Gideon Book 3

LAYLA

“So, who’s all coming with us?” I ask Gideon as he pulls down two large suitcases from the closet—a hard-shelled black one for him and a purple-and-black polka-dot one for me.

On the way back to the penthouse, Gideon had explained more in depth about finding Balthazar’s letters to Alistair Pembroke and the plan for talking to him at his home in Mykonos.

My stomach tingles at the idea of Greece, a place that I’d never dreamed of being able to go to.

I’d spent so long scraping by cleaning houses and offices and attending community college that money had seemed like something that would always fall through my fingers.

But now I had a partner who had more money than I could imagine and who wanted nothing more than to shower me with gifts.

While I wasn’t one for big, gaudy gifts—the diamond bracelet Helen had had, and I’d subsequently sold to Pembroke, sprung to mind—traveling the world was something that I’d always wanted to do.

Gideon was more than happy to oblige.

I thought about everything that I could do in Greece, the places I could take pictures of: the Parthenon and the Acropolis in Athens, the beaches in Santorini.

I nearly sigh thinking about the sunsets, the different colors that my camera lens could capture.

“Genesis,” Gideon says, “Constantine, Serena, Lazarus, Penny, and Darius.”

“The usual group, then,” I say. They’re currently in LA with us, looking into Pembroke’s compound with Gideon. “I’m surprised the palace doesn’t refer to you guys as ‘The Dream Team’ by now.”

Gideon lets out a low laugh as he walks into the closet. “Funny, Layla.”

I follow him into the closet and make a face at his back. Almost as if he can see me, he chuckles again.

“How long will we be gone?” I ask, surveying my clothes. And what should I pack? I think to myself.

Greece is warm no matter the time of year, so maybe shorts? But then again, I’ve heard that only tourists really wear shorts in Europe.

While I am a tourist, do I want to look like one? Skirts, then, and dresses. But maybe I should pack a couple pairs of pants?

“You’re thinking too much,” Gideon says, suddenly right behind me. His hands are warm and firm on my shoulders. He leans down to press a kiss to my neck. “Wear whatever you want.”

Right. Mind-link.

I blush a little at my inner ramblings. He probably thinks I’m anal.

“It’s cute, though,” Gideon says.

I reach back and swat him. “Stop reading my mind!”

“I hope we won’t be there for too long,” Gideon says, conveniently going back to my first question. “At least, not for business. But you and I can stay for a little longer, if you’d like.”

“Two weeks?” I suggest.

“Sounds perfect.”

I look over my shoulder to see Gideon staring at me, a brilliant smile on his golden face. I flush, and Gideon’s eyes darken.

“Hurry and pack,” he tells me. “Then, we can move on to more pleasurable matters.”

The look he gives me is purely sinful, and I debate just throwing some clothes into my suitcase, so we can skip to the pleasurable matters.

Then, a thought hits me.

“Oh, shoot!” I sigh. I turn back to my clothes and run a hand along my tops. Everything is generally summery.

I grab a handful at random—a fluttery coral-colored blouse, a floral baby tee, a blue-and-white gingham top with spaghetti straps—and yank them off the hangers before going to put them in my suitcase.

“What?” Gideon asks. Surprise has overtaken the lust in his voice.

I sigh. “I need to call my mother.” Once my shirts are folded into the suitcase, I go over to my nightstand and grab my phone, going into my recent calls where her number is the first.

I press call and then put her on speaker as I walk back into the closet, trying to determine how many dresses I should bring.

“Layla?” Mom asks. In the background, there’s the usual din of people moving about. It’s after dinnertime, so Mom is probably in the kitchen, cleaning up.

I wonder if Maya or Carmen are in there helping her wash dishes; then again, if they were, they would have jumped into the call as soon as Mom said my name.

“Hey, are you too busy to talk?” I ask.

“Of course not,” Mom says. “How have you been? How is Lord Archer? How—”

“The same as yesterday, Mom,” I say, laughing a little.

Well, I suppose not everything is the same as yesterday, considering I now know that there’s an angry lycan wanting my head on a platter, but my mother most certainly does not need to know that.

