Chapter 248. Night of Gratitude

The heavy, carved door of the private balcony clicked shut behind them, encasing them in a world of dark velvet night and muffled sounds of the distant city. Geneva lay below, its bright colors of sapphire and gold interwoven around the black thread of the lake. A pleasant crispness hung in the air, carrying a hint of alpine frost from distant peaks, an oddly pleasant contrast to the smell of gunpowder that had clung to the villa walls mere hours before.

Anton stood at the balustrade, a statue of a man hardened into infinity. But the disciplined billionaire was absent; the imperturbable tycoon was no more. In his stead was a man whose control had broken and been reforged in the fire of a split second—one in which he saw Sabatine tottering and the spreading stain of darkness on his shoulder.

Sabatine shifted to follow him, his gestures still cautious, punctuated by the low, medicinal pain in his chest. Anton gripped a formal sling awkwardly against the fine wool of the sweater, which Anton had decreed he should wear. He came to a stop a foot away, close enough almost to feel Anton's body heat, but not quite. The distance between them was charged, a live wire humming with all those unspoken possibilities.

“The doctors were very clear,” Anton said, his low voice raspy from fatigue. He didn’t turn. “Rest. No stress. And yet, here you are, flaunting medical advice as if it’s a boardroom edict.”

“Here I am,” Sabatine repeated, his voice barely above a whisper. He shifted his good shoulder against the stone wall and examined Anton's profile. The clenched jaw, the eyes heavy with shadows and fixed, unseeing, on the city below. “Nonetheless, I couldn't leave you out here by yourself. Bodyguard reflexes, I reckon. Even after taking so much damage to myself.”

The echo of a smile played on his lips, and then it was gone. “A bodyguard. That’s what you are to me, now?”

The words shook Sabatine with their pain. “I don’t know what I am,” he said. “A consultant? A liability? The man who nearly got you killed today?”

Finally, Anton turned around. The city lights reflected in his eyes, making them look like pieces of broken glass. ‘You accepted a bullet that was intended for me, Sabe. That’s what you call ‘nearly getting me killed’? That’s a strange way of putting it.’

“I brought you into that room. My past, my. my colleague, Rico, his intelligence. It was a trap that was woven with threads of my own failures.” Sabatine’s voice was constricted. “Evelyn is dead. Marcus is in custody, spitting threats. And it all leads back to me walking into your office.”

“No,” he said to Sabatine with the final command in the single word. Then he closed the distance between them and his hand paused momentarily beside Sabatine’s wounded shoulder. “It begins with my father's secrets and my brother's resentment and my sister's avarice. But you were the only truth in a den of liars. The only person who didn't want something from me.”

“I wanted the truth.”

“And now you have it. All of it. The ugly, corrupt, bloody truth of my legacy.” Anton’s stare was almost too much to bear. “Do you wish you’d never taken the case?”

This is the barren terror that had been with him always before Anton. “Gray, grinding purpose of atonement. It had been a surprise, a shock, the unexpected draw that had been there from the moment he had met Anton in the penthouse, a fortress of steel and glass, the loneliest man he’d ever met.”

“No,” Sabatine whispered.

The admission seemed to shatter something within Anton. The tense line of his shoulders slumped ever so slightly. He indicated the small wrought-iron table upon which was perched the Burgundy and the two wine glasses. “Sit down. Please. Before you keel over and my guilt rating reaches stratospheric proportions.”

Sabatine complied, easing himself into the chair. Anton poured the wine. The deep red fluid glimmered in the starlight. He offered Sabatine a glassful. Their hands touched. It was a shock of contact that had absolutely no connection to the coolness of the night.

Anton took the seat across from him, but he didn't drink a drop of his cocktail. He merely sat there, holding his glass, his eyes gazing into its depths, as if he could read his own fortunes there. “I spoke to the board, to the Swiss authorities, to three separate news syndicates.”

Sabatine’s stomach turned. “

“I laid it all out. The thievery. Evelyn’s embezzlement and her pact with Marcus. Their intention to auction the prototype to the highest bidder. The firefight.” Anton’s gaze cut upward, fixing on Sabatine. “I told them about your exemplary service. Your investigation into the conspiracy. Your intervention that saved not only my life, but could have averted a global security disaster.”

Sabatine blinked in disbelief. “You. you framed it on Evelyn. Complete.”

“The truth,” Anton corrected him gently. “A package truth, perhaps. One that leaves out the specifics of your former involvement with Rico Nadir. One that suggests your disappearance was not an escape, but an entry into deep cover work in pursuit of evidence. Evidence that you brought, at considerable personal expense.”

“They'll question it. There'll be holes.”

“Let them try.” There was a cold edge that had crept back into Anton’s voice, but this time it was for his own use. “I’ve bought a crucial degree of confidentiality of my firm—and several lucrative patents for certain interested agencies of our glorious government. Your little sting? Taken care of. A certain number of civilians killed in that last op of yours? Discrepancies in intelligence from an abandoned source: that will stick.”

