Page 22 of Love At the Gates of Hell (The Seven Sinners Trilogy #1)

thirteen

Gideon

“Wake up, brother.”

Gideon grunted as the pillow hit him in the face, his hands capturing the offending weapon in his arms. He didn’t need to wake up.

He hadn’t fallen asleep. He hadn’t slept a fucking wink.

His body and his brain had come to a crossroads.

Why grant him the gift of sleep when they could just torment him instead?

He had flown a little too close to the sun, his body buzzing with Benny’s magic running through his veins.

He could still feel the press of her hand against his skin, the way her fingers lingered, every moment of her touch driving him absolutely mad.

So much so he leaned right into it, unable to stop himself. Had she magicked him in some other way?

Put him under another kind of spell?

“What are you doing out here?”

“Fuck off,” Gideon groaned, turning his body into the couch, all but smothering his own face into the pillow.

“You didn’t actually bang on the counter, did you?”

“Why don’t you go out for a walk in the sunshine?”

“I’m out a hundred bucks because of you.”

Gideon sighed as he pushed himself up to a sitting position.

“Pray tell, Lucas,” he said, running his hands through his hair, trying to smooth out what he was sure was a mess of bedhead. He braced himself for pain that never came. He still couldn’t wrap his head around how easily she had healed him. “Why would that be?”

“Cleo called it.”

He grinned from his perch on the edge of the coffee table.

“Called what?” Gideon asked, though he had an idea of the answer already.

“You see, I told her you wouldn’t,” Luke said, as he took his glasses off his face, holding them up to the sunlight before wiping them clean on his handkerchief.

“That you, of all people, wouldn’t risk the payout.

You’ve been dead set against this little rescue mission since I took it, so I couldn’t imagine you’d become so wrapped up in our little witch that’d you’d risk everything we’ve got riding on this just so you can get laid. ”

Gideon really hoped Benny was still sleeping because the walls in the loft were thin and this was not a conversation he wanted her to hear.

This wasn’t a conversation he even wanted to have.

He leaned forward to smack his brother’s glasses out of his hands before he stood up, grateful for the renewed energy he felt in his body.

Luke fumbled to catch them as a laugh burst from his chest.

“You like her,” his brother said, surprised.

“I do not want to have this conversation with you.”

“Too bad,” Luke continued, following him into the kitchen. “Because this isn’t part of the job, Gideon. And it’s messy enough as it is, so you’ve gotta squash this shit before it goes any further.”

It hadn’t gone anywhere.

He knew Luke was right. They both understood the trouble with getting emotionally invested.

Trouble he knew Benedetta Russo was going to bring them from the moment the door to the shipping container opened.

But that didn’t stop him from agreeing to take it all one step further, by agreeing to become her bodyguard for better or for worse.

She sparked something in him that he hadn’t felt in a long time. He liked it. Liked her. Liked those stupid fucking pajamas, and the way she always had something to say, and the ferocity in which she wanted to fight regardless of her fears.

How could he not want to keep her close? Keep her safe?

But he knew that was all that could come of it.

Because she deserved better than him.

His life wasn’t like hers. She was about to add ‘Dr.’ to her name and he had a rap sheet a mile long, a mug shot in three different states.

Just a couple more weeks and then they could return to the admittedly weird normal they’d created for themselves since Chicago.

And he could say goodbye to Benedetta Russo.

He almost laughed in spite of himself.

“Gideon?”

He blinked, and saw Luke staring at him expectantly.

“Nothing happened last night,” he said, reaching for the coffee maker. He desperately needed a strong cup of coffee. “And nothing will.”

“Good,” Luke said, clapping him on his shoulder roughly. “Cleo and Harker are on their way.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gideon muttered. “It’s not even nine o’clock. Don’t you bloodsuckers need to sleep during the day?”

“We’ve got some maniac trying to become a demon from hell, and we have no idea who we’re looking for,” Luke told him pointedly. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“I need a map of the county.”

The brothers turned to find Benny standing in the hallway.

She was fully dressed and recently showered by the looks of her hair, her curls still damp as they grazed her shoulders, leaving wet stains on the white T-shirt she wore, this one with “TROPHY HUSBAND” written across the chest in a strong serif font.

Why did he have to find that so stupidly funny?

