Page 7 of Love At the Gates of Hell (The Seven Sinners Trilogy #1)

“You got it,” Cleo replied, her hand turning on the doorknob. She turned back to look at Benny one more time. “Hey,” she said, voice soft. “It’s fun to give them a hard time, but I trust those two with my life. You’re safe here. You’re safe with them.”

Those words hung in the air long after Cleo left Benny alone in the bathroom.

She hoped they were true.

She ran the side of her fist against the mirror, wiping at the condensation.

She took a good, long look at herself and sighed.

She looked about as shitty as she felt. There was a dark bruise at the line of her clavicle from some impact she wished she could remember, and her skin was paler than usual, a sallow tinge beneath the surface.

Her brown eyes seemed so dark in comparison to the rest of her pallid features.

She pressed the pads of her fingers gingerly against her cheek bones as she continued her inspection.

So what she looked like shit.

She was alive.

Which was enough for her at the moment.

Her brown hair hung in damp ringlets around her face, and she worked her fingers through them.

They’d dry however they wanted to without any of her usual products.

But the shower had done her a world of good, as did fresh, clean clothes.

Cleo had managed to grab her favorite pair of vintage jeans and the bra she didn’t hate.

She futzed with the collar of her T-shirt, well- worn concert merch she bought two summers ago after a show at The Fillmore, tucking in the front and then tugging it back out again.

What was she worried about? They had certainly seen her look worse.

She took a deep breath. She held it for a moment, her eyes squeezing shut as she tried to center herself. Then, with a heavy exhale, she made her way back into the main room of the loft.

She was met with an oddly domestic scene.

Cleo was at the stove, humming along to a song coming from a small speaker on the counter as she flipped a grilled cheese, her shoulders shimmying to the beat.

Luke was reading a book in the living room, his feet propped up on the arm of the sofa as he flipped to another page.

Gideon sat at the kitchen island, a towel spread out before him, his gun laying in neatly organized parts.

He paused only to take a long sip from his coffee mug.

It was calmer than she expected. It even reminded her a little bit of being back at her childhood home. Gun cleaning and all.

Benny hadn’t really taken a good look at it earlier, too disoriented by waking up in another place that was not her home, but the loft was really something.

Exposed brick with tall ceilings and steel rafters, wide-plank hardwood floors, and windows that were nearly two stories high.

They didn’t seem very vampire-friendly. But Luke looked as comfortable as anything while flipping through a musty-looking old book in full view of the sunlight.

She wondered if the windows were tinted for his benefit.

The furniture was worn leather sofas and dark woods, and there was a punching bag tucked in the far corner, boxing gloves hanging from a hook in the brick wall.

The true crime puzzle board Cleo mentioned was right beside it.

She had half a mind to stalk over towards it, see all of the pieces of her they’d managed to comb together while looking for her.

“Wheels up in ten,” Gideon said when she crossed into the kitchen.

He was perched on the edge of a stool, his suit jacket hanging on the back, his face steady in concentration as he carefully worked a brush tip through the barrel of his gun.

But he let his gaze drift up toward her for a moment, a scowl forming on his face as he took her in.

Like everything about this was a chore for him. “We’ve got a decent ride ahead of us.”

“Did you talk to my father directly?”

“As a matter of fact, we did,” Luke replied, not bothering to look up from whatever page had him so enamored.

She tilted her head to read the spine, her brow raising as she saw A History of Witchcraft emblazoned in a faded embossed font.

He really did like to do his homework. “We agreed on a specific location. Just us. Just him.”

Benny sighed in relief.

“I wonder if he knows…” she said.

“Which one of his men sold you out?” Gideon asked, finishing her thought.

Hearing it again out loud made her feel sick.

“If he doesn’t, he’ll find out soon enough,” he continued with a quick rise of his shoulders. “Your disappearance is going to cause a real problem with whoever kidnapped you. And that’s going to come down hard on the guy who made it possible.”

“He’ll probably run,” Luke mused from his spot on the sofa.

“And if your dad is as scary as people say he is, I can’t imagine that guy is gonna live for very long,” Cleo said.

Benny leaned against the kitchen counter as she squeezed at the bridge of her nose.

A flurry of questions were battling in her brain at the moment.

Who would sell her out and risk the wrath of her father?

She knew the reality of who Angelo Torretta was.

She knew what he had to do to ensure he remained in his position in the Caruso family.

Maybe she had grown too desensitized to it all, but these men had raised her.

She considered them uncles and brothers and friends.

But there was a price for everyone.

“You said my phone was gone,” she said, turning toward Cleo. “Did anything else look out of place? Or like it was missing?”

