Chapter 61. Frostbitten Streets

The adrenaline that had carried Anton through the door-shattering rescue and the raw, seismic confession had ebbed, leaving behind a cold, granular fear. It settled in his joints, in the pit of his stomach, a constant, low hum of dread. The suite at Le Repos de l'Ombre, once a mirage of safety, now felt like a gilded trap. Every window was a potential eye, every silence a held breath before the shot.

Sabe was on his feet, moving with a stiff, efficient grace that couldn't quite hide the pain in his shoulder. He had shrugged on a fresh, dark sweater from his go-bag, the bulk of the bandage hidden beneath the fabric. The bloodstained jacket was stuffed into a trash bag, a ghost of the recent violence to be disposed of elsewhere.

"We can't stay," Sabe said, his voice low. He was at the window, not looking out, but standing to the side, peering through the narrow gap in the heavy curtains. The city lights painted a sharp line down his profile. "They knew where to find me. It's a short leap to finding this place."

Anton, who had been methodically wiping Sabe's blood from his hands with a damp towel, stilled. The red-tinged water in the basin looked surreal. "Where do we go? Another hotel?"

"No. A flat. Off the grid. A place Rico didn't know about." Sabe finally turned from the window, his gaze meeting Anton's. It was the look they had agreed upon—the look of partnership. But the shadow of his confession—like I’ve already lost you once—lurked in its depths, giving his intensity a new, terrifying weight. "It won't be… comfortable."

Anton almost laughed. Comfort was a concept that belonged to a different lifetime, to a man who worried about stock prices and merger arbitrage, not sniper rounds and bloodstains on five-thread-count linen. That man felt like a stranger.

"Just lead the way," Anton said, his voice rough.

They left the way they had come, through the service entrance, but the illusion of discretion was gone. Every shadow in the corridor seemed to hold a threat. The ride down in the service elevator was a silent, suffocating descent. Sabe held his body between Anton and the door, his good hand resting near the concealed pistol at his back.

The alley behind the hotel was bitingly cold, a damp chill that seeped through Anton's expensive but inadequate wool coat. Geneva in the dead of night was a different city—not a hub of international finance, but a labyrinth of frostbitten stone and echoing emptiness. The quaint cobblestones of the Old Town, charming by daylight, were now treacherous and slick with a thin film of ice.

Sabe set a punishing pace, his head on a constant swivel, his senses stretched to their limit. He didn't walk in a straight line. He wove a complex, unpredictable path through narrow, shadowed alleyways, across deserted squares, doubling back twice in a dizzying pattern designed to shake any possible tail. Anton followed, his breath plumbing in the frigid air, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. It wasn't the physical exertion that winded him; it was the sheer, visceral understanding of their vulnerability. They were prey, moving through a frozen hunting ground.

He watched the set of Sabe's shoulders, the way he favored his right side, the absolute focus that made him seem both utterly present and miles away, locked in a private war with every potential threat. This was the reality of Sabe's world. Not the glamour of private jets and high-stakes intrigue, but this: the grit, the cold, the constant, grinding pressure of being a step away from death.

I protect you like I’ve already lost you once.

The words echoed in Anton's mind with every footfall. He wasn't just seeing a bodyguard doing his job. He was seeing a man living in a self-made hell, tormented by a phantom loss. And he was the cause. His existence was both Sabe's reason for fighting and his greatest source of terror.

Sabe stopped abruptly at a junction, pressing them both into the deep recess of a stone doorway. He held up a hand, listening. The only sound was the distant wail of a siren, probably heading for the café in the Paquis. After a full minute, he gestured, and they moved again, slipping across the wide, exposed boulevard and into the darker, more residential streets of Plainpalais.

The buildings here were taller, more anonymous, their facades grimy with time and exhaust. Sabe led him to a nondescript door squeezed between a shuttered bakery and a laundrette. He produced a key from a magnetic box hidden beneath a loose brick and unlocked it, ushering Anton into a pitch-black stairwell that smelled of damp concrete and boiled cabbage.

"Four flights," Sabe murmured, his voice tight. "No elevator."

Anton just nodded, following him up the narrow, creaking stairs. The journey felt endless, each step a reminder of how far they had fallen from the world of penthouses and corporate suites.

The flat was on the top floor. Sabe unlocked three separate deadbolts before the door swung inward. He entered first, a silhouette against the faint light from the streetlamp outside the single grimy window, his pistol drawn as he cleared the three small rooms with a brutal, practiced efficiency.

"Clear," he said finally, his voice echoing in the emptiness.

Anton stepped inside and closed the door, the multiple locks clicking shut like a series of tomb seals. The flat was a freezing, spartan box. A bare mattress on a metal frame in one room. A small, formica-topped table and two rickety chairs in the main space. A kitchenette with a single cold tap and a two-burner hotplate. It was less than nothing. It was a hole to crawl into and hide.

Sabe was already at the window, adjusting the slats of a broken blind to block the view from outside while maintaining his own line of sight. The professional was back in full command, but Anton could see the fine tremor in his hands, the sheen of cold sweat on his temple.

The reality of their situation crashed down on Anton with the force of a physical blow. The sniper's bullet hadn't just killed Rico; it had shattered the last vestiges of the life he knew. This—this freezing, squalid safehouse—was his world now. And Sabe, wounded and pale, was all that stood between him and the void.

He was shaken, not just by the attack, but by the horrifying proximity of the loss he had almost incurred. He had come within inches of a world where Sabe did not come back. A world where he would be sitting in that opulent suite, waiting for a ghost, until the real ghosts came for him.

He walked to the center of the barren room, his shoes scuffing on the dusty floorboards. He looked at Sabe, who was still staring out into the night, a sentinel against the dark.

"You were right," Anton said, his voice quiet in the hollow space.

Sabe turned, his expression guarded.

"About this," Anton gestured to the room. "About moving. About… everything." He took a step closer. "I was angry before. I felt… caged. But I didn't understand. I didn't let myself see what it costs you to keep me in that cage."

Sabe's gaze softened, the operative's mask slipping. "Anton—"

"No." Anton shook his head, his own fear and gratitude coalescing into a fierce, burning certainty. "I see it now. I see the price. And I am so… goddamn… sorry that my life has become this for you. This cold, this fear."

He closed the final distance between them, standing before Sabe in the dim, frigid flat. He didn't reach out to touch him. The moment was too fragile, too raw.

"But I am also so impossibly grateful that you are the one standing here," he whispered, the words misting in the cold air. "Shaken is too small a word for what I am. I feel… remade. Forged in this damn cold. And I am with you. However we do this. Wherever we go. However long the night."

Sabe looked at him, and the last of the walls came down. The fear, the exhaustion, the relentless pressure—it was all there, reflected back at Anton. But so was the unwavering resolve.

"The night is almost over," Sabe said softly. "And then we end this. Together."

Outside, the frostbit streets of Geneva held their breath. But inside the barren flat, for the first time, Anton felt a flicker of warmth. Not from a furnace, but from the unbreakable, terrifying, and beautiful truth that stood before him. They were two men, wounded and hunted, but they were facing the dawn as one.

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