Chapter 160. The Bedside Vigil

The despair was a passing storm, not a climate. Anton Rogers did not break; he recalibrated. Sabatine’s fierce, unwavering belief was the lever that moved the world off his shoulders, just long enough for him to take a full breath. He straightened, the lost look in his eyes burning away into a familiar, cold ember. The despair was gone, replaced by a focused, analytical fury.

They spent the hours after the news bulletin in a kind of fevered, silent industry. Sabatine, using a hardened satellite laptop Leon had prepositioned at the cottage, dove into the deepfake audio. He isolated the clip from the news report, running it through spectral analysis programs, hunting for the tell-tale digital phasing, the uncanny valley of synthetic speech. Anton paced, a restless predator, dictating a stream-of-consciousness counter-strategy to a voice recorder—legal avenues, forensic audio experts they could trust, a plan to pressure the broadcaster for the raw files.

They worked not as lovers and beloved, but as co-conspirators in a bunker, the wind and sea their only witnesses. The fire died to embers. The grey day darkened into a starless, blustery night. Mugs of coffee cooled, untouched, then were reheated and forgotten again.

Sabatine found the first anomaly just past midnight—a micro-compression artefact in the mid-range frequencies that didn’t match any known recording device Anton used. “Here,” he said, his voice hoarse. “It’s a splice. They’ve stitched phrases together. ‘Belarus pipeline’ is from a speech you gave at the Davos forum last year. The inflection is off by three percent.”

Anton stopped his pacing, coming to look over his shoulder at the jagged lines on the screen. He didn’t smile. He nodded, a general approving a troop movement. “Good. Document it. We need a dozen more like that.”

The work was meticulous, painstaking. It was digging for diamonds in a mountain of mud. Each tiny digital flaw was a victory, but the sheer volume of the lie—the perfect, pervasive sound of his guilt—was a weight that pressed down on the room. Anton’s movements grew slower, more deliberate. The sharp, rapid-fire commands to his recorder became longer pauses filled with the howl of the wind.

Sabatine found the fourth anomaly—a missing breath sound where a human would have taken one. He looked up to point it out and saw Anton standing by the cold fireplace, one hand braced against the mantelpiece, his head bowed. His shoulders were rigid, but they trembled with a fine, constant vibration that spoke of a body pushed far past its limits. He had been running on sheer will for days—through the financial siege, the Geneva firefight, the boardroom coup, the physical attack, and now this psychological evisceration. The will was a finite fuel, and the tank was reading empty.

“Anton.”

Anton didn’t respond. He was staring into the ashes as if reading his own fate there.

Sabatine stood, his joints protesting. He crossed the room and placed a hand on the small of Anton’s back. “You need to sleep.”

“I need to find the fifth anomaly,” Anton replied, his voice a dry rustle. “The fifth will give us the pattern of the algorithm they used. The sixth will—”

“The sixth will be there in the morning,” Sabatine said firmly, turning him. In the dim light of the single lantern, Anton’s face was a landscape of exhaustion. Dark smudges like bruises under his eyes, skin drawn tight over sharp cheekbones, lips pale and chapped. The cut on his forehead stood out, livid and ignored. The billionaire was gone. The commander was gone. This was just a man, at the very end of his strength.

“I can’t,” Anton whispered, a confession of terrifying vulnerability. “If I close my eyes, I hear it. My voice… saying those things. It’s in my head, Sabe. They’ve put it in my head.”

The admission was more frightening than any physical threat. The enemy had breached the final fortress: his own mind.

Sabatine didn’t argue. He simply took his hand. “Come on.”

He led him to the cottage’s single, Spartan bedroom. There was a narrow, wrought-iron bed with a thin mattress and rough wool blankets. It looked like a monk’s cell. Sabatine pulled back the covers. Anton went without protest, moving like an automaton. He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the bare stone wall.

Sabatine knelt and pulled off his shoes, then his socks. The mundane intimacy of the act seemed to ground Anton. His eyes flickered down, watching. Sabatine helped him out of his sweater, then guided him to lie down, pulling the scratchy blankets up to his chest.