The redhead twirled the spatula between her fingers as she considered the question.

“Hard to say,” she said as she turned off the burner.

“Your computer was still there. Nothin' looked like it was missin' from the bookshelves. Your bedroom took the brunt of it but there’s a trail from the bedroom to the front door. Your dad mentioned the door was unlocked when he and his men got there. So whoever took you either picked the lock or had a key. You have a cute place, by the way. I love that wallpaper you have in the hallway.”

Benny couldn’t help her smile at the compliment. She had spent six hours trying to get that wallpaper level.

“The coffee table in the living room is an old trunk,” she said then, raking her fingers through damp hair. “There’s an old lock, like a really old brass thing. You didn’t happen to notice if that was broken, did you?”

Cleo shook her head. “Still intact,” she said. “You think they took somethin' else?”

Until she knew for sure what was going on, Benny couldn’t be sure what was at risk.

But she found herself worrying more about the sentimental things in her home, the thesis work on her laptop, the parts of her she’d be devastated to lose.

Her mother’s jewelry she had tucked away in her closet, the altar she had painstakingly curated over the course of her adult life in the living room, the generations old grimoire tucked away in the old steamer trunk.

“Maybe.” She sighed. “I don’t know.”

Cleo slid the grilled cheese onto a large plate and used the spatula to cut diagonally down the center.

Benny’s stomach ached at the sight of it, and she realized she couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten.

She couldn’t remember her last meal before the shipping container and if she’d been knocked out the last couple of days, it had been at least three days since she’d eaten anything substantial.

But the redhead seemed to understand exactly that as she slid the plate toward her with a knowing look.

“Talk to me,” she said. “What’s got you worried?”

“I just picked a real shit time to get abducted,” she replied.

“I’ve got an inbox filled with papers I need to grade for this summer session I’m teaching and I’m like a week out from fall semester and every single day counts when it comes to dissertation research—and yeah, there’s a three-hundred-year-old grimoire in that trunk in my living room and it’s the only tangible thing I have that connects me to the other Stregas in my family and if someone were to get their hands on it—”

She had to stop. She was beginning to spiral.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t worry too much about those papers, princess,” Gideon said with a wave of his hand. “I called Penn the other day.”

Benny coughed over her first bite.

“You what ?”

“You had an accident,” he replied with a little shrug of his shoulders as he carefully ran a cloth over the slide of his gun, barely taking his eyes off his project.

But he looked pleased with himself, a ghost of a smile playing at his lips.

“Even faxed over a doctor’s note. You might have to fake a limp once you’re back to really sell it, but your professor said she’d handle it. ”

“Wow, you’re really a full service kind of rescue service,” she said, recovering with another bite of her grilled cheese. “I guess my father’s getting his money’s worth.”

“We’ll see about that,” was all Gideon said in response.

“Benedetta Russo is a fifth-year PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania,” Luke read from his spot on the couch, his nose now buried in his phone.

“Her research interests focus on mythology and folklore, particularly passed on through oral storytelling, and how the two have influenced an understanding of gender and femininity as it pertains to magic and ritual. She’s currently teaching Summer Session II, English 159, Gender and Society. ”

Benny cupped her chin in her hand as she listened to Luke rattle off the distilled version of the last four years of her life, wondering briefly if she shouldn’t work a bit more on the phrasing for her Penn candidate page.

But her eyes drifted over toward Gideon, watching as he very carefully smoothed his hands over the barrel of his gun, everything neatly put back into place, looking content with his work.

There was something about how meticulous he was about it, how methodical, how expertly his hands worked.

“You actually talked to Dr. Malhotra?” she asked, tearing her eyes away from his hands.

He looked up as he wiped off his hands on a cloth, a slow grin spreading across his face.

His eyes lit up, and Benny found herself a little breathless.

Even at her own expense, she found she liked that smile.

“She seemed really surprised when I told her I was your boyfriend. You never talk about your personal life, apparently. I wonder why.”

She groaned before taking a huge bite from her grilled cheese.

Big enough to choke on it, hopefully.

“I can do another sweep of your place,” Cleo said. “Grab your laptop and grab your grimoire thing?”

“Really?” she asked, looking up. “No, you shouldn’t have to do that, I’m sure it’s fine—”

“It’s no sweat, Ben,” Cleo replied with a bright smile.

“Be careful when you decide to go, keep us in the loop alright?” Gideon said as he rose from his spot. Then, to Benny. “Come on. It’s time to go.”

Cleo glanced down at Benny’s half-eaten sandwich.

“Take that to go. Looks like you’re gonna need that energy of yours.”