GABRIEL

Had I just heard her correctly? Now that all her attempts to boss me around weren’t working, the little human wanted to hire me to find her sister? I snorted and then burst into full-on, belly-heaving laughter. “Oh my god.” My arms wrapped around my middle; I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt. “You’re joking right? Tell me you’re joking.”

Mikah glared at me from his place glued against the door. “Shut up, Gabriel. You made me lose my count.” He listened in again. “You’re lucky the guards weren’t right by the door. You would have completely blown our cover!”

I just cackled in response.

“Shut. Up,” he hissed again before resuming his count of guards’ footsteps on the other side of the door. “One, two, three…”

Tabitha glowered at me and braced her hands on her hips…like an angry little doll. “What, pray tell, is so funny?”

I wiped my eyes, one last chuckle slipping through my lips. “Would you like a comprehensive list?” Man, I’d needed that laugh. Maybe this pesky girl wasn’t so useless after all. We could keep her around for comedic relief in the interim, at the very least. Mikah probably didn’t even know what comedic relief was.

“I’m serious,” she said. “You don’t want to help me for free? Fine. Then how much do you charge?”

I looked her up and down and shook my head. “You couldn’t possibly afford me.”

She stared me dead in the eye. “Try me.”

“Okay.” I shrugged. “One million dollars to find your sister.” I barely kept my poker face intact. One million dollars was well beyond my starting rate. I mean, I was good, but I wasn’t that good. My former clients had described me as “impulsive, dangerous, prone to causing collateral damage”—that kind of stuff. If I had a Google review, it’d probably be a solid 3.8. But, of course, she didn’t need to know that. And since I had less than zero interest in helping this human do anything, there was no harm in inflating my quote by a few…hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But Tabitha didn’t even blink. “Do you want a check or wire transfer?”

Was she…serious? I almost had to check that Mikah hadn’t accidentally bitten me, it was like all the blood had drained out of my body. “Excuse me?”

“Your fee for helping me find my sister. How do you want it?”

I examined her face for the smallest sign that she was bullshitting me. There wasn’t even a hint of a laugh, of bluster, or even a tell that she was lying. The little human girl was serious—so serious that she was willing to hand over a million dollars to me, a total stranger.

Where the hell is she getting that kind of money, I had to wonder. And what the hell is a super-rich girl and her sister doing in a sex-fueled Fae night club, anyway?

I glanced over at Mikah, who watched our exchange with raised eyebrows. He’d probably lost his count again.

I smirked. “Alright, buddy. Looks like I’ve got myself a proper job now.”

Tabitha held out her hand, a grim smile on her face. “So, we have a deal?”

I took her hand in mine. It was so small and delicate compared to my own callused one, and I took extra care to be gentle as we shook on our terms. Didn’t want to break my new client. “It’s a deal.”

I was going to need something after this Xavier nonsense was over.

Mikah straightened suddenly, his ear no longer glued to the door. “Now’s our chance. If we want to get back in that club, we need to move.”

Tabitha looked down at herself. “Do you think I’ll be recognized?”

I slipped out of my leather jacket and offered it to her. Normally, I wasn’t in the habit of offering my jacket up to damsels in distress, but now that this one came attached to a million dollar paycheck, I was happy to check every box on the chivalry list.

The bottom of my jacket reached the middle of her thighs, and the sleeves trailed down well past her fingertips. She could have wrapped it around herself like a leather bathrobe. “How do I look?” she asked.

The jacket wasn’t the most stylish disguise ever, but considering that I’d danced and sweated in the thing earlier, it had to be covered in my scent—and would hopefully mask her own human scent. Between the jacket and Mikah and I keeping her close, maybe we had a chance—a slim one—of getting her through the club unnoticed. “Like a leathery, human-filled Hot Pocket.”

She frowned and muttered to herself. “Why did I even ask?”

Why, indeed.

We managed to pass through the door—no guards—and close the door behind us. As we snuck out on the floor, Tabitha sandwiched between us like last time. She rolled up the sleeves of my jacket to free her hands. “Are all vampires and werewolves, or whatever you are, this huge?”

“Stroke my ego, will you?” I smirked, puffing out my chest. I’d been wearing a tight white T-shirt beneath my jacket, and now that I’d given the jacket up to Tabitha, the whole world got to marvel at my body. I could wear the shit out of a T-shirt—I knew it, and I wasn’t too shy to admit it. And…judging by the way Mikah was staring at my chest, he seemed to agree.

