Chapter 202: The Drive into Stormlight

The black SUV, an altered Range Rover with matte paint that sucked in the light, careered through the neon-lit streets of London like a shark through dark water. But inside, there existed a world that consisted solely of the thrumming engine, the aroma of cooled leather, and, between these two men, an electric and brittle silence.

Leon, a silent and competent presence behind the wheel, drove with an almost supernatural sense, his eyes darting frequently to the mirrors. There had been no words beyond a brief, “Car's clean. Get in.” He was Sabatine's last connection, the only remnant he hadn't yet discarded from his previous life. To see him was like taking a roundhouse punch into the pit of memories—the tension coiled within him, the elegance of motion. A phantom in a tac sweater.

In the cavernous back seat, Anton Rogers was unwinding.

Sabatine's eyes were on him, and he could sense the fierce beating of his own heart. The man who ruled board meetings with a raised eyebrow was no more. Before him stood a man who buzzed with a shock so intense that it had reduced him to naked. Anton gazed at his own hands as if they were foreign. His hands lay on his knees, well-proportioned and aristotelian, but they quivered. A tiny, incessant tremble, as if a string had been plucked. It had an effect on Sabatine. It hollowed out a space for protectiveness within his chest that bordered on agony.

The memory of the penthouse is still smart. The sanitized light, the chill of betrayal in Evelyn’s gaze, and then the blinding crack that split the world apart. Anton, muscling aside, taking the blow intended for Sabatine. The flash of crimson on spotless white. Anton’s gasp, which was not pain, but pure, raw surprise. I’ve been shot. It was as if he were announcing a market change, as he stumbled.

They’d barely escaped. Leon had been their ghost, appearing in the service corridor, carrying Anton as if he weighed no more than a child, shouting orders that Sabatine had been too stupid with adrenaline to question. But within the safer confines of the fleeing vehicle, the tremors were beginning to take hold.

But Anton's breathing was too controlled, a quick whistle sound as he puffed air through his nose. His skin looked almost white, and the bones of his cheek stood out against it. Anton was so tense that he might shatter.

Without thinking, on an impulse that skipped his usually cautious consideration, he reached across the space separating them. He didn’t say anything. Words were currency that had devalued on this night. He merely put his hands over Anton’s, which were shaking, and held them firmly.

Antón flinched. A spasm, as if he had touched a live wire. The rest of him jerked as his head snapped up, grey eyes—normally like a winter sky but today madder and more stormy than that—widening with unexpressed emotion. Antón looked at their clasped hands, then at Sabatine’s face. He searched for it. ridicule and pity perhaps.

But then, he met her eyes, and he let his mask slip. Let Anton see the fear that had been choking him since he realized that Evelyn had raised the gun. The naked, unmediated relief that he felt because Anton was still alive and breathing and beside him. And then there was the weight of the guilt because it was he who had painted the target on Anton's back.

A prolonged silence ensued as they just stared at each other. The SUV rocked around a corner and into the illumination of a bridge, and then back into the dark.

“Stop it,” Anton whispered, ragged with emotion. His hands trembled beneath Sabatine's. “I can’t. I won’t fall apart. Not now.”

“You’re not,” Sabatine said, his voice low and rough. “You’re hanging on. But you don’t have to be alone. Let me. Just for the drive.”

It was the wrong thing and the right thing at the same time. It was an offering, a moment of intimacy that broke every professional and personal boundary still intact between them. Anton’s jaw muscle worked. His gaze shifted, slitting out into the city blurring outside, but he didn’t remove his hands. Slowly, he uncurled his fingers, taking hold instead of Sabatine’s.

“She shot me,” Anton said, and it was a ridiculous thing for him to have to say. “Evelyn. Twelve years. I gave her a chair at the table because no one else would. She. planned my father’s downfall, didn’t she?”

“It would appear so,” Sabatine replied cautiously. “Financial irregularities I uncovered at the Berlin subsidiary trace back to her approval. Stealing the prototype was the ultimate move. You were out of the picture, and I set up as scapegoat. She would have had complete control. Marcus would be her willing pawn, hungry for a piece of the empire.”

‘My brother.’ It was an epithet that haunted me. Anton closed his eyes as a spasm of pain danced across his features. ‘My father’s greatest shame and my greatest failure.’

“He’s not your failure,” Sabatine said, squeezing his hands. “He’s a grown man who made a choice. A terrible one.”

Anton’s eyes flew open, locking on Sabatine with a fierce focus. “And you? You knew they were setting you up. You went into that penthouse knowing it might be a trap. Why?"

The question ripe with deadly intention hung unspoken among them, more deadly than any bullet. Sabatine could lie. Point to duty, to contract, to ethics. But Johannsen’s skin against his, his own memory of Johannsen’s body sheltering his own, made lying impossible.

“I had to see your face,” Sabatine confessed. The words were ripped from him. “I had to know if, when the evidence was laid out, you'd believe it. Believe in me. Or if I was just another transaction to be managed.”

Anton took a sharp breath. The pain medicine Leon had fed him was making him sloppy, blurring the corners of his famous control. “I almost didn’t,” he confessed. It clearly pained him. “The information was. tempting. Evelyn perfected it. But for an instance, I caught the echo of my father’s betrayer in you. And I resented you for stirring that fear within me.” He gazed at their entwined hands. “But then I looked at you. At you. And you were just. waiting. Like a man already standing on the gallows. No hint of remorse, just resignation. That’s when I knew.”

