Chapter 287. The Unlearning

The island was a sigh.

It emerged from the iron-grey Atlantic as a smudge of green and granite, crowned with a low, clinging mist. The jet had touched down on a rough, short airstrip on a larger, neighbouring island—a place of sheep and taciturn fishermen who asked no questions for the thick envelopes of cash Anton provided. From there, a battered, open fishing boat had ferried them across a narrow, churning channel, the salt spray stinging their cheeks with a cleansing bite.

Their new home was not a palace. It was a long, low crofter’s cottage, built centuries ago from stone the colour of storm clouds, with a newer, seamless addition of glass and grey timber facing the sea. It hunched against the wind, stubborn and enduring. As the boat puttered away, the silence that descended was absolute, profound. It was the silence of the world before humans, broken only by the relentless, rhythmic crush of waves on rock and the keening cry of gulls.

For a long moment, they just stood on the narrow wooden dock, their single duffle bag at their feet, and breathed it in. The air was cold, laced with salt and peat and a wild, untamed purity. It scoured the last traces of London’s perfumed toxicity from their lungs.

“It’s…” Sabatine began, but words failed. He was a creature of cities, of shadowed alleys and digital labyrinths. This vast, empty expanse of sky and sea was terrifying in its openness. There was nowhere to hide, and yet, paradoxically, it felt like the first true hiding place he’d ever known.

“It’s ours,” Anton finished softly, taking his hand. “For now.”

The cottage was warm inside, heated by a hidden geothermal system. The main room was a cathedral to the view: one entire wall was glass, framing the endless, shifting tapestry of the ocean. The furnishings were simple—deep sofas in grey wool, a massive stone fireplace, shelves lined with well-worn books, not for show but for reading. There was no art except for what the sea and sky painted through the window.

The first day was a strange, disjointed ballet of unlearning.

They moved around each other with a carefulness that had nothing to do with suspicion and everything to do with awe. The frantic energy of the escape was gone, leaving a hollowed-out space they didn’t know how to fill. They were two tightly wound springs, suddenly released into an environment with no tension.

Anton found himself compulsively checking the secure satellite terminal in the small study, his fingers itching for a keyboard, for a problem to solve. Sabatine paced the length of the glass wall, his body taut, his eyes constantly scanning the horizon not for threats, but out of sheer habit, unable to believe no threat existed.

It was Anton who broke first. He emerged from the study, saw Sabatine standing like a sentinel at the window, and something in his heart cracked.

“Stop,” he said, his voice gentle.

Sabatine turned, a question in his eyes.

“Stop being on guard. The only thing out there,” Anton said, gesturing to the wild sea, “is weather. And I’ve checked the forecast. We have forty-eight hours before the next gale.”

He walked to the kitchen, a compact space of stainless steel and slate. “I’m going to make tea. And I have no idea how to use this kettle.” It was a lie; the kettle was straightforward. But it was an offering—a shared moment of mundane incompetence.

A slow smile touched Sabatine’s lips. He joined him. “It’s electric. You press that button.”

“Revolutionary,” Anton deadpanned, pressing it. The domestic normalcy of the sound—the click, the soon-to-be hum—was absurd and wonderful.

They took their mugs to the sofa and sat, not touching, but angled towards the same vast window. The silence returned, but it was softer now, a shared contemplation.

“I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Sabatine admitted, his voice quiet against the backdrop of waves.

“I know,” Anton replied. “So do I. We’ve been living in the gust before the storm for so long, the calm feels like a trick.” He sipped his tea. “But what if we let it be real? Just for these hours. What if we pretend we’re just two men who came here to… be away?”

“What do men who are ‘away’ do?” Sabatine asked, a genuine curiosity in his tone.

Anton looked at him, his blue eyes soft. “I have absolutely no idea. I haven’t been ‘away’ since I was fifteen.”

The admission hung between them, a testament to a life of relentless duty. Sabatine understood it in his bones. He set his mug down. “Then we’ll have to invent it.”

He stood and offered his hand. Anton took it, letting himself be pulled up and led to the glass wall. Sabatine slid open a heavy door, and the sound of the world rushed in—the roar of the sea, the whip of the wind, the smell of cold, salt-spray life.

“First,” Sabatine said, raising his voice over the elements, “we go for a walk. Not a patrol. A walk.”