Anton lay on his back, eyes wide open, fixed on the beamed ceiling. The tremors hadn’t stopped. He was a clockwork mechanism winding down in uneven, jerky ticks.

Sabatine didn’t leave. He dragged the room’s lone wooden chair to the bedside and sat. For a long time, he just watched him, this formidable, wounded creature he loved. He saw the pulse fluttering in his throat, the tense set of his jaw.

Slowly, hesitantly, Sabatine reached out. His fingers brushed the dark hair back from Anton’s damp forehead, avoiding the cut. He didn’t speak. Words were useless here. This was beyond strategy, beyond rebuttal. This was the quiet war after the battle, fought in the silent spaces of the soul.

He began to stroke his hair, gentle, rhythmic passes from his temple to the crown. It was an echo of the touch Anton had offered him on the terrace, now returned. A silent language of care.

At first, Anton remained rigid, trapped in the prison of his own wired thoughts. But gradually, minute by minute, under the relentless, gentle repetition, the tremors began to subside. His eyelids fluttered, once, twice, then stayed closed. His breathing, which had been shallow and rapid, deepened into a slower, more ragged rhythm.

Sabatine kept up the soothing motion, his own exhaustion held at bay by a fierce, protective focus. He watched the lines of pain and tension slowly ease from Anton’s face, leaving behind a youthful, heartbreaking vulnerability. In sleep, he looked his age. He looked like the man he might have been without the weight of empires and betrayals.

The wind screamed outside, rattling the windowpanes. A draft sneaked under the door, carrying the salt-spray scent of the chaotic sea. But inside the small room, a pocket of profound stillness formed.

Anton murmured in his sleep, a jumble of incoherent words. “…the figures… Father… not my voice…” His hand twitched on the blanket.

Sabatine caught it, lacing their fingers together, holding it firmly. “Shhh,” he breathed, barely a sound. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”

As if the words penetrated the dream, Anton’s breathing evened out. His grip on Sabatine’s hand relaxed, but he didn’t let go. He held on as if it were the only anchor in a storm-tossed sea.

The vigil stretched on. Sabatine’s arm ached. His eyes burned with lack of sleep. But he didn’t move. He watched the slow rise and fall of Anton’s chest, the peaceful abandonment of his features. This was his duty now, his most important mission. Not to uncover truth, but to guard the peace of the man who sought it.

He thought of the avalanche of lies tumbling through the world, of the drones and the guns and the false voices. All of it was noise. This—the quiet rhythm of breath in a dark room, the warmth of a hand in his, the trust implicit in surrendered sleep—this was the signal. This was the only thing that was real.

Dawn came slowly, a reluctant seep of grey light around the edges of the blackout blinds. It found Sabatine in the same position, his hand still carding gently through Anton’s hair, his other hand still clasped in Anton’s. He hadn’t slept a wink. He was more tired than he’d ever been in his life. And he had never felt more purpose.

Anton’s eyes opened. Not with a start, but slowly, swimming up from the depths of true, healing rest. They were clear. The drowning despair was gone, washed away by the tide of sleep and silent guardianship. He blinked, focusing on Sabatine’s face in the dim light. He didn’t speak. He just looked, and in that look was a world of gratitude, of awe, of love so deep it needed no words.

He squeezed Sabatine’s hand.

Sabatine stopped stroking his hair, letting his hand come to rest on the pillow beside Anton’s head. He leaned forward, and pressed his lips to Anton’s forehead, just beside the wound. A benediction. A claim.

“The sun’s up,” Sabatine murmured against his skin.

Anton’s voice, when it came, was sleep-roughened but steady. “Find the fifth anomaly?”

“I found it,” Sabatine lied softly. He hadn’t looked at the laptop since sitting down. “And the sixth. The pattern is clear. We can break it today.”

A ghost of Anton’s old, wry smile touched his lips. He knew it was a lie. And he loved him for it. He lifted their joined hands, pressed a kiss to Sabatine’s scarred knuckles.

“Then let’s go break it,” he said.

The vigil was over. The night had passed. The man was restored. And the war awaited. But they would face it not with exhaustion, but with the quiet, unshakeable strength forged in the silent watch beside a narrow bed, with the dawn breaking over a wild sea.

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