“Knew what

“That I was already in too deep.” But Anton’s eyes were no longer drifting; they shone with an almost-toxic brightness through the dark illumination. “That firing you, turning you in, had become an impossibility. The thought of you in a cell, because of my world… it was viscerally unacceptable.”

The confession was earth-shattering. The end of the silk and steel mask marked the end of everything. The last remnant of the mask broke apart, and it exposed the naked, vulnerable man. Sabatine's throat constricted. He raised a hand and paused for a moment before gently pushing a strand of dark hair out of Anton's forehead. It made him ache.

“You took a bullet for me,” Sabatine whispered, running his thumb gently against Anton’s temple.

“A risk,” Anton whispered, but he leaned infinitesimally into contact. “I would have had better odds of survival in a corporate scandal with you by my side than I would have without you at all.”

The words, spoken with characteristic Anton precision, were the most romantic thing he ever heard. Yet with Anton, it was as if he didn’t have walls. It was as if he were naked. And he felt his own walls crumbling apart.

“Do you ever do that again,” Sabatine snarled, and it was an imperative laced with pure terror. “Your life isn’t a bargaining tool. It’s…”

“It’s mine to spend,” Anton completed quietly. “And I decide where the value is.”

Leon cleared his throat ahead, a subtle signal. “Heathrow’s out,” he said, eyeing the rearview mirror. “Too many eyes on it. We’re going dark. Safe house north of the city. Then we pivot.”

“Pivot where?” Anton asked, with the CEO reemerging but still holding hands with Sabatine.

“Geneva,” Sabatine replied, watching Anton’s reaction.

“It took tracing that encoded trail from Evelyn’s ghost server. The prototype and the bidding on its algorithm will occur at Villa des Cygnes. In forty-eight hours.”

Anton’s thoughts were racing, breaking down pain and hurt into usable information. “Villa des Cygnes. The Durand family. Old money, old corruption. My father attempted to align with Claude Durand on an early design for the chip. Cited it as ‘a philosopher’s stone for tyrants.’” A bitter smile twisted his lips. “It seems they have no compunctions.”

“We have to move like ghosts,” he said. “Evelyn will have planned for contingencies. She will assume you’re dead or seriously hurt. We have an edge on surprise, but only if we don't appear. Now.”

Anton nodded, then flinched, his unoccupied hand reaching up to press against the bandage on his shoulder. The action snapped him out of the trance. Sabatine reluctantly released his hands, already missing the touch, and reached for the med kit that Leon had set aside on the floor.

“Let me see,” he said, with a voice that brooked no refusal.

But this time, Anton didn’t argue. He let Sabatine carefully remove the covering. The puncture wound itself was ugly and inflamed, clean but already bruising on Anton’s white skin. It swelled with purples and blues. Sabatine’s stomach turned. But he moved with a clean, cool efficiency that came with experience on a battlefield, cleaning and applying a fresh bandage. His fingers, capable of taking apart a heavily secured server and an explosive device, were exquisitely gentle on Anton’s flesh.

Anton looked at him, and his gaze was a heavy burden. “Where did you learn such skills?” he asked softly.

“Kandahar,” he said, without looking up. “A different life. One that ended with me causing collateral damage I can never fix.” He taped the bandage down firmly. “This. patching you up. It's like a start. A start towards balancing some cosmic scale I don't even believe in.” Anton's hand rose, encasing Sabatine's wrist and halting his actions.

“You do not define yourself by your worst act, Sabatine. I, of all people, should remind you that.” He paused. “My father’s ‘betrayal’ that destroyed him? A safety issue with one of our emerging drones. He attempted to shut it down. The board, led by a man he considered a brother, overturned him. The issue was overlooked for profit. A year passed. A malfunction… children died. He never forgave himself, nor could he ever again trust himself, though it was not his hands on the button.

A prison of guilt and shame existed within him, and he died there.” Anton's voice had no tone. “I swore I would never be at risk for that degree of suffering. To trust anyone enough they could bring me down with failure.” “And yet, here you are,” he whispered, twisting his wrist so that their palms touched again. “Bleeding in the back of a spy car, trusting a disgraced investigator and a man you pay to drive.” A ghost of Anton’s old, wry smile flickered. “It seems my risk algorithms are fundamentally wrong where you are concerned.” Out here, the city lights were slowly dropping below the horizon, mingling with the blacker-dark of rural regions.

London, with its glinting prison of Anton’s empire, was receding into the background as they entered into the unknown. The storm that had been raging all night finally unleashed itself. Rain pounded furiously on the windshield, and the world around them degenerated into a mess of water and darkness. At the back of that speeding car, packaged in steel and hurtling toward the stormlight, these two men sat with their hands entwined.

The road before them would be fraught with more deception and violence. But for the duration of that paused moment within the storm, they were not a billionaire and a bodyguard. They were not a client and an investigator. They were Anton and Sabe, two broken men finding within each other’s brokenness the components necessary for something whole. The road was a lengthy drive, but they were no longer alone.