Chapter 245: The Rite of Healing

The Gables, for all its safety, was still a headquarters. A place of strategy and ghosts, thick with the echoes of Jessica’s worried footsteps and the spectral presence of the war they’d just won. Two days after the debrief, a restless, wordless tension had built between them. The silence was no longer companionable; it was a held breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop in a war that was already over.

Anton broke it. He found Sabatine in the stable yard, methodically checking the perimeter sensors, a task he’d already done twice that morning.

“We’re leaving,” Anton said, not a suggestion, but a declaration.

Sabatine looked up, a question in his eyes.

“Not far. Just… away from here. From all of it.” Anton gestured vaguely at the manor, at the history it now held. “Somewhere with no history. For a night.”

An hour later, they were in the Aston Martin again, but this drive held none of the desperate, silent charge of the escape. Anton drove them not into hiding, but towards the coast. He had a destination in mind: a small, discreet luxury hotel nestled in the South Downs, a place of rolling hills and salt air, owned by a subsidiary of a subsidiary. A place with no connection to Rogers Industries, to conspiracies, to tunnels or banks.

They booked in under an assumed name—Mr. & Mr. Gray—a joke so thin it was almost poignant. The room was a symphony of understated wealth: cream linen, pale wood, a wall of glass leading to a private balcony overlooking the Channel, which lay grey and vast under a brooding sky. It was utterly anonymous, and it was perfect.

The first hour was awkward. They were two soldiers who had forgotten how to be civilians, let alone lovers. They unpacked the single small bag they’d brought. Anton ordered tea from room service. They stood on the balcony, watching the clouds gather, not touching.

The tension wasn’t about danger anymore. It was about proximity without a mission. About the terrifying freedom of the next minute, and the next, with no enemy to outwit, no fortress to defend.

It was Anton who found the catalyst. As he turned from the balcony, the movement pulled at the torn skin on his shoulder, a relic of scrambling through the tunnel hatch. He winced, a faint hiss escaping his lips.

Sabatine was across the room in an instant, his operative’s reflexes still razor-sharp. “What is it?”

“Nothing. A scrape. It’s fine.”

But Sabatine was already moving, retrieving the small, high-end medical kit from their bag. He pointed to the bed. “Sit.”

Anton didn’t argue. He sat on the edge of the pristine duvet, pulling his simple linen shirt over his head. The wound wasn’t serious—a ragged abrasion on his shoulder blade, bruised and angry-looking, dotted with tiny, embedded grit that hadn’t been washed away in their hurried bath.

Sabatine sat behind him on the bed, his knees bracketing Anton’s hips. He opened the kit, his movements reverent and precise. He selected antiseptic wipes, sterile tweezers, and gauze.

“This will sting,” he said, his voice low, close to Anton’s ear.

“I know.”

The first touch of the antiseptic was a cold, sharp bite. Anton stiffened, then forced himself to relax, focusing on the feel of Sabatine’s presence at his back, the warmth of his body, the absolute concentration in his hands.

Sabatine worked in silence. He used the tweezers to pluck out the tiny, stubborn fragments of dirt and brick, his touch astonishingly gentle for hands capable of such violence. Each extraction was a tiny, focused victory. He cleaned the wound with meticulous care, wiping away the dried blood and grime, revealing the clean, pink flesh beneath.

This was not battlefield triage. This was a rite. A deliberate, slow act of cleansing and repair. It was Sabatine speaking the only language he was fully fluent in—the language of action, of fixing what was broken—but directing it now towards tenderness.

Anton closed his eyes, giving himself over to the sensation. The sting of the antiseptic faded, replaced by the soothing pressure of Sabatine’s fingers as he applied a healing salve, then a light, sterile dressing, securing it with gentle touches of medical tape.

When he was done, his hands didn’t leave Anton’s skin. They rested on his bare shoulders, thumbs making slow, hypnotic circles on the tight muscles. Anton leaned back into the touch, his head falling forward.

Sabatine’s hands slid down his arms, then back up. One hand came to rest over Anton’s heart, feeling its steady, slow beat. The other remained on his shoulder, a point of anchor.

They stayed like that for a long time, breathing in sync, the only sound the distant cry of gulls and the whisper of the wind against the glass.

Then, Sabatine shifted. He turned Anton gently by the shoulders until they were facing each other on the edge of the bed. His eyes, grey and solemn, scanned Anton’s face, then dropped to his own hands, which were resting in his lap. They were clean now, but the knuckles were still bruised, the skin scraped from the hatch, from the fight in the exchange.

Almost absently, Anton reached out and took Sabatine’s right hand. He turned it over, palm up, just as he had in the churchyard. But this time, there was no dirt to brush away. Just the map of calluses and scars, the story of his life written in keratin and healed tissue.

He studied it, this instrument of survival and salvation. Then, slowly, deliberately, he brought Sabatine’s hand to his lips.

He didn’t kiss the palm. He turned it and pressed his lips to the bruised knuckles, one by one. A soft, lingering touch on each ridge of damaged bone and skin. It was a kiss of gratitude, of awe, of a reverence so deep it had no name.

Sabatine’s breath caught. He tried to pull his hand back, a reflex of ingrained self-containment. “Anton, don’t. They’re… they’re just hands.”

Anton held on, his gaze locking with Sabatine’s. “They are the hands that built a fire in the snow,” he said, his voice a raw whisper. “The hands that cracked a ghost’s cipher. The hands that held a detonator and saved a city from a different kind of plague. The hands that pushed open a door to the sky.” He kissed the last knuckle. “They are the hands that brought me home. They are everything.”

The words, the kisses, were a dismantling. Sabatine’s defences, so carefully reconstructed after the safe-house breakdown, crumbled under this targeted, loving assault. His eyes glistened, and he looked away, overwhelmed.

Anton didn’t let him retreat. He released his hand, but only to frame his face, forcing his gaze back. “You are not a weapon to be holstered, Sabatine. Not a ghost to be thanked and dismissed. You are the man I love. And I am going to spend the rest of my life learning how to kiss every scar, and thank every callus, for bringing you to me.”

He leaned in then, and this kiss was not on the hand, but on the mouth. It was slow, deep, and full of a promise that had nothing to do with war and everything to do with peace. It was a kiss that said, The debrief is over. The healing starts now.

In the quiet hotel room, with the grey sea brooding beyond the glass, the last of the fortress walls fell. Not with a roar of collapsing stone, but with the soft, sacred sound of a kiss on bruised knuckles, and the silent, grateful tears that followed, absorbed by the clean linen of the bed, in a room with no history except the one they were just beginning to write.

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