.

That was ok, though. They were pack, and we would take care of them.

“So, your man has a bit of a problem…” Liam started, turning the computer toward me.

What followed was a mind-bending conversation about dark spiderwebs and onions inside networks (which didn’t seem physically possible to me), and I let Liam drone on about his weird computer shit, nodding when it seemed appropriate. He eventually got to the point—Aiden’s brother had upped the stakes and hired a hitman to kidnap Aiden. The hitman was, from everything Liam could tell, a hellbound soul.

“I’m not sure why it took all that explaining. You could’ve just said we get to go kill someone,” I replied.

Liam huffed, leaned down, and smacked his head against the top of his computer, which looked a little awkward.

Such a drama queen.

“It’s important because obviously something has changed. The contract isn’t for Aiden’s death, but hiring a hitman to retrieve him is a big step up from private investigators. The brother clearly doesn’t care about killing people. He wants Aiden alive for some reason—that’s very clear in the negotiations—but anyone else is disposable,” Liam commented.

Details, details. “We can torture the information we need out of the hitman,” I said. “You do know where we can find him, don’t you?” I asked.

Hopefully all Liam’s computer shit had proven somewhat useful.

Liam sighed. “Of course I do. That’s also part of the problem. He’s closer than I would like, and we need to know how he traced Aiden this far. I’ve covered Aiden’s digital tracks very well, but we can’t go kill anyone who helped him initially.”

I tilted my head at him. Was he sure we couldn’t just kill them?

“I checked—they’re not bad people. We can’t kill them, Atlas,” he repeated, because I’m sure he could tell exactly what I was thinking.

I sighed that time. Liam was never any fun. Not that I would really kill innocent people, but scaring them a bit for information wouldn’t cause any harm. Then again, torturing the actual hitman would be far more fun.

“Someone needs to stay here,” I commented. I wasn’t leaving Aiden and Quinton alone.

Liam nodded, typing a message in his phone. It buzzed a second later, and he nodded again. We waited for a moment, and I heard footsteps and a caw outside the door. Corbin was here, then. I hoped his bird wouldn’t wake the guys.

Liam and I went out, and he and Liam made some small talk, but Corbin knew the drill. He would protect our mates, and I had no patience for talking.

Liam drove, and he was right—our hitman was a little close for comfort. He was holed up in a house in the woods less than two hours away from Paradise Falls. He shouldn’t have been that close.

It was actually a pretty cabin, and I admired the woodwork as we strode up the steps. I could smell only one soul inside, so I kicked the door down. Liam walked in first, the idiot, and he got shot for his troubles. I heard him grunt, and then I was tackling the guy with the gun. He was fast, but I was faster, and I had no desire to deal with a gunshot wound. They were annoying.

“Fuck!” Liam shouted as I wrenched the gun from the guy’s hands.

The guy was strong, built like someone who took their job seriously, but he was no match for a hellhound. I had his wrists held in my hands and forced him to his knees in front of me, facing Liam.

“Do you have any idea how much it fucking hurts to get shot?” he yelled at the guy, who was still trying to struggle.

Stupid human. He still thought he had hope. I almost laughed.

Liam stuck his fingers through the hole in his shirt, which had some blood spatter around it, dug around a bit, grunted, and pulled out a bullet.

How theatrical. I almost rolled my eyes.

“What the fu—” the guy started, but Liam cut him off with a knee to the face.

I let the guy’s dead weight drop to the ground.

“That fucking hurt!” Liam said again, staring at me.

I shrugged. “You went first. Didn’t you smell the gun?”

“ Didn’t you smell the gun?” Liam imitated, rubbing at his chest. So dramatic.

I shrugged again. Not my fault Liam’s instincts lay more in technology than in the real world. We all had our uses.

He just sighed and mumbled, going to grab his murder bag from the front porch where he’d dropped it.

I looked around. It really was a pretty cabin, and I kind of doubted that the hellbound hitman was the owner—it had decorations and shit. Men like that didn’t decorate.

Liam came back in and taped up the guy’s arms and legs, then he walked over to grab a kitchen chair. I made a sound of protest, and he looked at me.

“It’s a nice cabin,” I said.

Liam sighed again, rolled his eyes, and motioned to the guy. Fine, I’d carry him since I didn’t want to burn the cabin down or get blood all over. Blood really soaked into wood, and it made cleanup a bitch.

I threw him over my shoulder and trudged out to the woods, Liam behind me. There was plenty of cleared space in the back, and I dumped him on the ground, sniffing the air.

“No one around to hear him scream,” I confirmed.

Liam nodded, trusting my judgement.

Liam pulled out a knife, and I grunted. Liam always hated getting messy, and I was always happy to exercise my muscles. He looked at me, raised his eyebrows, and I cracked my knuckles. He made a go-for-it gesture, and I stepped forward. Liam could ask the questions, and I’d do the torture.

This was going to be fun.

* * *

“Fuck, you make such a mess,” Liam complained.

