All Chapters of Cracking His Code: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

104 Chapters

Chapter 71 – Eight Hours

KirThe plastic keycard clicks red, then green. I got a spare key to Oliver’s room when we checked in so I wouldn’t have to knock when I pay a midnight visit.Empty.The bed is still perfectly made. The cheap hotel pen is chewed to hell on the desk, next to a half-empty water bottle. No Oliver.I stand in the doorway and look at the bathroom. The light is off and the door open. He’s not in there.I gave him one direct, unequivocal order before I left. Stay in the room.Apparently that was more than he could handle. Because he just has to push my fucking buttons.Fine. I drop my jacket on the desk chair. I know exactly how I’m going to handle this when he strolls back in.I’m not going to yell. I’m certainly not going to spank him. He likes that too much. He turns physical discipline into a dare. A convoluted way to get my hands on him so he can prove he can take it and then seduce me with his resilience.Not to mention the perfect curve of his soft, peachy ass.No. I will not play

Chapter 72 – Holding On

OliverSwallowing is a mistake.The hinge of my jaw clicks with a sharp, grinding pop that shoots static straight behind my right eye.Broken, probably. Or at least fractured. Hard to tell when the rest of my face is also radiating heat and throbbing in out-of-sync rhythms. My nose is definitely broken. Blood keeps dripping down the back of my throat, thick and metallic, making me gag. Every time I cough, the right side of my ribcage screams so loud my vision actually grays out around the edges.I don't know what time it is. There are no windows in this basement. Just a buzzing fluorescent tube overhead that makes my retinas ache.Could be night. Could be tomorrow. Doesn't matter."Let's try it again."Broken Nose is standing in front of me. He looks tired. His knuckles are split, mostly from my cheekbones. He’s holding a pair of heavy, rubber-handled pliers. They have dark smears near the joint.My boots are off. My socks are somewhere in the corner. My right foot is resting bare o

Chapter 73 – Confession Time

KirWe move through the ground floor in absolute silence, suppressed rifles raised. Butcher takes the left flank, Saint takes the right. I slip on my night vision goggles and it washes the cavernous space in flat green light. Empty textile racks. Abandoned forklifts. Nothing moving.Every empty room we clear ratchets the tension in my spine one notch tighter. The silence is wrong. He’s here. I know it. But the sheer square footage of the warehouse means we’re burning minutes just sweeping empty space.Then the scream happens.It’s muffled by layers of concrete, but I can hear the raggedness. The panic and pain. The sound rips straight through the cartilage in my sternum. My boots stop moving. The rifle barrel dips a fraction of an inch."Basement," Ray whispers over the comms.We all went over the municipal blueprints of the building as soon as we pinpointed this as Oliver’s location. There are no cameras to give us eyes, so we had to study the layout of the building. I know the

Chapter 74 — Comedown

OliverThe painkillers Tariq pushed into my IV are top-tier, black-market military grade. I know this because my left hand is wrapped in rigid aluminum splints, several of my toes are missing their nails, my ribs are taped so tight I can barely expand my lungs, and I actually feel fantastic.Warm. Floaty. The edges of the room are a little soft.The private clinic smells like antiseptic and expensive, freshly laundered linen. It’s a weird combination.The overhead fluorescents are off. The only light comes from a small desk lamp in the corner, casting a dull yellow glow over the floor.Tariq finishes packing his trauma bag. He glances at the monitor tracking my vitals, nods once to himself, and walks out the door. The rest of the team already filtered out into the hallway after my comment about sharing a room.Dom had actually snorted, shaking her head before dragging Max out by the elbow.That leaves Kir.He’s sitting in a chair next to the examination table, staring at me with an

Chapter 75 – Convalescence

KirTariq hands me three orange plastic bottles and a printed schedule. His handwriting on the labels is an illegible scrawl, but the printed spreadsheet he shoves against my chest is idiot-proof."The jaw is fractured, not shattered," he tells me for the fifth time as he zips his trauma bag, keeping his voice low while Oliver sleeps off the sedatives in the clinic’s back room. "He’s very lucky. There’s no need to wire it shut, but he has to wear the compression strap when he sleeps so he doesn't grind the bone. Soft foods only. Soups. Shakes. If he tries to chew a piece of toast, he’ll reset the fracture and scream the house down. You have to make sure he follows the rules."I shove the bottles into my jacket pocket. "Understood.""Change the bandages on his feet twice a day. Keep antibiotic ointment on the nail beds so the raw tissue doesn't get infected. The ribs just need time and immobilization. Keep him off his feet, Kir. I mean it. If he trips and catches himself on that spli

