Chapter 103: The Unscheduled Meeting

The spiced milk had been a punctuation mark in a long, run-on sentence of tension. It hadn’t resolved anything, but it had created a new, fragile space. A space where Anton didn’t issue commands and Sabatine didn’t perform a role. For two mornings, they’d repeated the ritual—Anton appearing at the door just before dawn with two simple mugs, Sabatine accepting, the two of them standing in the quiet hall until the sun gilded the edges of the abstract art on the walls. No corporate talk. No strategy. Just the steam from the mugs and the shared, unspoken acknowledgment of another night survived.

On the third morning, Anton didn’t have the mugs.

He stood in the same spot as the first light filtered in, dressed not in his usual immaculate suit, but in dark, comfortable trousers and a soft, navy sweater. He looked younger, less like the CEO and more like the man who had built a fire from nothing.

“There’s something up on the roof,” he said, his voice still holding the quiet of the early hour. “It’s not a boardroom. It’s… unscheduled. Would you walk with me?”

Sabatine, who had opened the door expecting porcelain, paused. His guard, which had lowered a fraction over the shared milk, rose again. A walk. A talk. It was the preamble to something. A negotiation, perhaps. The gentle prelude to a new set of terms for his gilded confinement.

He studied Anton’s face. The exhaustion was still there, etched in fine lines, but the brittle intensity of the CEO was muted. This was the man from the study at 3 a.m., not the one from the 9 a.m. conference call. This was the architect of gentleness, offering another blueprint.

“Alright,” Sabatine said, the word a cautious concession. He stepped out, closing the door behind him. He was dressed similarly, in clothes that felt more like his own than anything in the walk-in closet Anton had provided.

They didn’t take the main elevator. Anton led him to a private lift at the end of the hall, its doors opening to a plush, silent interior. The ascent was swift. When the doors opened again, they stepped out into the light.

The rooftop garden was a shock. In all his time in the penthouse, Sabatine had never been up here. He’d imagined something manicured, geometric, another display of controlled luxury.

This was different.

It was wild. Or as wild as something thirty-eight stories above London could be. A winding gravel path meandered through dense plantings of ornamental grasses that rustled in the high-altitude breeze. There were bursts of lavender and rosemary, their scents sharp and clean. Stunted, wind-sculpted junipers grew from stone planters. At the far end, sheltered by a curved glass windbreak, was a simple bench of weathered teak, looking out over the waking city. The sky was a vast, pale bowl, streaked with the last trails of morning clouds. The noise of the metropolis was a distant, oceanic hum.

It felt… honest. A place that acknowledged the elements that required tending but not domination.

“I come up here when the walls downstairs feel too close,” Anton said, starting down the path. His hands were in his pockets, his posture loose. “The gardeners hate it. They want symmetry and order. I prefer chaos.”

Sabatine fell into step beside him, the gravel crunching softly underfoot. The wind tugged at his hair, a real sensation, not the recycled air of the penthouse. “It doesn’t look like you.”

“It’s the only part that feels like me, sometimes,” Anton replied, glancing at him. “The part that existed before the company. The part that just… likes the wind.”

They walked in silence for a while, the city unfolding beneath them like an intricate, silent model. The tension in Sabatine’s shoulders, ever-present since Geneva, began to ease a fraction, eroded by the open sky and the simple act of movement.

Anton stopped near the bench but didn’t sit. He leaned against the glass windbreak, facing Sabatine. The casual posture was a deliberate disarmament.

“I’ve been handling this wrong,” he began, his gaze direct but not demanding. “Since we came back. I’ve been treating… this… us… like a post-acquisition integration. A problem to be managed.” He looked out over the city, then back, his expression open, vulnerable in a way that made Sabatine’s breath catch. “I don’t know how to do this, Sabe. I know how to build fortresses. I don’t know how to make a home.”