They followed a faint, sheep-trodden path that wound along the cliff tops. The wind tore at their clothes, flushing their skin with sharp, clean cold. They didn’t speak; there was no need. The shared physicality of battling the elements was conversation enough. Sabatine pointed out a fulmar soaring on the updrafts, its wingtips brushing the cliff face. Anton stopped to examine a cluster of tiny, vibrant wildflowers clinging impossibly to a crack in the granite, their defiance a splash of purple against the grey.

They walked until their lungs burned with cold air and their cheeks were numb. When they returned to the cottage, shuddering and alive, the simple act of closing the door on the wind felt like creating a new, shared world of warmth.

The second day, the unlearning went deeper.

Anton woke to find Sabatine already up, standing before the glass in just his sleep trousers, watching the dawn bleed fiery orange across the water. Anton came to stand behind him, wrapping his arms around Sabatine’s waist, resting his chin on his shoulder. They watched the sun rise in silence, and the intimacy of the quiet, of the shared awe, was more profound than any kiss.

Later, Anton built a fire in the great fireplace, the ritual of arranging peat and wood, of striking the match, satisfyingly primal. Sabatine found a tin of soup in the well-stocked pantry and heated it. They ate it from chipped ceramic bowls on the rug before the fire, the flames painting gold and amber on their skin.

The careful distance evaporated.

Sabatine leaned back against the sofa, and Anton settled between his legs, his back to Sabatine’s chest. Sabatine’s arms came around him, and they simply stayed like that, watching the fire consume itself. Anton felt Sabatine’s breath against his neck, the steady beat of his heart against his spine. It was an embrace that asked for nothing, promised everything.

“I keep thinking I should be doing something,” Anton murmured, his head lolling back against Sabatine’s shoulder. “Analysing data, planning the Geneva approach.”

Sabatine’s lips brushed the shell of his ear. “You are doing something. You’re letting your nervous system remember what peace feels like. It’s the most strategic thing you could do for the fight ahead.”

The logic of it, framed in the tactical language they both understood, finally allowed Anton to fully let go. He turned his face, seeking Sabatine’s mouth. The kiss was not one of heat, but of depth—slow, exploring, a silent conversation of gratitude and discovery.

Time lost its meaning. It was measured in cups of tea, in the changing light on the water, in the slow, tender mapping of each other’s bodies without the frantic urgency of before. They learned the landscape of scars—the thin, white line on Anton’s ribs from a childhood sailing mishap, the rougher, raised skin on Sabatine’s shoulder from a shrapnel wound he never discussed. Each was a story whispered against skin, a secret surrendered, a piece of armour willingly laid down.

On their last evening, with the promised gale beginning to whip the sea into white-capped fury beyond the glass, they lay tangled in the sheets of the bedroom that faced the storm. The world was a symphony of wind and water, a dramatic, violent contrast to the peace within the stone walls.

Sabatine was tracing the line of Anton’s eyebrow with a fingertip, his expression solemn. “This,” he said, his voice barely a whisper beneath the storm’s howl. “This is what I was fighting for. And I didn’t even know it.”

Anton caught his hand, pressing a kiss to his palm. “What do you mean?”

“All of it. The military, the investigation, the digging for truth… it was a penance. I was trying to earn a right to a peace I didn’t believe I deserved.” He met Anton’s gaze, his eyes reflecting the turmoil outside and the calm within. “You didn’t make me earn it. You just gave it to me. This island, this silence… you.”

Anton’s throat tightened. He pulled Sabatine closer, until their foreheads touched. “You were worthy of it from the moment I met you. I was just too guarded to see that giving it to you was how I would find it for myself.”

The storm rattled the windows, a reminder that the world of conflict and conspiracy still turned. Geneva awaited. Evelyn and Marcus were plotting. The prototype was still out there.

But here, in their fortress of stone and trust, they were no longer just a billionaire and a bodyguard defined by their traumas. They were Anton and Sabe, two men who had found, in the other, a harbour so profound it had changed the very geography of their souls. They had unlearned loneliness. They had learned, in waves and whispered love, what it meant to be home.

As the gale reached its peak, they fell asleep wrapped around each other, not in escape, but in fortification. They were storing up the light of this sanctuary, knowing they would need its memory to navigate the shadows ahead. They had been given the rarest of gifts: not just a hiding place, but a foundation. And whatever came next, they would face it not as fragmented men, but as partners, their love forged in fire and now tempered in the deep, quiet peace of the unlearning.

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