Chapter 178. Sabatine’s Dream

Sleep, when it finally came, was not a sanctuary. It was a theatre, and the play was a horror of memory and premonition.

Sabatine dreamed in fragments, the spliced, chaotic logic of profound exhaustion. He was back in the desert, the one from his military past, but the sand was the colour of London concrete dust. The heat was the oppressive, greasy warmth of the burning tower. He was running, not towards an objective, but away from a voice—Roland Cross’s polished, poisonous baritone, which melted into the cold, precise tone of Eleanor Rogers-Voss.

“He is a liability, Anton. A flaw in the architecture.”

He turned a corner in a non-existent cityscape and saw Anton. Not the CEO, not the lover in the dark, but the boy from the garage, his face pale with a betrayal so deep it had hollowed him out. He was standing at the edge of a vast, black pit that had opened in the middle of the Rogers Industries lobby.

“Sabe?” Anton’s voice was small, lost.

Sabatine tried to run to him, but his legs were leaden, mired in the sucking sand-dust. “Anton! Don’t move!”

But Anton wasn’t looking at him anymore. He was looking into the pit. And from its depths, shadows began to pour. Not shapeless darkness, but figures—Evelyn Voss with her calculating smile, Marcus with a bottle in hand, Roland Cross holding a microphone like a scepter, and behind them, a legion of faceless, tactical-geared forms. The Curators’ clean-up crew.

They didn’t advance on Anton. They simply flowed around him, a river of malevolence, and as they passed, they pulled him apart. Not with violence, but with erosion. His sharp suit dissolved into rags. His confident posture crumbled. The light in his ice-blue eyes guttered and went out, leaving only the hollow, staring horror Sabatine had seen in the bunker. Piece by piece, the essence of Anton Rogers was stripped away by the sea of shadows, until he was just an outline, a ghost of a man, being pulled backwards into the black pit.

“NO!” Sabatine’s scream was soundless, trapped in the desert air.

He fought against the mire with everything he had, a raw, animal desperation. He finally broke free, lunging forward, his hand outstretched towards Anton’s fading silhouette. Their fingertips brushed—a fleeting sensation of terrible cold—and then Anton was gone, swallowed whole by the darkness. The pit sealed over, leaving only seamless, polished marble floor.

Sabatine was alone in the vast, empty lobby. The silence was absolute. And the loss was not an emotion; it was a physical vacuum in his chest, a howling void where his heart had been. It was the desolation of a mission failed so utterly there was no debrief, only oblivion.

He woke with a gasping, silent scream, tears already hot on his face. The transition from dream to reality was so violent it left him disoriented. The cold mountain air. The solidity of the bed. The deep, rhythmic sound of… a heartbeat.

Not just his own. Another. Steady. Strong. Alive.

He was curled on his side. And he was not alone. Anton’s body was a solid wall of warmth against his back. One of Anton’s arms was a heavy, secure band across his chest, holding him firmly in place. Anton’s face was buried in the space between Sabatine’s shoulder blades, his breath a warm, even tide against Sabatine’s spine.

The dream’s terror was still a live wire in his nervous system, the image of Anton dissolving into nothing seared onto the backs of his eyelids. But the reality was this: the solid weight anchoring him, the undeniable proof of life held against him.

A sob broke from him, a raw, helpless sound he couldn’t contain. It shook his entire frame.

Behind him, Anton stirred. The arm across his chest tightened instinctively, pulling Sabatine even closer, tucking him more securely into the curve of his body. Anton didn’t speak. He didn’t ask what was wrong. He simply held on, his presence a silent, unwavering answer to the unspoken fear.

Sabatine cried then, in earnest. Silent, wrenching tears that soaked the pillow. They weren’t just for the dream. They were for the garage, for the bomb, for the mother who was a monster, for the terrifying, beautiful responsibility of being someone’s “only real thing.” They were for the ghost he’d been and the frighteningly solid man he was trying to become. They were for the love that felt like both a salvation and a sentence.

Anton held him through it all. His hand, splayed over Sabatine’s heart, seemed to feel every tremor, every hiccupping sob. He didn’t shush him. He didn’t offer empty comfort. He just held him, a fortress against the aftershocks of the nightmare, his own breathing a slow, deliberate counter-rhythm to Sabatine’s distress.

Gradually, the storm passed. The tears subsided to shaky breaths. The terrible hollow ache of the dream was filled, slowly, by the solid reality of Anton’s embrace. The warmth seeped through the layers of fabric and fear, reaching the frozen core of him.

Sabatine’s hand came up, covering Anton’s where it lay on his chest. He laced their fingers together, a mirror of their earlier pose, but now it was Sabatine clinging, grounding himself in Anton’s pulse.

“I lost you,” Sabatine whispered into the dark, his voice wrecked. “In the dream. They… took you. There was nothing left.”

Anton’s lips brushed against the nape of his neck, the lightest of kisses. “I’m here,” he murmured, his own voice thick with sleep and emotion. “I’m right here. They can’t have me. I’m yours.”

The words, simple and profound, did what no logic or strategy could. They dismantled the last of the dream’s hold. I’m yours. Not a possession, but a gift. A choice. A declaration that the essence Anton had feared losing—his sense of self, his will—was now inextricably linked to Sabatine. To lose him would be to be lost.

Sabatine turned in the circle of Anton’s arms. The movement was awkward in the dark, but Anton loosened his hold just enough to allow it. Now they were face to face, their breath mingling, their foreheads almost touching. Sabatine couldn’t see his eyes, but he could feel his gaze.

He brought his hands up, framing Anton’s face, his thumbs tracing the sharp line of his cheekbones, the stubborn set of his jaw. He needed to feel him, all of him, solid and alive and here.

“Don’t leave,” Sabatine breathed, the plea shameful and necessary.

“Never,” Anton vowed, the word a bedrock promise in the shifting dark. “You’re stuck with me, Sabatine Stalker. In this bed, in this fortress, in whatever comes next. You don’t get to dream me away.”

A wet, shaky sound that was almost a laugh escaped Sabatine. He pulled Anton closer, until their bodies were aligned from chest to thigh, no space for shadows or fears. He buried his face in the hollow of Anton’s neck, inhaling the scent of him—clean cotton, cold mountain air, and the underlying, essential note that was simply Anton.

Anton’s arms came around him again, one hand cradling the back of his head, fingers threading through his hair. The other arm wrapped tightly around his back, holding him as if he were something precious, something fragile and vital that needed safeguarding.

This closeness was no longer forced. It was chosen. It was sought. It was the only answer to the desolation of the dream, to the cold logic of the siege outside. In the heart of the mountain, in the deepest hour of the night, they built a sanctuary not of stone, but of shared breath and intertwined limbs. The fear wasn’t gone. The enemy wasn’t vanquished. But for now, in the silent, steadfast circle of each other’s arms, they were safe. They were whole. They were home.

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