all this and heaven too

I am an Avery and these are my babies in whatever fucking worlds I want because my partner is a gift. var sc_project=9895891; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_security="3984d1e2"; var scJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://secure." : "http://www."); document.write("");

[v-engence]

making love with violence

[v-engence]

The next sentence died on his tongue as she stood, chair clattering to the floor as it tumbled over. He had expected it. Josh could only assume that an ability – the oddness that came with being able to touch and feel things, read their life even when they weren’t living, to extract words without picking through pages – like theirs wasn’t one that she had shared before. Brannagh would have ended up, at best, in a psych ward or, at worst, poked and prodded, locked up and caged away by some scientists who wanted to figure her out.

It was like that ten percent brain myth that floated around once or twice a year in Hollywood movies. What would the government, the military in particular, give to get their hands on someone who had the ability to do things that other humans couldn’t? When Josh had been younger, he’d dabbled with the idea that he was an aborted super soldier project. An cocky teenager with too much time on his hands, he’d built up so many scenarios of his origins, what exactly had happened to him in his mother’s womb that made him so completely different from others. He’d been born to Craig and Aoife Murray, and he knew for a fact that they were his parents because he had the birth footage and a piece of paper with DNA results on it.

Along with a few other fucked up markers, but Josh had already guessed that there was something wrong with his genetics. He didn’t have a good grip on science because he’d never been interested, and as much as his younger self had conjured fantasies of where he’d come from, his older self knew better than to poke his nose in places such as that.

But here he was anyway, stuck in the middle, with Brannagh Tierney – the child, girl, woman he’d been living inside of periodically since he’d been a teenager – about to touch him.

A don’t let out a croak and keeled over the moment she touched him.

Chained and seated, Josh shook with the force of it. It was worse than any beating he had taken as a teenager. It was worse than falling out of tree and getting the wind knocked out of him. It was like something with whispy, spidery fingers had dug its way into his chest, wrapped itself around everything that had ever been him and yanked it out, pulling him inside out. He was falling, the floor tumbled out from underneath his feet, and Josh wasn’t even sure if he was breathing anymore.

Everything came like a punch in the face. Too much information was shoving itself inside Josh’s brain. Flashes and images, sounds of screaming and laughter, sounds of deep sighing and mumbling beneath tired breaths. Faces and moments flickered behind his eyes. Needle on skin and the tight, throbbing sensation of the machine gunning and vibrating. Sheets tangled about legs that weren’t his. Hands that were pale and feminine, slender and pretty held up in front of his face. A hospital room. The beeping of machines and footfalls. Darkness. The scent of cheap, slightly burned coffee.

His hands trembled when she pulled away, and Josh realized that he hadn’t been breathing. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed. It felt like a lifetime, but it couldn’t have been more than a few moments, a minute at best. Sucking in a sharp, shallow breath, he focused his eyes on Brannagh.

He would have laughed if his lungs would allow it. What he’d done to her? That was rich. She’d been the one to touch him. “Nothing,” he croaked, tongue and mouth as dry as sandpaper. He swallowed, working his tongue to slick the roof of his mouth. “Something. Fuck, something, but I really need you to stop yelling because someone’s going to show up and then you’re going to have to explain this.”

[silverliars]

Brannagh didn't know if you could get a hangover from having your entire being turned inside out and fused with someone else's, but it seemed likely. Her head was pounding, her throat was dry, and she could barely think, so full was she with the awareness of Joshua. Every experience he'd ever had was crowded into her head beside her own thoughts. Every skinned knee, every birthday, every tattoo, every lover, all the books they'd cumulatively read via touch. His memories were hers which probably meant hers were his. Brannagh didn't want her secrets opened up to anyone. She'd effectively walled off her own memories, and the idea of a stranger running through them made her ill. Claiming herself and everything that included had taken years. Brannagh didn't want to start the process over.

Quick and sharp, she glanced over her shoulder at the door and the reflective window behind which anyone could be standing. Brannagh didn't want a witness to this. Whatever was happening here it belonged to the dark side of her. To secrets she had thought she could keep from coming to light. Brannagh refused to taint her work environment with it.

A few shallow seconds stuttered by, Brannagh scarcely daring to breathe lest she hear the rap on the door that would tell her someone heard her outburst and had come to investigate. She remained frozen, eyes locked Joshua's. Pulling away, moving at all, seemed to be inviting trouble. She exhaled softly. He had blue eyes. Who - what - was he? The silence rushed against her ears, deafening as a ticking clock. Suddenly claustrophobic, the sense of not having enough time seized up in Brannagh's throat, like she'd been locked in a trunk and was running out of air. Her pulse slammed against her temple. She knew suffocation all too well. Years on and it still haunted her nightmares.