“Right, right. Well, it’s the same here. You know life in the pack. Although—” Mom’s voice turns conspiratorial “—do you remember Nancy, the girl a couple of years older than you? She’s pregnant, and—”

“Mom.” I cut her off. I don’t need to get sucked into another conversation about why I should get pregnant sooner rather than later. “I actually called you for a reason.”

“Oh?” The excitement in her voice is not palpable. I sigh. She’s got babies on the brain.

“I am not pregnant,” I tell her.

“Oh.” She deflates.

I shake my head. “I wanted to tell you that Gideon and I are heading to Greece. We’ll be gone for a couple of weeks.”

“Oh, a vacation?” Mom asks.

“Kind of,” I hedge, not quite lying. Gideon did say we could stay longer after his business with Helen’s father is over.

“Where in Greece?” Mom asks.

“Athens,” I say.

“Hmm, well, you know, while you’re over in that area, you should consider visiting Grandma’s family,” Mom tells me.

I furrow my brow. “In Greece?” Since when did Grandma have family in Greece?

Mom blows out a breath. “No, Ethiopia.”

“Mom, I don’t think that Greece and Ethiopia are considered to be in the ‘same area.’ They’re pretty far away.”

While Greece is toward the bottom of Europe, Ethiopia is in the middle of the east coast of Africa.

“Well, Greece is closer to Ethiopia than California is,” Mom says.

“I suppose I can’t argue with that,” I say, “but I don’t know.”

“I think it would be a great opportunity for you to meet more of your family,” Mom says. “You didn’t visit when you went to the safari like you said you would.”

My cheeks burn. “We were busy.”

She absolutely does not need to know that when we weren’t on safari tours, Gideon and I were much more interested in exploring each other than whatever else Africa had to offer.

“I’m just saying,” Mom says, “it would be quite simple for you to simply tack on a week at the end of your travels to go visit Ethiopia.”

I sigh, resting my forehead on a shelf.

Everything okay? Gideon’s voice is in my head. I look over my shoulder to see him staring at me, bemused, with several ties draped on one arm while holding the hangers of dress shirts.

I wave a hand at him. He gives me another look but leaves the closet to pack his clothes.

“Where, exactly, are they in Ethiopia?” I ask.

“They’re an hour outside of Gondar,” Mom says.

“Gondar,” I repeat. “We’ll look into it.”

In truth, I would love to visit my family, especially now. Just like me, my grandmother was born without a wolf, despite being born into the Blue Nile Pack.

Once she’d moved to the United States, she hadn’t mated with a werewolf and had my mom, who had later married my dad, who was a werewolf.

But Grandma never talked much about her family back in Ethiopia. It would be nice to meet aunts, uncles, and cousins and see yet another branch of my family tree.

I promise to let Mom know both when our plane leaves for and lands in Greece, along with any changes that we might make to our itinerary.

We exchange goodbyes, and I hang up. Then, I let my head fall back and groan. I didn’t do anything about packing while talking to my mother.

I grab several sundresses, then a few skirts, and two pairs of jeans. My arms are piled with clothes by the time I make it back into our bedroom. I let the mountain of clothing fall beside my suitcase and sigh.

I glance at Gideon’s suitcase, which is filled with neatly packed shirts and pants, barely half full. He’s in the bathroom right now, probably packing up our toiletries.

I sigh again and set about folding my clothes as carefully as I can. I lay everything out and survey it. My suitcase is rather large, but it’s a lot of clothes, and I still have to pack some shoes, too.

I pick up a shirt and lay it out on the bed before attempting the Marie Kondo method.

Quincy and I had binged her show on Netflix when it had come out, and while Quincy had picked up the folding tricks quickly, I struggled.

“What are you doing?” Gideon asks, his voice right in my ear. I shiver as his breath fans over my neck and glance at him over my shoulder.

“Packing,” I tell him.

He chuckles as he hands me a little plastic bag filled with my toothbrush and travel containers of shower stuff.

“You might as well just crumple it up and throw it in,” he says. I pout at my shirt. It’s a wrinkled mess. How do they do it?

“Here, let me.” Gideon moves me gently to the side and picks up my folded mess of a shirt. He expertly folds it and lays it in my suitcase before moving to the next clothing item.

It probably takes him all of five minutes, and by the time he’s done, my suitcase is packed and organized nicely.