The admission was so stark, so utterly devoid of Anton’s usual controlled rhetoric, that it disarmed Sabatine completely. He’d been braced for a proposal, a plan, an offer. Not this—a confession of helplessness.

“You have a home,” Sabatine said quietly, gesturing vaguely towards the penthouse below. “A very expensive one.”

“That’s a fortress,” Anton countered, his voice soft. “It’s designed to keep things out. Or in.” He took a slow breath. “When you said you weren’t my enemy… in the forest. That was the most important truth anyone has ever given me. And I’ve done nothing since but make you feel like a prisoner of war.”

The words landed with the weight of truth. Sabatine looked away, his throat tight. The anger, the claustrophobia, the sense of being neatly filed away—it was all there, named aloud by the man who had, unintentionally, built the cage.

“I don’t want your forgiveness,” Anton continued, his voice gaining a quiet strength. “Not yet. Maybe not ever, if I haven’t earned it. And I don’t want to negotiate terms for your… continued presence.” He seemed to struggle for the right words, the master of language fumbling. “I just want to ask for a chance. A chance to speak to you, not as my employee, or my protector, or a problem to solve. But as Sabatine. And for you to speak to me as Anton. Not the CEO. Just… the man who is desperately in love with you and is currently making a spectacular mess of showing it.”

The wind whipped between them, carrying the scent of rosemary and city. The confession hung in the air, more binding than any contract. It wasn’t a strategy. It was a surrender. An invitation to a meeting with no agenda, where the only item on the table was their shattered, complicated truth.

Sabatine felt the last of his defenses, the ones built from a lifetime of operational secrecy and recent weeks of polished isolation, tremble. He’d seen Anton be many things: ruthless, brilliant, vulnerable, determined. He’d never seen him humble himself. He’d never seen him ask for a chance, rather than take one.

He walked to the edge of the windbreak, looking out at the endless horizon. The city he’d fought to protect, for Anton, sprawled beneath him. It was Anton’s world. But this patch of wild garden in the sky felt like a territory neither of them owned, a neutral ground.

“Honestly?” Sabatine said, the word rough. He turned to face him. “I don’t know who I am in your world, Anton. The ghost? The bodyguard? The consultant? I look at the life you’re offering—the title, the office, the… the suits—and it feels like a costume. One I’ll put on and then disappear inside.” He shook his head, the frustration he’d banked for weeks finally finding a vent. “I fought my way out of one set of chains. I can’t just walk into another, even if they’re made of platinum.”

Anton listened, his entire being focused on the words. He didn’t interrupt, didn’t offer a solution. He just absorbed the truth of Sabatine’s fear.

“I don’t want to put you in a suit,” Anton said finally, a faint, pained smile touching his lips. “I want to see you. The man who can build a fire and disarm a global threat and carry a city of guilt without buckling. That man… he doesn’t belong in a boardroom. He belongs wherever he damn well pleases.” He took a step closer, not crowding, but closing the gap of the windy space between them. “So please. Talk to me. Tell me what that looks like. Because I’ve been trying to design it for you, and I’ve gotten everything wrong. I need you to draw the blueprints.”

It was the ultimate olive branch. Not a gift, but a shared blank page. Not a demand for forgiveness, but a request for collaboration. Not on a security plan, but on a future.

Sabatine looked into Anton’s eyes, seeing the fear there, the hope, the love that was as terrifying in its intensity as any gunfire. The cautious, willing part of him, the part that had whispered ‘stop running from me’ in the snow, won out.

“Alright,” Sabatine said, the word softer this time. An agreement. He nodded towards the teak bench. “We can start here.”

They sat, side by side, not touching, but the space between them was no longer a chasm. It was a worktable. The city glimmered below, the fortress and the kingdom. But up here, in the unscheduled meeting on the roof, with the wild wind as their only witness, they began, for the first time, to speak not from their roles, but from their hearts. The conversation was halting, painful, and real. It was the first step off the battlefield, onto a path they would have to build together, one honest word at a time.

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