Gideon focused on grabbing coffee mugs from the cabinet, not at all thinking about the denim cutoffs she was wearing and the way they hugged her hips.

Or how close he had been to kissing her last night.

“A map?” he asked.

“I think I can get us closer to the ritual,” she said, her nose wrinkling. “I just need to see if I’m right.”

“I’ll call Harker,” Luke said.

He crossed to the other side of the loft with a pointed look in his brother’s direction as he pulled his phone from the inner pocket of his suit jacket.

Gideon watched after him, wondering if he was going to be using that elevated hearing of his to eavesdrop.

Gideon’s privacy had become supremely lacking in the last year, wreaking havoc on his already pathetic dating life.

When the beep of the coffee maker snapped him out of a particularly uncomfortable memory, he realized Benny was looking at him curiously.

“You sleep okay?” he asked.

“Good enough,” she said, offering him a small half smile. “You?”

“Good enough,” he mimicked. “It's a lot easier to sleep when your insides aren’t all torn up.”

She waved her hand.

“It was nothing,” she told him.

Magic came with a price. He had heard Harker say that last night. It wasn’t nothing. But he didn’t know what to say next. How to relay how much it had meant to him for her to even offer, to worry over him the way she did. How it felt to have someone take care of him in that way.

“Benny—” he started at the same time she said, “Gideon—”

He laughed as he gestured for her to go, pouring her a cup of black coffee. She reached for the mug with a sheepish smile, their fingers grazing against each other with the exchange, and Gideon would have loved to shove his brother off the roof of the building at this point.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about last night,” she started.

Gideon swallowed, the hot liquid of his coffee burning his throat.

“About what we have to do, and how there’s even a ‘we’ at all,” she continued, her hand waving. “I don’t want you or Luke or anyone to feel obligated to do this with me—”

“I don’t,” he said, perhaps more firmly than he intended. He relaxed his shoulders. “I’m on board. We all are.”

She looked at him, smiling.

“I imagine no one makes you do anything you don’t want to do,” she said.

Not typically.

He had a feeling Benny could.

“I don’t make it a habit,” he told her.

Her smile widened. “Thank you. That’s all. I know a ‘job is a job’ and everything but I just— I want to make sure you know how thankful I am. For all of it. All of this.”

A job is a job.

He had said that to her the other night. When she looked up at him with those doe brown eyes, drunk as hell, making magic glitter in the air around him. It hadn’t been true then and it wasn’t true now.

“It’s good to diversify the resume,” he said, with a little shrug.

“Sure, I imagine ‘saving city from demon’ is right up there alongside ‘heist’ and ‘breaking and entering’ on the list.”

“Not nearly as high as you’d think,” he told her.

“No, of course not,” she said, leaning her hip against the counter, the hem of her T-shirt riding up slightly on the one side, enough to showcase the tiniest sliver of smooth skin. “What’s a little hero behavior among criminals? I’ve gotta stop acquiring such morally grey individuals as friends.”

Friends.

Gideon choked out a laugh.

He could be friends with Benny. That could be enough.

Telling her how he really felt would be a disaster, anyway.

There was no indication she felt the same way.

No concept in which the two of them would make sense beyond the insane situation they currently found themselves in.

If they survived. A small nagging part of him needed to make sure he didn’t ignore that part. The surviving part.

Luke was right.

He had to focus.

The kitchen island had become their ground zero, the countertop covered in old books, candles, and parchment that smelled an awful lot like the inside of a gym bag.

In the center lay a large map of the county, the edges curled from where it had been rolled up.

Gideon watched as Benny all but draped herself over the counter, her knees carefully positioned on a kitchen stool for leverage as she drew a spot with a thick black marker at a point on the map.

He refused to let his eyes stray from the map, refused to let them rake over the slope of her back as she shifted, the way her hair spilled from its braid, the way her face screwed up in concentration, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.

He knew what it was like now to have her close, to feel the touch of her hands. He scraped his hand against his jaw. He had to get it together.

“Okay, so, Abigail Milligan was last seen at Central High, and they said James Rivera never came home from his job at the bakery here—” She scanned the map, drawing out the word as she found the next point.

“And then there’s Connor Crosby who never got on the bus here—” Another mark.

“Lizzie Wells was taken from Saylor Grove—” One more. “And Nina Cho—”