A minute passed. Two minutes. Five. Slowly, Brannagh unwound her muscles from the tense knots she'd forced them into, pulling back from Josh's still form. She swallowed hard, the uncomfortably flickering bulb overhead abruptly returning to her awareness. Everything was too harsh. Until now she'd lived asleep, and touching Josh jolted her awake. If only one point of contact could so thoroughly shatter her world, what could more do?

"If you didn't do that," her voice came out a shattered whisper, "What did? What happened?" Smothering her fear, Brannagh fixed him with the sort of glare that could stop even Niall Tierney, if only for a moment. "And don't say it was nothing. If you lie to me, I will leave you here and let someone else deal with you."

[v-engence]

breath of life

[v-engence]

Hannah looked down at her hands. They were the same as they had been before, long and thin, the nails of a few fingers growing to the side instead of straight. Her polish was chipped. She’d spent last night in the bath painting them, tongue caught between her teeth in concentration as she’d dragged the brush over the nail and sighed every time the polish spread and stuck to the skin. It was surreal. Last night her nails had been perfect. Now they were chipped and broken.

She glanced back at Dylan, running her tongue along the fronts of her teeth. She’d been dead. Actually, truly dead. Her heart had stopped beating and her brain had stopped firing off coherent thoughts and she’d been dead and cold, and she still felt so fucking cold that she wanted to crawl inside someone because maybe she’d find some warmth there.

She cleared her throat, giving him a sceptical look. “You’ve been doing this forever, right? Like, it’s not something that just happened one day?” God, wouldn’t that be a fucking trip? Up until now, the weirdest thing that had ever happened to Hannah was her father being a murderer and her mom acting like it was totally okay and wasn’t weird or anything. It was, of course, really fucking weird but she went with it. But waking up and having to be careful about who you touch because you might bring them back to life? Fucking trip, man. “And you just, what, don’t know what goes on outside of your own little world?”

Maybe that came off a little cruelly, but Hannah had never been one to mince words and sugar coat. If she could do something like Dylan could, she’d want to know what else was out in the world. Bringing people back from the dead was cool and all (and she was super thankful for that, even if her life was now officially a mess; she’d rather a mess than dead), but what else was there? A lot, probably, or at least something. While Hannah had never been into horror movies and bad B-grade slasher flicks, she did like fantasy movies and books. Dragons had been her favourites as a child, and she’d spent an entire week in a funk when her mother had finally broken that news of unicorns being made up to her when she’d been eight.

Vampires and creepy things that went bump in the night weren’t something that Hannah would want to come face-to-face with, but a werewolf could be kind of cool. As long as it wasn’t like the werewolves from Harry Potter, because they looked more like bald, spindly babies on stilts than werewolves. Mermaids and sires and dragons and every other kind of mythical creature that she had read about in the paperback novels she picked up at the library would be really cool to talk to. Especially if that mythical creature was centuries old and could tell her what the fuck was up with pyramids and Stone Henge.

Compared to those ideas, Dylan was downright boring.

Not that she wasn’t still thankful or that being able to bring people back to life was boring, per se, but it was a lot less interesting than someone who could turn into a bat or live forever. Or, maybe, Dylan was a sketchy axe-wielding murderer, and that would make him both terrifying and less boring.

Hannah gave him a sour look, snorting and flicking her hair over her shoulder in a dismissive gesture. “I’m not stupid,” she said, and she could feel every single teacher side-eyeing her when she asked a slight-but-not-really off topic question that derailed the conversation peering at her. “It’s not like I haven’t read stuff. I mean, there’s a bunch of Dracula-type vampires and then there’s Sparkle McSparkle-Pants in, like, one book. They’re probably all, y’know –” She held up her hands in front of her face, index fingers curled down like little fangs against her mouth, making a little hissing noise. Probably not scary, but at least it got her point across.

She lifted her eyebrows and watched him move out of the living. And then she did what she did best.

She snooped.

There was a reason her mother had called her Felix when she’d been a child, and a reason that her friends had picked up on it whenever they’d come over to her place. Hannah didn’t really see a point in doing things the easy way. What was the point in going to easy route, walking on solid, levelled ground when she could run and jump and climb a tree? Sure, sometimes she hit the ground at an awkward angle and ended up breaking an ankle, but it wasn’t like she did that more than once. Hannah always learned from her mistakes. She just tended to make more of them than anyone else.

Going through a stranger’s shit? Probably not the best idea, especially considering everything that had happened. Dylan was still a stranger, even if he was a bit of a weirdo who had brought her back to life, and Hannah didn’t know what made him tick. She knew what made her tick, and it involved people going through her things without her permission. She even got snippy with her mom when she went to pick up her laundry from the floor. It wasn’t like she was mad because her mom was doing her laundry (because, to be honest, Hannah wasn’t going to do laundry until she was down to her last pair of panties, and even then she might just go al fresco instead of washing anything); she was mad because it was her space and she hated having it invaded.

