Chapter 38: Fractured Reflections

The world was a muffled, jolting roar. Anton was only vaguely aware of being half-dragged, half-carried through the steaming kitchen, past the stunned, wide-eyed stares of sous-chefs still clutching knives and ladles. The grizzled pilot—Mac, his name was Mac—barked orders in a low, urgent tone, clearing a path to a rear exit that opened into a reeking alleyway filled with overflowing bins.

Cold night air, thick with the scent of decay, hit Anton like a physical blow. He gasped, his lungs starved for clean oxygen after breathing in the cloying mix of perfume and cordite. Sabe’s arm was a band of iron around his waist, holding him upright as his legs threatened to buckle.

A nondescript black van, its engine already running, sat idling in the alley. Mac yanked the side door open, and Sabe practically threw Anton inside before scrambling in after him. The door slammed shut, plunging them into near-darkness, and the van peeled away with a screech of tires, leaving the muffled chaos of The Dorchester behind.

For a long moment, the only sounds were the van’s engine, Anton’s ragged breathing, and Sabe’s own harsh, controlled pants. They were thrown together in the dark, their bodies pressed against each other on the cold metal floor with every turn. The adrenaline was a toxic sludge in Anton’s veins, leaving him shaking and nauseous.

A dim interior light flicked on. Mac was up front, his eyes fixed on the road, navigating London’s backstreets with a terrifying, practiced ease.

Sabe shifted, his movements stiff. He wasn’t looking at Anton. His gaze was sweeping the interior of the van, his mind clearly still in threat-assessment mode. But then his eyes snapped to Anton, and the professional mask cracked, revealing a raw, frantic concern.

“Are you hurt?” The question was demanding, sharp and strained. His hands came up, patting down Anton’s arms, his chest, his shoulders, his touch clinical yet trembling with a barely suppressed violence. He was checking for injuries, for blood, his fingers probing with an urgency that bordered on desperation. “Anton. Talk to me. Are you hit?”

Anton could only shake his head, his voice trapped somewhere between his lungs and his throat. He felt Sabe’s hands on him, the same hands that had held him in a waltz, that had shielded him from bullets, now searching for wounds. The contrast was dizzying.

Sabe’s searching hands stilled on his collar. His fingers came away dark and wet.

“You’re bleeding,” Sabe said, his voice dropping to a horrified whisper.

Anton looked down. A dark crimson smear stained the pristine white of his borrowed shirtfront. For a heart-stopping second, he thought he had been shot without realizing it. But there was no pain. He lifted a trembling hand to his neck, his fingers coming away clean.

“It’s… it’s not mine,” he managed to croak.

Understanding dawned in Sabe’s eyes, followed by a wave of self-loathing. The blood was from the shooter. The one Mac had shot. It had sprayed onto Anton when Sabe had tackled him behind the column.

The realization seemed to break something in Sabe. The last of his operative’s composure shattered. A violent tremor ran through him. He grabbed Anton by the shoulders, his grip bruisingly tight, his eyes wild in the dim light.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” he snarled, his voice cracking with a fury that was pure, undiluted fear. “Do you understand me? When I tell you to run, you run! You don’t look back. You don’t stop. You don’t… you don’t almost get yourself killed because you hesitated!”

He was shaking him, just slightly, the terror of those seconds in the corridor finally erupting. “I had a shot. I had a plan. And you… you screamed. You distracted me. You could have gotten us both killed!”

Anton stared at him, seeing not the angry operative, but the terrified man beneath. The man who had just seen the person he was protecting froze at the worst possible moment. The man who had been prepared to die in his place.

“You were going to take a bullet for me,” Anton whispered, the words a statement of awe and horror.

Sabe’s rage evaporated as quickly as it had come, leaving him looking hollowed out, exhausted. His grip on Anton’s shoulders loosened, but he didn’t let go. His head bowed, his forehead almost touching Anton’s.

“It’s my job,” he mumbled, the words a weak, transparent lie.

