Page 28 of Unleashing Mayhem
“No, um…I haven’t changed my mind about the babysitter. I have a request.”
“Sascha isn’t giving you enough funds?”
Before Matty could reassure Ivan that Sascha was more than generous with funds, he heard Nix’s voice in the background. “Ohh, is that Matty? Put him on video call! I want to see the little chickadee.”
Ivan let out a loud, put-upon sigh, but he also immediately did as his incubus asked, so the sigh seemed more like a performance than anything else.
Matty accepted the video call, smiling shyly when the screen revealed Nix’s beautiful face in front of Ivan’s, sly grin included.
The grin fell in an instant.
“By the Book,” Nix whispered, his pretty purple eyes wide and focused on the demon behind Matty. And then, much louder, “Holy fucking dick and balls!”
“What is it?” Ivan tilted the phone toward himself, presumably so he could see what had Nix so surprised. His lips thinned. “Who is that?”
Nix snatched the phone back, his brow furrowed in an uncharacteristically serious expression. He cocked his head, his long red ponytail swishing behind him. “Matty, little darling, are you doing okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“And can you perchance see the infernal creature lurking behind you?”
Matty turned around with a start, but there was only Nightmare, still seemingly content to be used as Matty’s chair, staring at Matty’s phone without any particular expression.
Matty turned back to Nix. “Of course I can see him. I summoned him.”
His words didn’t seem to reassure Nix at all, and now Ivan was looking decidedly cranky. “As I currently have the Book in my possession,howdid you summon him, Matteo?”
“Dominico Caruso,” Nightmare interjected, and though his voice was quiet, it halted any other discussion immediately. “Where is he?”
Nix murmured something that sounded like, “Best to answer him, darling,” and Ivan’s jaw clenched.
“I don’t know.”
When Nightmare said nothing more to him, Nix started making crazy motions with his eyebrows, and Ivan added,“Cooper has gathered some surveillance data. Nothing he nor I would be comfortable sending over digitally.”
“I can’t come to New York,” Matty told him immediately.
“Can’t or won’t?” Ivan asked icily.
“Won’t.”
Even with Nightmare at his side, Matty wouldn’t do it. And he knew it made him cowardly and stupid, and he didn’t care. New York was Dominico’s territory. Matty would be staying far, far away.
Ivan gave him a single sharp nod. “Give me a moment, then.” He stepped away, and Matty could see him in the background, picking up his office phone.
Nix gave Matty a strange sort of smile. “It’s always lovely to see you, Matty, but let me talk to Nightmare for a minute, hm?”
Without you presentwere the unspoken words.
Matty slipped off Nightmare’s lap and took a seat at the other side of the table. He could only hear vague murmuring on Nix’s side of things—apparently the brash incubus could be quiet when he wanted to be—but Nightmare said nothing.
When Matty’s demon finallydidspeak, his raspy voice was colder and crueler than Matty had ever heard it. “I don’t answer to you, incubus. Interfere at your own risk.”
And that seemed to be that, because Nightmare put the phone down on the table, and Matty had to slide back over onto his lap to reach it.
He found Ivan back on the other end, Nix nowhere to be found. “Cooper and his demon can meet you in Portland,” Ivan told Matty without preamble.
Matty winced. “Or we can just wait for the next time you vis—”