“Hey, I’m up here.” I grinned as his face colored. “Xavier and the others are due to arrive any minute. You can undress me with your freaky vampire vision later.”

Mikah shook his head. “That’s not how it works—” he stopped abruptly and then sniffed the air. That frustrated expression he wore almost constantly—at least when I was around—evaporated and was replaced by something that looked a whole lot like worry. Shit. What now?

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “Why do you keep doing that?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, his eyes scanning the room, seemingly wanting to look anywhere but at my face.

I caught his arm. “I’m serious. What’s wrong?”

He finally met my eyes. “I’ve just…got a feeling I can’t shake.”

Well, if that wasn’t the most cryptic—and unhelpful—thing I’d ever heard. “About what? Our mission?”

“I don’t know.”

I scoffed. “Well, figure it out. I’ve got a million dollars at stake now, and if there’s something going on that’s going to keep me from getting paid, I think I deserve to know!”

He shrank back, his eyes skipping away from mine. “Fine. We should get moving, anyway. We need to get off this floor. We’ve left a bad impression down here, and it’d be best if we find another place to wait.”

A bad impression? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Were we trying to make a good impression with a bunch of human-trafficking demons? Aside from picking up our little human hitchhiker—who was definitely growing on me now that I saw dollar signs every time I looked her way—things on this floor hadn’t gone so badly.

I glanced out toward the dance floor, then back to the doorway through which we’d come after I’d kissed him to keep our cover intact. “I mean, not everything on this floor was bad,” I said lightly.

Mikah froze, his expression guarded, but I knew he was remembering what we’d done, too. Kissing him, dancing with him—those had easily been the highlights of this shitshow of a mission so far. Right up there with eviscerating that demon.

Of course, that was a pretty low bar—so low you could trip on it. But that still didn’t mean it was all bad.

Tabitha glanced from my face to Mikah’s. “So… what’s up with the two of you, anyway? What’s your deal?”

Mikah was doing a very thorough impression of a statue, so I shook my head. “Nothing. Just forget it. Let’s just go downstairs.”

We left the Lust floor and descended down a flight of stairs to a new level of The Chop Shop. This one had…a very different vibe. The dance floor had been replaced with the most high-end buffet I’d ever seen. There were mountains of food, ranging from potato chips and hot dogs to fancy shit I’d only ever seen on TV shows. Champagne fountains flanked each buffet, and gorgeous Fae waitresses passed by with trays full of unknown substances. I did a double take in shock as a waitress sauntered past me with what looked like more wine on one tray then I’d ever seen in my entire life.

A grin pulled at my lips and I turned back to Mikah and Tabitha, feeling very much like a kid at Christmas. “Guess what floor this is?!”

Mikah sighed. “Gluttony.”

Tabitha blinked. “Like the seven deadly sins?”

I nodded. “It’s part of the theme. Try to keep up, Tabby.”

A waitress stopped in front of us, brandishing a tray of desserts. “Can I get you any—”

“No, thank you,” Mikah cut her off. She flitted away, and he thumbed over at a seating area in the corner of the room. “Let’s go sit down for a bit.”

“What?” Tabitha asked, incredulous. “Why would we sit down right now?”

“Blending in is the first rule of jobes like this,” I said. It was actually don’t die, but I wasn’t going to tell her that just yet. “It’s the best way to get intel. People love to spill secrets.”

On our way to sit, we were stopped twice more on our way to the corner—once by a waitress with a tray of golden tequila poured into over-sized shot glasses that made my mouth water. The second time, I’m pretty sure there was actual gold caviar on the waitress’s tray.

Mikah, our perpetual wet blanket, tersely sent them all away. We took our seats, and I glanced around, catching the eyes of more than a couple of guards. “We may need to try a bit harder to fit in, or the guards are going to get suspicious.” I turned to Mikah and the human. “We need to eat, drink and be merry. Whatever. Just do what everyone else is doing.”

A waitress stopped by with a tray of fruit and cheese. I stopped her. “Leave the tray, sweetheart.”

I dove in with a ravenous hunger that went beyond my werewolf instincts. Even Mikah took a bite of some of the fruit on display, and Tabitha took a bite out of an apple before she spat it out into her napkin. “What the hell? That is so disgusting!”

I frowned, my mouth full of cheese. I swallowed. “What’s the mat—”

Then the world started spinning around me in that all too familiar floaty sensation that reminded of that Fae Lottie’s weed farm.

Don’t tell me we’ve been drugged again.