“No,” Anton said, his own voice gaining strength. He reached up, covering one of Sabe’s hands with his own. It was ice cold. “It hasn’t been about the job for a long time.”

The van swerved into an underground car park, lurching to a stop in a dark, secluded corner. Mac cut the engine. The sudden silence was deafening.

“We’re here,” Mac grunted from the front, not turning around. “Safe house. Five minutes. Then we move again.”

Sabe finally released Anton’s shoulders, pulling back as if burned. He shoved the van door open and jumped out, not offering a hand. The moment of raw vulnerability was over, locked away again behind a wall of grim duty.

They were in the basement of another anonymous building. Mac led them to a steel door, unlocking it with a key from a large ring. The room beyond was another safe house, slightly better appointed than the last, with a small, functional bathroom.

“Clean up. Five minutes,” Mac repeated, before retreating to stand guard by the door.

Sabe went straight to the sink, turning on the tap and splashing cold water on his face. He braced his hands on the porcelain, his head hanging, his shoulders slumped with a weariness that seemed centuries deep.

Anton stood in the doorway of the small bathroom, watching him. His own reflection in the mirror above the sink was a stranger’s face—pale, eyes wide with shock, a smear of someone else’s blood stark against the white of his collar. He looked like a victim. He felt like one.

Then Sabe straightened up, and his reflection appeared in the mirror beside Anton’s. Their eyes met in the glass. Sabe’s face was etched with exhaustion, his hair damp and messy, his own borrowed tuxedo jacket torn at the shoulder from their dive behind the column. He looked like a soldier returned from a lost battle.

He saw Anton staring and his gaze dropped to the blood on his collar. His jaw tightened. He reached out, his movements slow this time, hesitant. His fingers brushed the stained fabric.

“This shouldn’t be on you,” Sabe murmured, his voice thick. “None of this.”

“It was already on me,” Anton replied, his gaze still locked on Sabe's reflection. “You just got caught in the splashback.”

Sabe’s hand didn’t move from his collar. His thumb stroked once, gently, over the stain, a futile attempt to wipe it away. The gesture was infinitely tender, a stark contrast to the violence it represented. It was the touch of a man trying to erase a nightmare from the skin of the man he…

The word hung, unspoken, in the air between their fractured reflections.

Sabe’s eyes lifted, meeting Anton’s again in the mirror. The storm there had quieted, leaving behind a deep, aching vulnerability. The question was there, plain as day: What are we doing?

Anton turned around, breaking the spell of the mirror. He faced Sabe directly, the small space of the bathroom shrinking until they were almost as close as they had been during the waltz.

“You asked me if I was hurt,” Anton said, his voice low and steady.

Sabe gave a tight, jerky nod, his hand falling back to his side.

Anton reached out, his own hand trembling only slightly. He didn’t touch the blood. Instead, his fingers came to rest on Sabe’s chest, right over the spot where he could still feel the frantic beat of his heart from when he’d shielded him on the floor.

“Not enough to forget you just saved me,” Anton murmured.

The words were simple, but they carried the weight of everything—the fire, the accusations, the rain-soaked confessions, the dance, the blackout, the gunfire. They were a thank you, an absolution, and a declaration, all in one.

Sabe’s breath caught. He looked down at Anton’s hand on his chest, then back up at his face. The war in his eyes was over. The last of his defences crumbled, and what was left was a raw, open need that stole the air from the room.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. He covered Anton’s hand with his own, pressing it more firmly against his heart, a silent answer to the question they had both been too afraid to ask.

Outside the bathroom, Mac cleared his throat. “Time’s up. We move.”

The moment broke. The world, with all its dangers and deadlines, rushed back in. Sabe’s expression shuttered, the operative returning. He gave a curt nod and stepped away, turning off the tap.

But as they left the bathroom, the memory of that touch, of the fractured reflections in the mirror, of the blood-stained collar and the unspoken words, lingered between them. They were both broken, both scared, both terrified.

But in the aftermath, surrounded by the wreckage, they had found a reflection of something real. And for now, that was enough to keep them moving into the gathering storm.

----