Chapter 14: The Kiss That Never Happened

The hotel suite was a masterclass in understated excess, worlds away from Anton's glass-and-steel penthouse apartment in London. There, the cash was older, permeating the highly polished walnut panelling and the thick, brocade drapes. A fire was lit on the marble hearth, casting dancing shadows onto a painting of the Alps. Beeswax and old money scented the air.

It should have been reassuring. It wasn't.

The electricity from the elevator had followed them in, a live wire that hung loose behind them. Anton stood at the window, his back to the room, watching the lights of Geneva sparkle like scattered diamonds on black velvet. He couldn't meet his own eye; he could only glimpse the shadow of his own confession, and the humiliating nakedness of Sabe's response.

Buying loyalty instead of deserving it.

The words had sliced him in two. They were a denunciation of the very philosophy of his existence. And yet, they did not ring like an attack. They rang like… a key. One that was being presented by the least likely of hands.

Sabe was business again, a lesson in contained movement. He had swept the room for bugs with practiced, frugal ease, his scanner humming softly, usually, its occasional click punctuating the silence. He checked the locks on the door, the balcony, his movements, a soundless dance of paranoia and protection. Each click, each quiet step, a reminder of the world outside this room—a world of thieves and brothers and conspiracies.

Finally, he was satisfied. He placed the scanner on the mantelpiece and stood there for a minute, watching Anton's rigid back.

"It's clean," Sabe growled, his voice a tad harsher than usual. "We're safe."

Anton didn't move. "Safe from microphones. And from everyone else." He paused. "But are we safe from each other?"

The question hung in the fire-heated air, dangerously true.

That finally converted Anton. The city lights ringed him, hiding his face, but Sabe could sense the tension in the line of his shoulders, the unfamiliar uncertainty in his posture.

"Whatever went on in the elevator…" Anton began to say, his voice a low rumble.

"Was a moment of stress," Sabe supplied for him, the words spilling out too quickly, a post-emptive withdrawal. "Adrenaline. It makes people say things."

"Was that what it was?" Anton moved away from the window, into the light of the room. The firelight picked out the flecks of gold in his eyes, usually so controlled, now burning with an unsettling brightness. "Are you taking a simple fact of my life and equating it to a biochemical response?"

Sabe held steady, though his heart was a runaway drum in his chest. "Easier to classify it that way." 

"Easier for whom?" Anton stepped closer, close enough for Sabe to smell the sweet, clean scent of his soap, to feel the slight stubble edging his jaw. The space between them, once one of professional distance, had become an electric field, pulling them closer.

"For the work," Sabe managed to say, his throat closing up. "For. for this. Whatever this is."

"I'm so tired of defining everything in terms of the job, Sabe." Anton's gaze was unflinching, peeling away defenses layer by layer. "I'm so tired of deals. You said I've been purchasing loyalty. You were correct. So I'm not going to try to purchase this. I'm not going to haggle over it. I'm just going to ask." He took one last, infinitesimal step, bridging the distance between them. "What is this?"

Sabe could feel the heat of Anton's body, a magnetic pull that could scorch away his carefully crafted control. He could see each lash tracing those intelligent, painful eyes. He could see the soft curve of his lips, the invitation and openness there. The guardian in him called out to step back, to reestablish the boundary, to shield his client from the trouble of him.

But the man—the lonely, guilty man who had caught a glimpse of a kindred spirit in this gilded cage—was weary of concealment.

"It's a mistake," Sabe breathed, but the words lacked conviction. They were a prayer, not a declaration.

"The best things usually are," Anton whispered, his voice a low rumble that shook deep within Sabe's body.

Anton raised his hand, not with Sabe's expected authoritative possession, but with a tearful uncertainty. His fingers skimmed the stray strand of hair off Sabe's forehead, his touch so light it was little more than a question. It was the touch of a man who had been used to taking, now learning, marvelously, to ask.

That one, soft motion shattered the last vestige of Sabe's resistance. The wall he'd built around his heart, shaped of remorse and fortified by obligation, dissolved into nothing.

He didn't know who made the first move. Physics and necessity merged into one urge. The space between their mouths was gone.

It was the kiss that never happened, and yet, in the suspended moment before lips touched, it was the only existence that had ever been. Sabe already felt the ghost coffee on Anton's breath, the theoretical softness of his mouth, the definite scratch of stubble. He felt the trembling breath that would pour from Anton's body into his. He felt the closed eyes, the final abandonment. He felt the universe drawing in to this one, irresistible point of collision—

BZZT-BZZT-BZZT!

The sound was a shard of ice, an ugly, electronic scream that tore over the firelit stillness.

They jumped away from each other as if electrified.

Reality flooded back in—the room, the fire, the cold glass of the window, the task.

Sabe was across the room in two strides, his own phone thrashing crazily on the mantelpiece next to his scanner. The screen glowed with a single, ugly word: ALERT.

His own face, once so soft and open, was now a grim mask. All the warmth, the openness, was concealed, locked away in a vault slammed shut by necessity. His hands flew over the screen, summoning a diagnostic program.

"What is it?" Anton's voice was rough, shaking. He stood where Sabe had left him, seeming to be curiously lost, his body shaking with the sharp, violent disruption.

“The perimeter alarm,” Sabe said, his voice all business, flat and hard. “On my equipment back in London. Someone just tried to access my primary server. A brute-force attack. Sophisticated.” He looked up, his eyes meeting Anton’s. They were no longer the eyes of a man on the verge of a kiss. They were the eyes of a soldier. “They’ve found my backtrail. They know I’m the one who uncovered Marcus.”

The moment was shattered. The kiss that never occurred a specter, an instantaneous, tortured what-if devoured by the chilly, urgent now.

Anton took a deep, shivering breath, visibly shrugging back into the CEO's role. The moment of bare personal danger was over; the corporate war was at hand. "Can they break in? What did they see?"

No. It's air-gapped, isolated. They just severed the wire." Sabe was closing up his laptop, his fingers moving rapidly and accurately. "But it shows they're in a panic. They're wiping the digital net, trying to erase all traces of how I found them." He closed his bag with a sharp, final zip. "We've lost the element of surprise. He knows we're here. And he knows we're close.".

He stood facing Anton, the professional distance reinstated. The man who had almost kissed him was now the private investigator, the operative. "We have to leave now. Before he gets a chance to escape or set a better trap."

Anton nodded, his expression grim. He smoothed his suit jacket, a small, futile gesture at trying to restore order. "Where?"

Sabe's gaze was cold and certain. "The Hôtel des Bergues. That's where the shell company that rents his suite is located. He's not at the d'Angleterre. That was a cover. He's on the other side of the river, watching us.".

The revelation was a blow, another stroke of his brother's dishonesty. Anton accepted it with ease. The pain was there, near his mouth, but masked by a crest of icy fury.

"Then let's not keep my brother waiting," Anton said, with a voice like a broken flint.

As they swayed towards the door, the memory of the kiss lingered between them, a bitter-sweet poison. It had been a moment of exquisite, ghastly possibility, the opportunity to fly free from the stage upon which they were playing.

But the warning had been a bitter reminder: in their world, lust was a distraction, love was a luxury, and it was one worth dying for. The kiss had never occurred. But the promise of its proximity, and the brutal cost of its terminus, would follow every breath, every look, from this moment on.

Sabe leant against the doorway, his body a shield, his face a wall. Anton pushed through, his own disguise in perfect place.

The door slammed shut behind them, containing the heat, the fire, and the ghost of what could never have been. The corridor beyond was cold, and silent, and led only to war.

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