Chapter 41: A Scar Exposed

The Shoreditch safehouse existed in a perpetual, dusty twilight, the heavy drapes drawn against the prying eyes of the city. Days bled into nights marked only by the frantic clicking of keyboards, the hushed intensity of strategy sessions, and the gnawing anxiety of the looming board vote. They were running out of time, and the pressure was a physical weight in the room, thickening the air with every hour that passed without a breakthrough on Vale Holdings AG.

Sabe had been working for sixteen hours straight, his posture etched into a permanent curve over his laptop. The glow of the screen was the only light he seemed to need, the only thing he acknowledged. Anton had finally insisted he rest, gesturing to the makeshift bed—a dust-sheeted mattress on the floor in a smaller, adjoining room that might have once been an office.

With a grunt of reluctant agreement, Sabe had pushed himself up, his body moving with a stiffness that spoke of old injuries and new exhaustion. He disappeared into the side room, leaving the door ajar.

Anton gave him a few minutes of privacy before following, intending to discuss a new angle on tracing the shell company’s assets. He pushed the door open without knocking.

And froze.

Sabe stood with his back to the door, having just peeled off his sweat-dampened t-shirt. He was in the process of pulling on a clean one, and for a breathtaking, unguarded second, his entire back was exposed.

It wasn't the lean, corded muscle that Anton’s gaze snagged on, though that was impressive in its own right—a map of disciplined strength. It was the landscape of ruin laid over it.

A jagged, ropey scar, the colour of old wine and raw meat, started just below his left shoulder blade and carved a vicious, asymmetrical path down his spine, disappearing into the waistband of his trousers. It wasn’t a surgeon’s clean incision. It was a tear, a rip, a thing of violence and chaos made permanent in flesh. Smaller, paler scars peppered the area around it—shrapnel, Anton realized with a sickening lurch. The main scar was thick and raised, a brutal topographical line on the map of his body.

Sabe went utterly still. He hadn't heard Anton enter, his senses likely dulled by fatigue. But he felt the weight of the gaze on his back. Slowly, he let the clean t-shirt fall back into his hand, not yet putting it on. His shoulders tensed, but he didn't turn around.

The silence was a chasm. Anton’s breath caught in his throat. He had seen Sabe’s body as a shield, a weapon, a vessel of graceful strength. He had never seen it as a record of pain.

“Sabe…” he began, his voice barely a whisper.

“IED,” Sabe said, his voice flat, devoid of all emotion, as if reading from a clinical report. “Kandahar. The vehicle in front of ours took the direct hit. Ours went over the secondary. The chassis buckled. A piece of it… went through the armour.” He gestured slightly with his head, indicating the horrific scar. “Lucky to keep the legs. They told me I might not walk again.”

He said it with no pride, no bitterness. It was a simple statement of fact. This happened. This is the result.

Anton felt the world tilt. The abstract concept of Sabe’s military past—the ‘disgrace,’ the ‘failed mission’—suddenly had a physical form. It was this. This brutal, permanent mutilation. This was the price he had paid long before Anton Rogers and his corporate wars had entered his life.

His eyes traced the path of the scar, his mind, against his will, constructing the moment of horror. The explosion, the shriek of metal, the searing pain. The long, agonizing recovery. The fight to reclaim his own body.

“My God,” Anton breathed, the words escaping him before he could stop them.

At that, Sabe finally turned. His face was a careful blank, but his eyes were defensive shutters slammed down. He saw the pity, the horror, in Anton’s expression, and his jaw tightened.

“Don’t,” he said, the single word a warning shot.

“I’m not…” Anton started, but he didn’t know how to finish. I’m not pitying you? But he was. And he was in awe. And he was violently, incandescently angry at the universe for having done this to him.

“It’s just a scar, Anton,” Sabe said, his tone deliberately dismissive as he finally pulled the clean shirt over his head, covering the evidence of his past. The fabric settled into place, and the vulnerable man was gone, replaced once more by the impenetrable operative. “It’s old news.”

But it wasn’t. Not to Anton. That scar explained everything and nothing all at once. It explained the slight stiffness in his gait that Anton had mistaken for tension. It explained the deep, bone-level understanding of pain and survival. It explained why a man with such formidable skills would choose the shadowy, uncertain life of a PI, answering to no one.

It didn’t explain how he could still move with such fluid grace. It didn’t explain the unwavering strength in his hands, the resilience of his spirit. The scar was a testament to what had been taken from him, but the man standing before him was a testament to what he had refused to surrender.

Anton had to look away. He turned his gaze to the grimy window, his own reflection of a pale, shaken ghost in the glass. He was shaken to his core. He had been obsessed with the fire that had nearly killed him, with the betrayal that was tearing his company apart. But those were fresh wounds. Sabe carried his with him every day, a permanent part of his architecture.

“You never said,” Anton murmured to the window.

“It wasn’t relevant,” Sabe replied, his voice coming from closer now. He had stepped up behind him. Anton could feel his presence, a solid warmth in the cool room. “It still isn’t. It doesn’t affect my ability to do my job.”

“This isn’t about your job!” Anton spun around to face him, the emotion he’d been trying to suppress bubbling over. “Damn it, Sabe, this is about you! That… that isn’t ‘just a scar.’ That’s a piece of you that was torn apart. How can you just… stand there and dismiss it?”

Sabe’s eyes flashed, a crack in his calm facade. “What would you have me do, Anton? Weep? Show you the medical reports? It happened. I lived. I moved on. Dwelling on it is a luxury I don’t have. It’s a luxury we don’t have.” He gestured sharply, encompassing the safehouse, their situation, the entire crumbling world outside. “We have a company to save and a conspiracy to break. My past injuries are a distraction we cannot afford.”

He was right. Of course, he was right. But Anton couldn’t let it go. The image of that ruined skin was burned onto his retina.

“The mission that went wrong…” Anton ventured, the pieces clicking into a more terrible, more complete picture. “The one with the civilians… was that after?”

Sabe’s face closed off completely. The shutters weren’t just down; they were welded shut. “That,” he said, his voice dropping to a deadly whisper, “is a distraction I will not afford.”

He pushed past Anton and walked back into the main room, returning to his laptop as if the last three minutes had never happened. The conversation was over.

Anton stood alone in the small, dark room, the ghost of the scar imprinted on his vision. He felt like he had been given a key to a locked room inside Sabatine Stalker, only to have the door slammed in his face. He had seen a profound vulnerability, a deep well of pain, and had been told it was irrelevant.

But it wasn’t. It was the bedrock of the man. The scar was more than damaged tissue; it was a fossil of the moment the world had tried to break him. And he had refused.

Anton finally followed him out, the planned discussion about Vale Holdings forgotten. He watched Sabe’s back, now covered by the simple grey cotton of his t-shirt. He knew what lay beneath. The knowledge was a weight in his chest, a new, aching dimension to the already overwhelming complexity of what he felt for this man.

The scar was exposed. And in seeing it, Anton felt something within himself break open, too—a protective, furious tenderness that was far more dangerous than any physical attraction. He had thought Sabe was protecting him. Now he understood, with chilling clarity, that he wanted to protect Sabe right back. From the past, from the present, from everything.

And that was a desire more impossible, and more terrifying, than any corporate takeover.

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