Dylan might be like that, but Hannah still poked around. On the tips of her toes and moving around, opening drawers and looking for anything incriminating that should make her want to flee. Like bloody gloves or a jaw of eyeballs or a necklace made of teeth.

Nothing. She found nothing. Hannah was no impressed. Plunking her fists on her hips, she turned, eyes narrowed to scan over the living room. It was normal and looked a lot like her own, if a little less cluttered. Okay, so maybe a lot less cluttered, but that was the hazard of living with Hannah. Still, she had expected something other than normality. He was a necromancer or whatever; shouldn’t he have something incriminating or just plain old weird?

She huffed, dropping her arms and crossing the living room to the window, grabbing a pack of cigarettes and the lighter, seating herself next to the window. The chilly wind swept in, brushing over her bare skin. She shivered, peeling off the plastic and crumpling it into a little pile beside her. Her hands shook as she pushed a cigarette between her lips, thumb sliding off the lighter wheel. She couldn’t get a grip on herself, when she had nothing to do but wait, and it took nearly a dozen tries with the lighter to light the flint.

Smoking her cigarette, Hannah looked out the window. She liked Chicago, especially at night. It was pretty and lit up, but not too big like New York was. She liked the bricks and the concrete and the nitty-gritty feel on the sidewalk when she hit the streets at night, and she liked that it more homey than other cities she had visited. It felt like home and it didn’t look any different than it had the day before – even though everything had changed since yesterday morning. Hannah had died, but the world kept turning and spinning, the city kept existing and no one had stopped to pause and fall apart because she had been dead. Hell, the city still thought she was dead and it was still moving.

It was far more unnerving than she’d thought it would be.

On her third cigarette by the time Dylan came back, she twitched when he spoke, head turning to look at him, legs unfolding from the window ledge as she tossed the butt out the window. She felt bad about littering, but where else was she gonna put it? The trash? She’d once set a can on fire trying to hide her cigarettes from her mom; she wasn’t trying that again.

Stepping towards the couch, she plopped down, leaning forward to dress up her oatmeal. “So,” she said, dusting the top with a thick layer of brown sugar, “what exactly did you do to me? I mean, I know you brought me back and everything, but did you, like, try to grope me or some shit? Or touch me in a special place?” That didn’t sound right, she thought as she sat up with a little frown, picking up the bowl. “That sounded wrong but you know what I mean.”

She swallowed a bite, leaning back and flicking her eyes up to him. “You gonna sit down, big man, or just stare at me? ‘Cause I got questions and they might last all night.”

[silverliars]

Dylan nodded. He felt like a puppet, dumbly strung up to jerk around uselessly as Hannah asked him questions. How could he possibly begin to explain the enormity of his reality to her? It wasn't very complex, in the end. He could bring people back to life. His mother told the future, or the present, or sometimes even the past. Somewhere out on the east coast he had a small pack of cousins and aunts, all with varying degrees of supernatural talent. All, according to his ma, particularly talented at getting underfoot. She'd lived with them before his father brought her out to Chicago, and they still spoke on the phone, twice a week. Or rather an assortment of people yelled into the phone while his mother made noises of assent and Dylan pretended he wasn't listening in. He'd grown up with it all and some days he still doubted whether it had been real. Then again, coming back from the dead did wonders for one's credulity.

"I found out I could do it when I was a kid." He raised his shoulder in a half shrug. "Lucky my mother knew what it meant." Dylan's eyebrows beetled together when she hissed. With her face all wrinkled up like that, Hannah looked more like a child pretending to be a walrus than an undead menace, but she got her point across well enough. "She never said anything about anyone else. Just us." A beat. No, Dylan decided. He didn't need to explain who us was. Psychics and witches and little boys with trembling hands who brought back the dead. He'd made his point well enough.

The smell of smoke lingered thick in the living room. Dylan decided not to cough. He wasn't asthmatic, and he figured enough things had made Hannah feel bad today, though his eyes watered at the unfamiliar acridity. 

She made her oatmeal with brown sugar, thick sweetness layered over bitter ash. That didn't mean anything except that Dylan thought it fit her, watched her stir it with a near fascination. Adrenaline, maybe. He'd seen the dark lines of sugar marbling with porridge a hundred times before. Just for tonight, because he'd brought someone back to life, everything was sharp and hard and would be better in hindsight.

At her behest, Dylan sat down. Heat burned beneath his ears and he regretted her phrasing probably more than she did. It made him sound like a pervert, someone who spent his time in the ice boxes fucking the corpses. While more than one person had implied that before, it sounded a little different coming from a girl who'd woken up to find him cutting her clothes off. Significantly more incriminating.