The world lurched. Then, before the glass could meet the floor, Sabatine carefully set it down. The weight that had pressed him down for so long, the anchor of guilt that had pulled him along through every day, didn’t go away, but it…. It moved. It was no longer only he who felt its presence. Anton had taken a part of it himself. Had used his power, his kingdom, as a fulcrum to turn the unturnable.

“Why?” The word ripped from him, jagged. “You could have made me the scapegoat. It would have been cleaner. Easier. The mystery man, the disgraced operative. The perfect villain.”

Anton recoiled as if he’d been struck. "Is that what you think of me?" he said, abruptly rising and pacing back and forth across the balcony, a pent-up tiger in a bespoke suit. "That you consider me someone for whom ‘clean’ comes before right?"

"It’s what you were taught. It’s what your world demands."

“‘My world,’” Anton growled, “‘was a gilded cage of paranoia and loneliness until you crashed into it.’ You recognized the flaws in the structure. ‘You saw me—not the heir, not the CEO, but the man who is terrified of turning into his father.’ A man “so afraid of betrayal that he constructed walls that no one could climb.”' He paused in front of the windows, the chilly draft from the glass ruffling the fog of his exhaled breath. “‘And then you scaled them—not to steal from me but ‘to… to see me.’ In the process of which, ‘you demonstrated that I was not alone within them.’”

He came back to the table, but he didn't sit. He knelt. It was a phenomenally strange thing to see. Anton Rogers, on his knees on a cold stone balcony, his face level with Sabatine's. All of the power struggle they'd been fighting since day one suddenly was erased.

"You asked why," Anton whispered now, trembling with emotion. "Because when Evelyn pulled that gun, I didn't worry about the prototype. I didn't worry about the firm. I didn't worry about myself. I just wondered that I had only just discovered you. And that it would be the universe’s biggest joke to rip you from me before I ever got the chance to."

“Before you got to what?” Sabatine asked, his own heart pounding against his breastbone.

“Before I could say thank you.” Anton’s hand finally rested, not on the good shoulder of Sabatine, but against his cheek, his thumb tracing the shape of his cheekbone as if in worship, and it took Sabatine’s breath away. “Thank you for seeing the truth. Thank you for fighting for me when I was too proud to fight for myself. Thank you for taking that bullet, though I will hate myself for it every day for the rest of my life.”

Sabatine placed his own hand over Anton’s on his body. "Don’t. Hate yourself for it. It was the easiest decision I’ve ever made," he said. The warmth of his touch was a lifesaver.

A sound eked out of Anton—half a sob, half a laugh. He pressed his forehead to Sabatine’s. Their breaths commingled in this tiny, holy space between them. “Well, then. Let me create one for us. Stay. Not as my investigator. Not as my bodyguard. But as my partner. In every way. Help me rebuild something that isn’t built on fear. Let me—let us build something on this.”

“Nothing,” he repeated. “I don’t want anything else. This is—”

     “What is ‘this’?”

     He didn’t elaborate on what ‘this’ meant. There was no need. It was in the shake of his touch, the tentativeness in his gaze, the frayed

“Sabatine thought of his empty flat in London, a place of transit, not home." He thought of the “found family” he had never dared believe in, a notion that was for others, not for him, a broken man. He looked at Anton, a man of silk and steel brought to his knees by gratitude and, oh, so much more, and he knew."

Home wasn’t a place. It was a choice. A rebellion. An act of defiant trust.

“The doctors said I need rest. No stress,” Sabatine murmured, his lips almost touching Anton’s.

“Well, I have a very large, very secure penthouse,” Anton whispered back, a real smile finally touching his eyes. “I can guarantee minimal stress. Except, perhaps, the stress of putting up with me.”

“I think I can handle that.”

     Sabatine closed the infinitesimal gap, and their first kiss was not a rush of passion, but a gradual, thankful meeting. It was a seal, a promise, a sign of survival.

     It tasted of Burgundy wine, cold night air, and a future that was tentative and hard-won.

When they parted, Anton remained exactly where he was, forehead touching Sabatine’s in a gesture of drawing sustenance from the pressure of her skin. The lights of the city twinkled in a fashion that was utterly bereft of concern and beauty. The shadows of the day—silk-wrapped duplicity and steel-cooled brutality—remained as well, hovering on the periphery of the light. But in this corner of the balcony, they had created their own haven.

"Partners," Sabatine said, trying out the word. It felt substantial. It felt

“Partners,” Anton agreed. He got up, extending his hand to Sabatine to pull her up. “Beginning tomorrow. Tonight.” Anton retained Sabatine’s hand, interlocking fingers. “Tonight is for thanks. And for this.”

He led him inside, away from the cool, to the heat and the silence that waited in the suite. The doors to the balcony closed, cutting out the night and its secrets. The way ahead was uncertain, filled with the consequences of what had been revealed today, and the subtle, ominous presence of the mysterious package that had arrived, encrypted, at Anton’s office in Geneva, just as they had left for the villa.

But for now, and in the unspoken understanding that had passed between them, and in the gentle pressure of their clasped hands, they had all that they needed. They had a night of gratitude. They had a truth that had set them free. And they had a love that had been tempered in the fires of adversity and was already their final defiance against a world of lies.