Page 69 of How to Flirt with a Hellhound
Toby walked over slowly and sat in a chair across from the guy.
“Hi Aiden. I’m Toby,” he said.
The man jerked at that, finally looking over at Toby.
“You’re safe?” the man asked.
“Yes. He didn’t get me. He tried, but he didn’t get me,” Toby said.
“Good,” Aiden said, looking at me. “He talked a lot about you at the end. He said he wouldn’t kick me out, and until you decided to move in with him, I could stay.”
Toby looked like he didn’t know what to say to that.
The man turned and looked off into the distance. “I knew he would probably kill me. I knew that from the moment he told me he was ‘breaking up’ with me. I didn’t want him to get someone else, but at the same time, I hoped… I hoped maybe it would give me a chance to get away.” He looked back at Toby then. “I’m sorry.”
Toby reached forward tentatively with his hand extended in invitation. The man flinched a little, but then he reached out and let Toby hold his hand.
“None of this is your fault,” Toby insisted. “None of it. And it’s ok that you hoped for that. Anything that went through your head is ok. Do you understand?”
Aiden stared at him, but eventually he nodded his head.
“He’s dead,” I said.
They both looked over at me, and Aiden tilted his head. I could smell his disbelief.
“I killed him. He suffered,” I added.
Toby flinched a bit and looked over at Aiden, worried. Oops. Was I not supposed to tell the man that?
Aiden eventually nodded his head, though. “Good,” he said, then he let Toby’s hand go and gripped his blanket again.
“You have choices,” Toby said. “We can get the police involved, but heisdead, and they’ll never find him, and we’ll deny the fact that we killed him.”
Awww, look at Toby being all protective of us, like we couldn’t handle the human police. Still, it was super cute.
“Or,” Toby continued, “we can bring you home, back to your life.”
Aiden snorted at that. “What life? I was a bartender. No family. No boyfriend. He knew all that. Friends, sure, but they gave up soon enough. Sure, people looked for me, but after a year… there’s no one left looking for me. He let me look it up. He let me search articles and the internet. He was trying to show me that no one but him cared about me. And really, I’m not the man I was before. I wouldn’t even know who to be with my friends. They wouldn’t know me now. I don’t know myself.”
Toby looked stumped at that, but I jumped in.
“That’s ok. We can give you a place to stay, a job, and new people. You can take your time finding out who you are now,” I said.
He looked over at me. “You want me to stay here?”
“You could stay in this house, but I think I have an even better solution,” I said. When the man nodded, I went out to the porch.
Time to call the oracle. Surely the first stray and this one could bond over their human trauma and stuff.
Cassius strangely hadn’t sounded excited to hear from me. When I told him I had another human who had been held prisoner, he had told me to bring the guy over, muttering something about not trusting me with humans.
I resented that. Ialwaysfound them good homes.
Toby had insisted on coming along, and his presence seemed to set Aiden at ease, so the three of us headed out in the car. Although Jude and Corbin had rescued him, Aiden hadn’t seemed attached to them in the least. I wasn’t sure if that was because they’d shown some of their hellhound abilities ornot, but he also didn’t seem scared of them. He just seemed indifferent.
So it was just the three of us that walked into Cass’s shop that afternoon. The guy from the basement was at the counter when we walked in, and he gave us all a glower. Good to see he was still feeling feisty. Maybe he’d spread some of that energy to this guy.
Cassius hurried out, saying, “Q, be nice. Aiden is going to stay with us for a bit. He’s got a similar story to yours.”
