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Chapter 49 – Wash Away

last update publish date: 2026-03-22 14:49:55

Kir

Oliver hasn’t said a word to me since we left the warehouse.

He looks shattered. His skin is pulled tight over his cheekbones, his eyes bloodshot from staring at the monitors for hours.

But underneath the exhaustion is a sharp, jagged resentment directed squarely at me.

He puts as much distance between us as the architecture of the penthouse allows, his shoulders rigid, the air in the room vibrating with his silent, simmering rage.

He drops his bag onto the floor with a heavy thud and doe
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  • Cracking His Code   Chapter 181 – Home

    OliverThe dog finds my socks again.It’s six in the morning and I’m on the back step of the kitchen with a cup of coffee in one hand and a half-shredded sock in the other, watching a fifteen-kilo brown idiot tear across the lawn toward the cedars with my other sock in his mouth and no intention of giving it back."Mishka!"He doesn't turn. He doesn't even slow."Mishka, you absolute bastard!"Nothing. The cedars are very interesting this morning, apparently. Our white cat, Anya, who Kir picked out at the shelter in February because she "looked like she was very discerning” is on the windowsill behind me watching this entire transaction with the dispassion of someone who decided long ago the dog is beneath her notice.I take a sip of the coffee. Still too hot. I burn my tongue. I swear, quietly, at the cedars, the dog, the sock, and the cat, in that order."You are losing this fight, lyubov."Kir is in the doorway behind me. Bare feet, wearing one of my t-shirts for some incomprehen

  • Cracking His Code   Chapter 180 – After

    DomTwo weeks out from the surgery Kir is up and moving and trying to move a chair across the kitchen, and Oliver has the bone-deep look of a man about to commit a homicide."Kirill Nikolaev, put the fucking chair down.""It is only a chair, Oliver.""It’s heavier than your head. Tariq said no lifting. Put it the fuck down.""I am not lifting it. I am moving it across the floor.""That’s lifting.""It is sliding.""Sliding is lifting. Sliding is the verb form of lifting. Put. The chair. Down."It’s really not fair of Oliver to be straight up lying about the English language to Kir, but in fairness, all four of that chair’s legs were in the air, he was not sliding anything.Kir, very slowly, with the patience of a man who’s been fussed at for fourteen days straight and has no say in how much longer he’ll be fussed at, sets the chair down on the lino.He turns to Oliver and raises his good eyebrow. The bandage on the right side of his face has come down, three days ago, to expose the w

  • Cracking His Code   Chapter 179 – Smoking Gun

    ChanaA week into Kir's recovery I make a serious tactical decision, which is that I’m going to spend as little time as possible in a room with Oliver.It’s not that I don’t love him. I love him a great deal. I have, in the months we’ve been working together, come to think of him as the kind of small irritating brother you'd kill for and also occasionally want to smother with a pillow. The problem is that I’m two ill-timed comments away from saying something that will cost me a friendship I value, and Oliver-in-carer-mode is a man engineered, in a lab somewhere, to draw the worst possible comment out of every person in his vicinity.He is, for one thing, ordering people around like he’s been declared the undisputed monarch of this territory and the others are just quietly accepting it.He’s ordering Tariq around about Kir's antibiotic schedule, even though Tariq has been doing this job for sixteen years and Oliver has been doing it for about a week. He’s telling Ray how to adjust t

  • Cracking His Code   Chapter 178 – Three Days

    OliverDay one is the easy one, which says everything.I sleep maybe three hours on the cot. Jozef stays in the corner the whole time. When I wake up Kir hasn't moved an inch, the vent is still doing his breathing for him, and the monitors are doing the quiet steady beeping they've been doing since Reilly walked out.That steady beep becomes my god by lunchtime.I learn it the way I learned to read heat signatures on surveillance cameras when I joined the team.Every rhythm, every gap, every faint stutter when he shifts in the sedation. I memorize the resting numbers on the bedside screen. I catch the exact second the oxygen level dips a point and the exact second it climbs back. Tariq tells me, gently, that I should let him do that. I tell him, less gently, to shut up.He doesn't take it personally. Saint hovers in the doorway looking pained. He obviously gets where I’m coming from, but he’d still rather like to break my jaw for being rude to his boyfriend.Jozef brings me food

  • Cracking His Code   Chapter 177 – Too Late

    OliverIt opens up in front of me, all at once, the whole dark yawning abyss of misery.The thing I’ve refused to look at since the alarm. A world with no Kir in it. A house in Canada with one set of footsteps. A bed that's too big and empty. A wedding that doesn't happen. The rest of my life as a long flat grey corridor with him not at the end of it, not anywhere in it, just gone, just a hole shaped exactly like the only person who ever made me feel like a whole person.I can't breathe.I press his slack hand to my mouth. His blood is on my lips. I don't care."Don't you dare," I whisper into his knuckles, and it comes out wrecked. There’s nothing left of the steamroller, just a man falling apart over the body of his soulmate. "Don't you dare leave me here. I have done everything I can. I found the surgeon who can fix you and he’s on his way. I will always find a way to fix you. You can’t leave me, Kir. You can’t. You don’t get to die on me, Kirill, I forbid it, do you hear me,

  • Cracking His Code   Chapter 176 – Pandemonium

    Oliver In my ear, Butcher speaks in a calm, flat tone. The voice he uses when a thing has already gone wrong and panicking won't unmake it.Kir’s down. He’s been hit in the face. It looks bad.Face.Face.The word goes into me like a spike and I’m out of the chair without deciding to stand, both hands flat on the table, staring at Butcher's cam feed because Kir's has dropped to the dirt and is showing me nothing but the toe of a boot."How bad — Butcher — how bad —"Butcher turns his cam and I see him.I see him and the bottom drops out of the world.The right side of his face is gone. That's what my brain says first, in the half-second before it can correct itself.It looks gone because there’s so much blood I can’t find the architecture of him under it.It's sheeting. It's coming off his jaw in a steady black ribbon and soaking the collar of his jacket and running down the inside of Butcher's wrist where Butcher has his hand clamped to the side of Kir's head.I can't see Kir’s ey

  • Cracking His Code   Chapter 134 – The Estate

    DomThe cottage Oba has put me and the Virginia Beach team in is a little holiday rental in a forest clearing six miles outside Middleburg. Three bedrooms, a wood-shingle roof, a porch with two rocking chairs that look like they haven’t been moved in twenty years. The owner is a retired airline p

  • Cracking His Code   Chapter 133 – Wheels Up

    OliverThe hangar at Vienna-Schwechat is the kind that asks no questions. Oba's man at the desk barely looks up when we come in. The plane is a Bombardier with the registration plate covered in matte vinyl and a flight plan filed for Reykjavík that we will deviate from somewhere over the Atlantic

  • Cracking His Code   Chapter 132 – Heat

    OliverThe street the cab drops us on is in the third district, off a courtyard you would never find without an address, behind a heavy wooden door with no signage and a brass intercom that asks you to say nothing.Kir says nothing. The door clicks open.We are five days out from flying to the Unit

  • Cracking His Code   Chapter 131 – Drop

    OliverBratislava is over and done with. Senator Augustus Scott is next and I honestly can’t wait to know he’s no longer breathing.There are a few things to take care of before we move on though.One is my mother.The other is sending the package to Kenzi Molina.The security firm we hired to gua

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