“How?” I ask, my mouth open in shock.

Gideon brings me close and presses a kiss to my forehead. “Years of practice.”

“Oh, so it’s an old person thing?” I tease.

Gideon pulls back to give me a playful glare. I spin out of his arms, heading back to the closet to pick out some shoes.

“Funny,” Gideon calls after me. “So, what was that about Ethiopia?”

I pause, looking over my shoes. I bite my lip before picking up a pair of sandals and a pair of sneakers. I head back into the bedroom.

Gideon sits on the bed now, waiting for me to answer his question.

“Mom wants us to go visit my grandmother’s family in Ethiopia,” I tell him.

“Oh,” Gideon says. “I’d forgotten that she had family there.”

“Yeah.” I busy myself with arranging my shoes in my suitcase, but I can feel Gideon’s eyes on me like a physical touch.

“Do you want to visit?” Gideon asks.

I sigh, giving up on my shoes for the moment. I hop up on the bed beside Gideon and let my head rest on his shoulder.

“I don’t know. I think so? I mean, the idea of going someplace new is always exciting, and I’d love to meet my extended family, but…”

“But?” Gideon prompts.

“My grandmother left,” I say, “and she never said why. But she didn’t have a wolf, just like I didn’t. What if… ugh, I don’t know. I guess I’m just worried that they’ll see me as… less than?”

“But you’re a lycan now,” Gideon points out.

“And what if that’s worse?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” Gideon’s brow is furrowed, and I’m tempted to reach out and smooth it with my fingers, to feel his skin under my fingertips, to let it ground me.

“I mean, I’m not really a part of my pack anymore, right?” I ask.

Gideon frowns. “I don’t think that’s true. Is that what you think?”

I sit up and pull my knees into my chest, resting my chin on them. “I don’t know what I think. I just feel… kind of caught, I guess.”

Stuck in the middle. That is how I feel. That’s how it was for my entire life—I was a part of a pack, but I didn’t have a wolf, so was I really a part of the pack? And now, I’m a lycan.

“I suppose that I should feel closer to being a wolf, but instead, I feel even farther away,” I tell him.

“Your family loves you, Layla,” Gideon says.

I shake my head. “That’s not what I’m saying. There’s a difference between knowing that you’re loved and knowing that you don’t belong.”

“Hey,” Gideon says, his hand gripping my chin to tilt my head up. “You belong with me. Does anything else matter?”

I swallow hard at his words. They’re comforting, in a way, but they’re also the opposite. Gideon’s never questioned who he is and where he fits in.

Even if his childhood was more Oliver Twist than ~Eloise at the Plaza~, he found Louis and his family.

He found a purpose.

What was my purpose?

I reach up and kiss Gideon harshly, hoping that he’s not in my head, hoping that he’s not reading my mind. I push him back on the bed.

The suitcases fall off—the clothes inside tumbling out—but Gideon is much more interested in me as I pull off my top.

I keep him preoccupied for the rest of the night, keeping my thoughts in the back of my head and instead focusing on us.

I love Gideon more than I ever thought I would love anyone, more than I ever thought possible, but I can’t help but worry that his love is all that really ties me to the world of lycans.

After, I lay in his arms, my head pillowed on his chest. He kisses my hair, a hand trailing lazily up and down my bare arm.

“I’m going to have to repack,” he says softly, but his voice is still loud in the silence of the room.

“I can help,” I offer. Gideon laughs and shakes his head.

“Get some sleep,” he tells me. “We need to be on the plane by nine.”

I crane my neck to look at the clock on his nightstand to see that it’s nearly midnight. I bury my face in Gideon’s neck, and he wraps his arms around me tighter.

“I love you, Layla,” he tells me.

“I love you, too,” I mumble.

“As long as I’m around, you never have to worry about where you belong,” he promises.

I don’t say anything. I close my eyes and try to steady my breathing. I doubt he’ll think that I’ve fallen asleep that quickly, but I don’t know what to say.

I could never regret meeting Gideon or the life that we’ve been building. I’m proud of myself and the lycan I’m becoming.

I know that he only wants me to be happy, that he would do anything he could to make sure that I stay happy, that he would fight anything that stood in the way of that happiness.

But he can’t fight the thoughts in my head.