The Demonslayer (Seven Sins MC 4)

“Heya, Maggie. Tell me you got some good hits in,” I said, nodding toward her bruises.

“I broke someone’s nose,” she said, starting to share a smile with me, then banking it right down again. She’d have to do that a lot over the years. Bank it down. Dull her shine. It was a survival tactic. But it was still sad to see.

“That’a girl,” I said, giving her a wink. “Keep giving them hell,” I added, voice low, as I moved past her.

Through the common room was another, shorter, hallway that sported the massive dining room lined in real wood tables with ornate carvings down the centers like runners, and a buffet that stretched the wall opposite the giant hearth.

Buried behind the dining room was the kitchen, staffed with devoted believers of the cause. They had no skills themselves, but they liked helping any way they would to ensure that demons didn’t continue to have free reign in the human world.

Beyond the dining hall was the place students and full-fledged demonslayers alike spent most of their time.

The gym.

That made it sound like one room full of bikes and rowing machines.

While, yes, we had that sort of equipment as well, that was only a small part of the bigger picture.

The gym was something more like a multiple room training area that was twice the size of the rest of the lower floor.

The biggest part of the training wing was the sparring area. Half of it had the typical padded floors to soften the frequent falls. The other half, though, was all hard, unyielding cement.

Students and demonslayers alike would spend equal amounts of time training on both surfaces. One made for longer training sessions. The other made for more realistic fights.

As someone who’d spent far too much time to recall in that room, I had to admit that, after a while, falling on the hard floor stopped being so jarring. Which made it easier for me to keep getting back up off the ground the first time I faced a demon all by myself.

It was hard and unforgiving training, but every bit of it was necessary.

The gym was almost never empty.

It didn’t matter if you crept down at four in the morning, someone was guaranteed to be down there working out on the machines, sparring with a buddy, or trying to figure out how to move with their longswords. Which, admittedly, had been the hardest part for me to grasp.

I would never say it out loud, but it was because the guys had an advantage over me in that department. They didn’t have to fight their own tits when they were trying to do the movements while clasping the sword with both hands.

Eventually, I hoped to help share my wisdom with Maggie. I figured it wouldn’t be long until I happened into the gym late one night or early one morning to find her having the same struggle I’d experienced years before.

“There you are,” Gideon called, voice impatient. “I need to see you and Marsh in my office,” he said, nodding toward the man who was starting across the gym, still dripping with sweat from his training.

If you were anyone but, you know, me, you might be standing there with your tongue hanging out.

Because, objectively, both Gideon and Marsh were handsome men. But in very different ways.

Gideon was older, somewhere close to forty with some gray flecking in his dark blonde, wavy hair. He had a ruggedly attractive look with his square jaw covered in careless stubble, gray eyes, and a strong, wide-shouldered body.

Marsh was the same age as me, having been one of those classmates of mine who’d given me a hard time. Actually, he’d been the ringleader of all my bullies.

It really annoyed me that he’d gone from a somewhat gangly teenager to an attractive man.

He, like Gideon, was tall.

But where Gideon was a bulky strong, Marsch was a lean sort of strong. A swimmer’s body, if you will.

Also, where Gideon was more fair-featured, Marsh was black-haired and dark-eyed with his almost aristocratic bone structure.

On a sigh, I fell into step behind Gideon as we walked back down the halls I’d just moved through, slipping inside his office with Marsh at my heels.

Gideon’s office was, well, a fucking disaster. It always was. Gideon had a chaotic sort of inner world, his head in a million places at once. His office was evidence of that. So much so, in fact, that his desk was often too piled down with files and books and various other crap that he had to use the desk in the common room to get any actual paperwork done.

He moved behind the mess of a desk, but didn’t sit. Since there were books on his chair. Neither Marsh nor I sat either. Because, again, our chairs had piles of crap on them.