I looked down at myself. Eh, so I was a little covered in blood. I shrugged. I could burn it off. The clothes were a lost cause, but I could ride home in my other form.

The man, or what was left of him, whined pathetically behind us.

“Aww, look—he’s trying to crawl away. Isn’t that cute. Like he could get away from us,” Liam said.

I turned around, and sure enough, he was trying to drag himself forward by his elbows. His hands may not have been entirely intact. Nor his legs, for that matter.

He had killed children. I didn’t like it when children were involved. I got angry.

“Are you done playing?” Liam asked. “It’s been hours, and I would like to get back to have a little cuddle with our men.”

Puppy pile! Fluffy cried.

I cracked my knuckles and twisted my head, cracking my neck. The man whimpered louder, trying to drag himself more quickly.

You done with this one? I asked my hellhound. We had been a bit feral when we’d learned what he’d done.

Puppy pile , Fluffy stated again.

I took that as an affirmative, and nodded to Liam. He could take care of disposal. I’d done all the torture, after all. Wasn’t that a thing—like whoever did all the work didn’t have to do the clean-up? I thought it might apply to cooking, but surely it carried over to torture as well.

Liam nodded back, and then gave me another once over. “You can’t get in the car like that,” he said.

Duh. I changed into my hellhound, getting rid of the clothes and blood and everything else. Liam grunted, then he dealt with the hitman. I almost felt bad I hadn’t given him a turn. He’d done all the talking, though, and he’d even gotten the man to piss himself. He had really upped his psychological torture game.

I think it was probably Quinton’s influence. His mate was bloodthirsty for a human.

We got back in the car and had a quiet drive back to Paradise Falls. We hadn’t found out much from the hitman. He’d been in the vicinity because Caleb Astor had told him the general area to look around. The brother had also tracked down the first two aliases that Aiden had used.

Liam had said those were the easiest to track, and then Aiden had gotten better at things, so he wasn’t particularly concerned about that. The brother still had quite a few more aliases to go through, and Liam was confident that the last few were untraceable. I wasn’t sure how, unless he’d killed at least one of the people who had forged the documents. If one of the later forgers was hellbound, that was probable.

The brother knowing the area where Aiden would be was a bit more troubling, though. I wondered if witches could figure that out? Corbin would have protected us all somehow, and maybe that’s why the brother couldn’t pin Aiden down completely. I’d have to ask Corbin some witchy questions.

Our hitman had met the brother, and he had described him as a “creepy fucker.” He had seemed a little afraid of Caleb Astor, which was interesting. It also confirmed that he wasn’t looking for Aiden out of the goodness of his heart. Someone who could scare a hardened hitman was not someone who did things for altruistic purposes.

We made it back in excellent time, and I was guessing Liam hadn’t paid much attention to human speed limits. Then again, it wasn’t like he wouldn’t hear another car coming.

We made our way inside, and Corbin was sitting at the table feeding his crow some nuts. Neither of them bothered to look up at us. I changed back into my human form, and Liam huffed before he went and grabbed me a pair of sweatpants, muttering about me being an uncultured mutt.

I grabbed them from him and put the sweatpants on before sitting down. For some reason Liam got all weird about bare asses on the furniture. He sat at another chair at the table, and Corbin finally looked up, raising his eyebrows.

“Could a witch track Aiden’s location?” I asked.

His crow ruffled their feathers out, and Corbin looked pensive.

“Our hitman knew the general vicinity from Caleb Astor, but there’s no reason he should have been able to track that,” Liam stated. “I did a wipe of all facial recognition software that pinged for Aiden’s features.”

Corbin shrugged. “I have protections in place, but a strong witch or an afterlifer could more than likely find a general area. If nothing else, they could trace to where the trail disappeared and see the blackout area. Aiden did a lot of traveling, and I couldn’t destroy all traces of his energy anywhere he’s ever been.”

Liam sighed. “Great. Not just mortals, then.”

Corbin looked thoughtful. “There are witches in existence who could do it, and not everyone with extra gifts chooses to use them in the proper way. It would darken their soul to misuse those gifts, but some don’t care about such things.”

“What about afterlifers?” Liam asked.

“Afterlifers tend to stick to their job descriptions, but a contracted demon or guardian angel could do such things. I’m not sure why they would—they generally exert no harm on those that are not hellbound. It’s a whole free will thing. Wilder would know more about that, though,” Corbin said.

I perked up. Wilder was coming? I couldn’t wait for him to meet my mate. That would be fun. Plus, he was a first generation hellhound, so he’d know more about the workings of the afterlifers.

Corbin’s crow cawed and hopped onto his shoulder. He got up and took his leave, giving us both head nods. With that, I stood and headed into the bedroom. Liam followed. Our men were sleeping in the middle of the bed, and they barely even stirred when Liam climbed in next to Quinton and I climbed in next to Aiden. We’d probably only get an hour or so of sleep, but any cuddle time was good cuddle time.