All Chapters of Cracking His Code: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

ChanaThe first thing I notice on the plane is that nobody is sleeping.Eleven hours into a twelve-hour flight and Saint, who falls asleep on tarmac, is awake in his seat with a tablet on his knee. Oliver has been hammering at his laptop since wheels-up over Heathrow, hasn't blinked in forty minutes. Kir, who can fall asleep in the middle of a rain of bullets when he wants to, is awake at the window.Even Butcher has his eyes open and is staring at the ceiling like there’s a movie playing there. He’s clearly deep in thought, which is a worrisome sight on Butcher.The cabin is dim. The charter is a midsize jet with twelve seats in pairs. The galley is at the back, the curtain to it pulled. The WiFi has been holding the whole way because Oba paid for the good package that doesn’t drop over the Atlantic, and it’s the entire reason none of us have slept.I have three browser tabs open. BBC. Sky. The Guardian.All three are running the same story above the fold.POISONING AT MARLBOROU

I sleep nine hours and wake up smelling Oba’s chicken stock and nursing a problem in my sweatpants.The dream that caused it is already fading, but it was about our night at the last club. About Kir using me in front of all those people.I loved every second of it. A new kink has definitely been unlocked and I’d love to keep exploring it. The sooner the better.The digital clock says it’s past three. Afternoon sun cuts through the curtains. The bed is empty and cold next to me. I’m sure Kir’s been up for hours. He can operate on astonishingly little sleep.We got home around six in the morning after the club, and after showering he made love to me again for over an hour. Talking the whole way through it. Telling me how good it felt fucking me in public.Showing those people that I belong to him alone.Then we had two hours of sleep before getting back to work on the Williams-Wynn hit.We didn’t sleep on the plane. He got me off behind the curtain instead, with a hand clasped firm

OliverWe're in a rented house in Atherton. Twenty-two minutes from Holroyd's place by the back roads.Saint and I are at the long oak table in the dining room with three laptops between us and a pot of coffee that's been refilled twice. I have eight feeds open. Eight body cameras. Eight voice channels. Kir, Dom, Butcher, Max, Jozef, Tariq, Ray, Oba. Chana's feed is also up. She's at the safehouse in San Mateo with her setup, talking to me through a separate channel because we’re not running everything through one node, not on a hit this big.The clock on the wall says 8:47 pm.Holroyd's dinner started forty minutes ago."All in position?" I ask, quietly, even though I can see they are.Saint nods. He's got the security feeds. The patrol grid Chana ghosted off Holroyd's own cameras. He's tracking the patrol patterns on a second monitor. There are six men walking the grounds. He has all six tagged with little orange dots. Two more at the gate. Two inside the main house. Six guests

OliverIt opens up in front of me, all at once, the whole dark yawning abyss of misery.The thing I’ve refused to look at since the alarm. A world with no Kir in it. A house in Canada with one set of footsteps. A bed that's too big and empty. A wedding that doesn't happen. The rest of my life as a long flat grey corridor with him not at the end of it, not anywhere in it, just gone, just a hole shaped exactly like the only person who ever made me feel like a whole person.I can't breathe.I press his slack hand to my mouth. His blood is on my lips. I don't care."Don't you dare," I whisper into his knuckles, and it comes out wrecked. There’s nothing left of the steamroller, just a man falling apart over the body of his soulmate. "Don't you dare leave me here. I have done everything I can. I found the surgeon who can fix you and he’s on his way. I will always find a way to fix you. You can’t leave me, Kir. You can’t. You don’t get to die on me, Kirill, I forbid it, do you hear me,

ChanaA week into Kir's recovery I make a serious tactical decision, which is that I’m going to spend as little time as possible in a room with Oliver.It’s not that I don’t love him. I love him a great deal. I have, in the months we’ve been working together, come to think of him as the kind of small irritating brother you'd kill for and also occasionally want to smother with a pillow. The problem is that I’m two ill-timed comments away from saying something that will cost me a friendship I value, and Oliver-in-carer-mode is a man engineered, in a lab somewhere, to draw the worst possible comment out of every person in his vicinity.He is, for one thing, ordering people around like he’s been declared the undisputed monarch of this territory and the others are just quietly accepting it.He’s ordering Tariq around about Kir's antibiotic schedule, even though Tariq has been doing this job for sixteen years and Oliver has been doing it for about a week. He’s telling Ray how to adjust t