Page 32 of Asher

“Any luck?” Zac asks brightly.

“No,” Gideon replies, and my knees wobble as I gasp.

“Whoa, Asher!” Micah and Zac lunge for me. “Take a breath. Breathe!”

I suck in air. “I’m breathing.”

“I was joking,” Zac promises. “I swear. I don’t know what Gideon’s talking about, but I was joking.”

“You’ve always been warped,” Gideon says. “What was the joke?”

Micah pushes me into a chair. “That Garrett’s run away and the lucifer sent you to find him.”

Gideon’s scowl gets even blacker. If I wasn’t distracted by thoughts of Garrett leaving, even I might be intimidated by it. Though he used to frown like that when he was a toddler, too, and it was so adorable then that the memory of it makes it less scary now. We used to call him our murder baby, because he always looked like he was plotting homicide.

“Garrett’s in the room across the hall,” he snaps. “Whose stupid idea was it that you had to be apart before the ceremony, anyway? Neither of you are that fussy. Why couldn’t you put on your damn suits and wait in the same room?”

I think there might be something more going on here, but I need to be absolutely certain… “Garrett’s across the hall?”

“Yes. And Sam is also there, because that idiot hellhound you’re going to be related to insisted their ‘bond as bestest besties’ meant Sam was part ofhisfamily first.” He folds his arms across his massive chest. “Have you ever heard anything so stupid in your life?”

I exchange a glance with Micah. “Are you… Are you pissed off because your boyfriend is in another room for”—I glance at my watch—“the next twenty minutes?”

His glower is all the answer I need.

“Here,” Zac says, opening my overnight bag and dumping the contents on the bed. “This stuff’s a mess. Organize it for us?”

Gideon’s no fool; he knows he’s being managed. But he also can’t resist the lure of a messy pile of crap, especially when he’s in a bad mood. It takes less than ten seconds for him to cave and stomp over to the bed.

While he busies himself sorting my belongings into categories, I mull over what he told us. “By ‘that idiot hellhound,’ did you mean Garrett’s cousin Alistair?” I really hope so. There are a lot of hellhounds here right now, and I’ll be mad if he’s insulted some other member of my future family. Since he already knows Alistair, I’m assuming they insult each other all the time.

“Who else?” he grumbles. “We got here, and next thing I know, Alistair’s saying Sam can’t come with me to wait with you because he has to go with him to wait with Garrett. Nothing would convince him otherwise, and believe me, we all tried. I should have brought him with us to visit over the summer and let you all deal with him.”

Let us… deal with him? “Gideon, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but I’m an investment banker, Micah is an architect and engineer, and Zac’s a geologist and botanist. You’re the scary one.”

Gideon stops sorting and looks up at me. “He had a T-shirt with a picture of both our faces on it.”

“I might have turned violent after seeing that,” Zac muses. “At the very least, I would have been annoyed enough to teleport him into the mountains and let him find his own way back.”

“Was there a caption?” Micah asks.

“Something about us being bros on world tour,” Gideon mutters, beginning to fold my shirts with military precision.

Micah pulls a face. “Thanks for not bringing him. I think that would have ruined the visit.”

Low-grade panic is starting to build in my gut. This guy is going to be my cousin by marriage in about an hour. What if he wants us to wear matching T-shirts?

“Is there a legal loophole if you kill a family member who’s that annoying?” I ask.

“No.” The answer comes from all three of them.

“Believe me, that’s how Alistair is still alive,” Gideon adds. “Sometimes he even annoys other hellhounds. A couple of years back, we had a hellhound mutiny in the office because he said something stupid, and Sam had to threaten to stab him again to make him apologize and fix it.”

I smile weakly. Maybe marrying into a hellhound family wasn’t the smartest decision I ever made. But… Garrett. He’s so perfect. Sure, I might have been able to find someone else willing to enter into a marriage of convenience with me, but it’s unlikely we would be as great together as Garrett and I are.

“Wait,” Zac interrupts my thoughts. “Did you say ‘again’?”

“What?” I ask, but he’s staring at Gideon.

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