Chapter 124: The Reluctant Garrison

Dawn found them not in separate rooms, but tangled in the quiet chaos of Anton’s bed. The panic of the garage, the raw terror of the hold, had burned itself out in the night, leaving behind a profound, exhausted intimacy. Sabatine woke first, the unfamiliar weight of Anton’s arm across his chest, the heat of his body a solid presence against his back. The world outside the blackout curtains was a dull grey hum, but inside, the air was thick with shared breath and the scent of skin and sweat.

For a long moment, he just lay there, cataloguing the sensations. The scratch of high-thread-count linen. The steady rhythm of Anton’s heart against his spine. The absolute, vulnerable trust in the way Anton held him even in sleep. The professional lines they had drawn in blood and strategy were not just blurred; they were erased, as if the night itself had washed them away.

He felt Anton stir, his arm tightening momentarily before he went still. A soft, sleepy sigh warmed the back of Sabatine’s neck. Then, the arm withdrew. The mattress shifted as Anton sat up.

Sabatine didn’t turn. He listened to the soft sounds of Anton moving—the pad of bare feet on the floor, the whisper of a robe being pulled on. He heard him walk to the window, the faint sound of the curtain being drawn back just a sliver, letting in a blade of pallid morning light.

“They’ll be looking for their failed asset,” Anton said, his voice husky with sleep but already clear, already strategizing. The CEO was reassembling himself, piece by piece, but the man who had held him through the night was still present in the quiet of the room.

Sabatine finally rolled over. Anton was silhouetted against the grey light, the robe cinched tight around his waist. He looked younger without the armour of his suits, his hair tousled, but his gaze was fixed on the city below with a predator’s focus.

“They’ll know we have him,” Sabatine said, pushing himself up on his elbows. “Or at least that he failed. Thorne will be spooked.”

“Spooked men make mistakes,” Anton replied, turning from the window. His eyes found Sabatine in the dimness, and a different kind of focus entered them—softer, but no less intense. “But they also become more dangerous. He knows we’re closing in. The proof from the freelancer’s phone is the noose. He can feel it tightening.”

He walked back to the bed, not to rejoin him, but to sit on the edge, facing him. “You can’t go back to the guest wing.”

It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of tactical fact, delivered with a gentleness that belied its finality.

Sabatine understood. The guest wing was across the penthouse, through a vulnerable corridor. It had its own security, but it was a separate cell. Here, in Anton’s private wing—a suite of rooms behind a second, reinforced door with its own dedicated systems—was the heart of the fortress. They keep.

“It makes sense,” Sabatine conceded, his voice neutral. “Centralized defense.”

“It’s not just defense,” Anton said, his gaze unwavering. “It’s… proximity. If they come again, I won’t be listening on a feed. I won’t be trusting a net. I will be there.” He reached out, his fingers brushing a strand of hair from Sabatine’s forehead, a touch so tender it made Sabatine’s chest ache. “Last night… that was the last time I will ever be in another room when you are in danger.”

The intimacy of the new arrangement wasn’t just about walls and doors. It was about the obliteration of the last professional boundary. They would share a living space, a bedroom, a life, not as a gradual evolution, but as a sudden, necessary garrisoning. There would be no more retreating to separate corners to maintain objectivity. Their war room, their strategy sessions, their moments of fear and resolve, would all happen within the same four walls where they also slept and woke tangled together.

Sabatine should have resisted. The operative in him knew the dangers of such entanglement, the loss of critical distance. But the man who had tasted the terror of almost losing this, and the profound peace of waking up in Anton’s hold, couldn’t summon the will.

He didn’t resist.

He simply nodded. “Alright.”

A visible tension drained from Anton’s shoulders. He had expected an argument, a reassertion of independence. The quiet acceptance was a gift. He leaned forward, pressing a soft, lingering kiss to Sabatine’s lips. It was a kiss of gratitude, of promise, of a shared future compressed into the dangerous present.

The day that followed was a study in this new, blurred reality. Jessica arrived for the morning briefing, her sharp eyes taking in Sabatine, dressed in a simple t-shirt and sweatpants from Anton’s wardrobe, emerging from the private wing. Her professional mask didn’t slip, but a new understanding settled in her gaze. The “calculated risk” was now a cohabitation.

The briefing was held at the small table in Anton’s sitting room, not the formal study. Sabatine sat beside Anton, not across from him. Their knees brushed under the table. When Anton reached for a tablet, his hand briefly covered Sabatine’s where it rested on the arm of his chair. Jessica noted it all, her reports on board sentiment and stock movements delivered with flawless efficiency, but the subtext of the room had fundamentally changed.

Voss came later to update on the forensic cleanup. She stood at attention, her report on the vanished freelancer and the sanitized van delivered to them both, as if they were a single command unit. She made no comment on Sabatine’s presence in the inner sanctum. It was simply the new operational reality.

And through it all, the intimacy was a constant, low hum. The way Anton would pass Sabatine a coffee without being asked, knowing exactly how he took it. The way Sabatine, while reviewing security schematics, would unconsciously tilt the screen so Anton could see. The shared, wordless glances that conveyed more than any status report—a question (Are you alright?), a reassurance (I’m here), a spark of shared fury at a new piece of Thorne’s duplicity.

By evening, the professional and the personal had fused into something entirely new. They worked side-by-side on the final plan to expose Thorne, their minds in perfect, ruthless sync. But when Anton stood to stretch, a grimace of pain crossing his face from the tension he’d carried all day, it was Sabatine who moved behind him, his hands finding the knots in his shoulders without a word, working them with a practiced, gentle pressure. Anton’s head dropped forward with a sigh, his eyes closing.

It was an act of care, of tenderness, performed in the middle of a war room. The lines were not just blurred; they were irrelevant.

Later, as night fell again, they stood together on the roof, the mesh-lined windbreak now feeling less like a barricade and more like the ramparts of a shared castle. Anton’s arm was around Sabatine’s waist, holding him close against the chill. They didn’t speak of strategy. They looked at the stars, few and faint through the city’s glow.

“This wasn’t how I imagined it,” Anton murmured, his lips against Sabatine’s temple. “Us. I thought there would be… dinners. Movies. A normal courtship. Not a siege.”

Sabatine leaned into him, the solid warmth a comfort he no longer tried to rationalize. “We’re not normal people, Anton. We never were. Maybe this is our version of a dinner and a movie. Planning a takedown. Sharing a foxhole.”

A low chuckle vibrated through Anton’s chest. “Our first date was you accusing me of corporate espionage.”

“And yours was offering me an obscene amount of money to do morally grey things,” Sabatine countered, a smile tugging at his own lips.

The laughter faded into a comfortable silence. The reluctant garrison had, in the span of a single day, begun to feel like a home. The boundaries were gone, obliterated by necessity and desire. What remained was a profound, unshakeable unity. They were partners in every sense of the word now—in strategy, in danger, in the quiet moments in between. The lines were blurred beyond repair, and neither of them, looking out at their kingdom under siege, wished to redraw them.