Chapter 76 — The Waiting Game

OliverMy body is a very loud, very annoying roommate.For the first week, Tariq’s chemical cocktail kept it quiet. I floated through the days in a heavily medicated haze, barely aware of my own limbs. Now, two weeks into this forced breather in our pretty Antibes cage, the heavy painkillers are completely gone. I’m down to over-the-counter ibuprofen. Which means the volume is all the way back up.My jaw is no longer a sharp, blinding agony, but it throbs with a dull, persistent ache that spikes every time I try to talk too fast. The rib tape is driving me absolutely insane. It itches. I sweat underneath it. If I sneeze, the fractured bone grinds against the cartilage, and a white-hot flare of pure misery shoots straight through my chest.The missing toenails are healing into shiny pink nubs, which means I can technically walk, but I look like a lopsided penguin doing it.The worst part is the brace on my hand though.Four metal splints lock the fingers of my left hand in rigid, u

Chapter 77 — Vindication

OliverFour weeks.I stretch my left hand out on the cold marble of the kitchen island. I force the fingers to extend. They tremble, and the tendons pull with a stiff, hot ache, but they bend and straighten at my will.The splints came off three days ago. I spent the first twenty-four hours aggressively rubbing the ghost-itch where the metal used to dig into my knuckles. The skin underneath is dry and peeling. My hand looks gross, a pale, bruised claw, but it works.I can type. Not at my normal, frantic velocity, and my pinky occasionally misses the shift key, but I wrote a fifty-line extraction parser yesterday without wanting to punch a wall.The ribs are just a memory of a really bad time. The heavy white tape is gone. I can take a deep breath without waiting for my skeleton to stab me. My jaw still clicks when I yawn, and the skin around the fracture is a faded, sickly yellow, but I ate actual toast this morning.Kir insists I’m not ready to suck him off yet, but I’ll be damne

Chapter 78 — Panic Room

OliverThe team cleared out just past midnight.Kir told them to leave their heavy gear in the living room and sleep at the Marriott down the coast.The penthouse doesn't have enough beds, and nobody wanted to spend their last night in France sleeping on a marble floor.We leave for Buenos Aires at eight in the morning. Diego Vargas is our next target. Another money man hiding behind gated security.I should be asleep. Kir is asleep. He’s sprawled on his stomach across the king-sized mattress in the master bedroom, taking up an unreasonable amount of space. I’m sitting on the floor of the walk-in closet.I didn't plan to end up here. I went to sleep two hours ago, tucked against Kir’s side, riding the lingering high of the team treating us like a permanent, obvious unit.Then the dream started.The smell of damp concrete and rust. The high, mechanical whine of the basement ventilation fan. The awful, dead weight of the zip ties cutting off the circulation to my hands.I woke up wit

Chapter 79 – Possessive Fallout

KirThe charter flight to Buenos Aires is twelve hours long. The Gulfstream cabin is loud. The engines generate a persistent, high-frequency whine that drills directly into the cartilage of my ears.I hate planes. I hate being sealed in a metal tube over the Atlantic with no tactical exit. Usually, I spend these flights scanning the manifest, cleaning a sidearm, or glaring at the bulkhead until we hit the tarmac.Today is different.Oliver is asleep against my shoulder.He’s wearing my black hoodie. It’s big enough to swallow his narrow frame. The thick cotton bunches around his neck. He has his knees pulled up to his chest in the wide leather seat next to mine. His head rests squarely on my bicep.Before the cellar, I would have forced him to sit across the aisle. I would have put Ray or Saint between us. I would have spent the entire flight watching him out of the corner of my eye, irritable and tense, pretending I didn’t care who he talked to.I don’t have to pretend anymore.

Chapter 80 – Kneel

OliverThe air conditioning unit in the Buenos Aires safe-house rattles like a dying engine. It does a terrible job of cutting the South American humidity.I’m lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. My tablet is heavy on my chest.I’m angry. I’ve been angry since we landed three hours ago, dragging our gear through a grimy transit hub and piling into a transport van. I’m not angry at the team. They’re currently down the hall in the kitchen, talking smack and eating lukewarm empanadas. I’m angry at myself.The closet in Antibes ruined my entire worldview.I dropped to my knees on that hardwood floor, and my brain shut up. Twenty-four years of Blaese-bred arrogance, all my carefully constructed defense mechanisms, totally dismantled by gravity and Kir’s hand on the back of my head. It didn't make me feel small. That’s the thing that’s really messing with my head. It made me feel invincible. The chaos dialed down to zero.I hate how much I want to do it again.My pride is stagin

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