Chapter 114: The Unsaid Current

The revelation of Viktor Croft as the inside man had shifted the battlefield once more. The sprawling, nebulous threat of Silas now had a localised agent, a pressure point they could squeeze. Plans were drawn up—a “ghost project,” a falsified expansion into Milan that Anton would be seen feverishly championing, with Croft personally overseeing its “security.” A honeypot, waiting for a strike.

But strategy was a cold art, and the space between planning and execution was a vacuum filled with tension of a different kind. The penthouse, stripped back and hardened, felt less like a corporate fortress and more like a submarine on a silent run—a pressurized, intimate world of two.

They were in the glass-walled study, the one room that still felt like Anton’s. The blinds were drawn against the night, turning the windows into mirrors that reflected the warm pool of light from the brass desk lamp. The holographic table was dark, a casualty of the purge. In its place was a sprawling, physical map of Europe, dotted with pins and annotated in Anton’s sharp script, and Sabatine’s secured tablet, displaying layers of digital intelligence.

They were shoulder to shoulder, bent over the map, the Milan trap taking shape. Sabatine pointed to a logistics route outside Genoa. “Croft will want to secure the overland transit. He’ll propose using a firm he vets. That’s our insertion point.”

Anton nodded, his brow furrowed in concentration. He reached to make a note, his hand brushing Sabatine’s where it rested on the table’s edge. A simple, accidental contact.

But it wasn’t simple.

A jolt, subtle but unmistakable, traveled from the point of contact up Sabatine’s arm. He didn’t move his hand. Neither did Anton. For a beat too long, they remained there, the warmth of skin on skin a silent detonation in the quiet room. The strategic discussion paused, suspended in the sudden, electric awareness of proximity.

Anton slowly pulled his hand back, his eyes flicking up to meet Sabatine’s. In the lamplight, they were dark, unreadable pools, but the air between them had thickened. The unsaid words from the other night, the vast, silent confession, hummed in the space like a low-voltage current.

“Sorry,” Anton murmured, the word meaningless.

“It’s fine,” Sabatine replied, his own voice lower than intended.

They returned to the map, but the focus had fractured. Sabatine was hyper-aware of the heat of Anton’s body beside him, the faint scent of his soap and the underlying, familiar scent of him that was simply Anton. He could hear the soft whisper of Anton’s breath, the rustle of his sleeve against the paper.

Minutes passed, the silence a living thing. They discussed choke points and dead drops, but the words felt like a performance, a script running over a deeper, more fundamental dialogue.

Then Anton leaned forward to point at a port schematic on the tablet, his arm crossing in front of Sabatine’s chest. The movement brought him closer. Sabatine could feel the whisper of Anton’s sweater against his own shirt. He could see the individual lashes framing Anton’s downcast eyes, the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw.

Anton’s finger traced a line on the screen. “The customs clearance here would be the vulnerability. Croft would have to…”

He trailed off. His finger had stopped moving. He was still leaning in, his head bowed, but his attention was no longer on the screen. Sabatine followed his gaze and saw their reflection in the dark glass of a monitor that was turned off. Two figures, haloed in gold light, bent together in a pose that looked less like strategy and more like devotion.

Anton didn’t move away. He turned his head, just slightly, and his eyes found Sabatine’s again in the reflection. The question in them was naked, stripped of all CEO calculation, all protective restraint. It was the man, asking.

The current between them surged, a silent, potent force. The map, the trap, the war with Silas—it all receded, blurred into background noise. There was only this room, this light, this magnetic pull that had been building through confession and crisis, through purges and burning warehouses.

Slowly, giving him every chance to pull back, Sabatine turned his own head. Their faces were inches apart. He could see the pulse beating fast in Anton’s throat. He could see the faint scar on his temple from the alpine fall. He could see the want, and the fear, and the love that Anton would not name.

Sabatine didn’t speak. He answered the unasked question with action.

He leaned in the final fraction. Not a claiming kiss, but a question. A soft, lingering touch of his lips to Anton’s.

It was not the kiss of the rooftop garden, born of adrenaline and shared survival. It was not the desperate kiss in the lift before Singapore. This was different. Slower. Deeper. A conscious, deliberate crossing of a threshold they had been circling for weeks.

Anton went utterly still for a heartbeat. Then, with a sound that was half-sigh, half-surrender, he melted into it. His hands came up, not to pull Sabatine closer, but to frame his face, his thumbs stroking the high arches of his cheekbones as if memorizing them by touch. The kiss deepened, a silent conversation that said everything the words could not. It spoke of trust earned in blood and fire, of loneliness finally answered, of a partnership that had become the axis their world turned on.

The tablet, forgotten, slid from the desk with a soft thud onto the carpet. The map rustled as Anton’s elbow brushed it. They didn’t notice. The world had narrowed to the taste of each other, the shared breath, the solid, real heat of the body under their hands.

When they finally broke apart, it was not with a gasp, but with a slow, shuddering exhalation. They stayed close, foreheads resting together, eyes closed. The air in the glass office was charged, alive.

Anton’s voice, when it came, was a rough whisper against Sabatine’s lips. “I’m…”

“Don’t,” Sabatine murmured, cutting off the apology or the confession he sensed coming. He opened his eyes, finding Anton’s, which were wide, vulnerable, shining with unshed emotion. “Don’t say anything. This… this was the thing. The current. We finally touched it.”

Anton swallowed, his throat working. He gave one slow, shaky nod. He understood. Naming it, analyzing it, trying to fit it into a strategy—that was his instinct. But this was beyond strategy. This was physics. This was the inevitable convergence of two bodies that had orbited each other for too long.

He didn’t pull away. Instead, he shifted, turning Sabatine gently until his back was against the edge of the heavy desk. He moved into the space between his legs, hands sliding from his face to his shoulders, then down his arms, a slow, grounding exploration. His gaze traveled over Sabatine’s face as if seeing it for the first time.

“I have spent my life building walls,” Anton said, the words quiet, raw. “I built them to keep everything out. And you… you didn’t break them down. You just appeared inside them one day, as if you’d always belonged there.”

Sabatine brought his hands up, resting them on Anton’s hips, feeling the solid reality of him. “I don’t belong in a fortress, Anton.”

“You belong with me,” Anton corrected, his voice gaining a quiet, fierce certainty. “And I will tear the fortress down, stone by stone, if that’s what it takes to make a home you can live in.”

It was the most profound declaration he could have made. Not that I love you, but I will change the fundamental nature of my world for you.

Sabatine pulled him close again, burying his face in the curve of Anton’s neck, breathing him in. The tension that had been thrumming between them—the professional, the personal, the electric—had finally found its release, not in a dramatic climax, but in this quiet, devastatingly intimate surrender.

They stayed like that for a long time, wrapped in the warm light, the war maps forgotten at their feet. The unsaid current had been touched, and its charge had fused them together, silent and sure. Outside, the city glittered, full of threats and shadows. But inside the glass office, for the first time, they were not just partners in a war.

They were simply, completely, together.

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