"I don't have to-" Dylan cut himself off, swallowed hard, tried again. "Touching your skin is all it takes. And intention. Magic-" he sounded stupid. Dylan didn't even know what he was talking about, wasn't sure if the thing that allowed him to exchange a few years of his life for all of someone else's was magic or not. Just that it happened. "It likes intention. If I didn't want it, nothing would happen. You'd still be dead." He watched her take a bite. "Does that help?"

[v-engence]

good graces, bad influence

She tugged the pins from her hair as she moved, heels clicking rhythmically on the pavement as she tossed the pins to the ground. Pollution and waste—she was sure that someone would reprimanded her for littering, but she had nowhere to put them. The dress she had squeezed herself into only hours before was two shades too tight, but the bodice gaped when she moved. She had stuck the edges down with double-sided tape, but there was too much fabric on the sides to hold anything without it just slipping down and falling to the ground.

Ana’s jaw clenched in a stuttering pattern, catching the side of her tongue and flooding her mouth with the taste of iron. She still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened, only that there had been a sudden commotion on the far side of the party and then screaming. It had sounded like someone had been stabbed, but she hadn’t taken steps forward to check the scene out. Grabbing Mitch’s arm had been first instinct, the lawyer’s number ringing through her ears as she’d dragged him out of the grand hall while everyone had been looking the other way.

253-555-9953. She could remember that. The others had sat in a circle, chanting the number like a mantra of hope and world peace for almost an entire day, ensuring that everyone knew who to call in case anything went wrong. Well, she thought numbly, a little bubble of hysteria burst into her throat, throwing her into a state of light-headedness, something had gone wrong.

Her heart thumped heavily against her chest, and she glanced to the left, painted nails still digging into Mitch’s arm, held on like a Venus flytrap with its only meal in years, refusing to let go. They weren’t near the hotel anymore; cars whizzed by them, shops proclaiming twenty-four hours service and cheap cigarettes with neon signs flashing brightly in the windows. Not out of the woods yet, but getting closer and closer. If anything went wrong, they were supposed to get away, change into street clothes and meet up at designated street sign.

Ana let out a little huff, stopping abruptly and turning to face Mitch. “Do you have any idea where we are?”

[silverliars]

"Ana." Mitch was fairly certain he'd been saying her name for the past five minutes, but that might just have been in his head. "Ana, stop."

He wasn't sure how long she'd been dragging him, only that when the screaming started, when he'd moved towards it with a sort of thoughtless determination, it had been her sharp nails in his arm that pulled him back, forced him to think long enough to push her towards the stairs. They could meet up later. For the moment, everyone needed to get out intact.

On his way, Mitch had pulled the fire alarm. His hand and arm were stained blue black, covered in a jet of ink that wouldn't fade for a week. The wasted water barely grazed against his consciousness, mind too overfull with the other events of the night to even consider it. Everything had gone so wrong so fast. This wasn't supposed to happen. They dealt in demonstrations, not tragedy. Whatever had happened tonight at the Ritz, it was not part of the plan, or what remained of it. Mitch could practically feel everything spiraling out of control, his heartbeat loud in his ears.

His feet hurt and if he walked any longer he was going to throw up. The evening's horror weighed too heavy to keep off his chest any longer, thick in the grimy streets and garish motel signs glaring down at him. When Ana turned, Mitch stopped gratefully.

"No fucking clue." His voice rasped against his dry throat, thirst he'd pushed away with panic crashing down in a sudden wave. He glanced around as though the enigmatic, busty silhouette advertising the Dancing Bare gentlemen's club would have the answers. Mitch didn't carry a phone, though he had one at home he used only for calling his mama, lest she kill him. "Gotta be past midnight though. We've been walking for a while." 

[v-engence]

live in the bedroom

[v-engence]

How had he lived without this? Oliver didn’t know how he’d spent so many years without Nikolai. Of course he knew how he’d done it. He’d done it by jumping around, spending time in hostels and strangers’ beds, sleeping on whatever couch he was shoved towards. There had been no Nikolai to fix him breakfast and a snack when he had forgotten, nudging him towards the bathroom when he needed to shower after a workout in the gym.

There had been no Nikolai Maslak. How the hell had he existed without Nikolai?

Oliver’s head tipped back, eyes half-closed and mouth turned up into a smile. Teeth, tongue, hands—Oliver would take anything Nikolai was willing to give him.

“Это прозвучало почти романтично. Собираетесь ли вы мягкий на меня?” he murmured, voice husky and thick with sleep and desire. His leg slipped down, the side of his knee touching the mattress as he let out a moan, hips twitching up. He was spent from the night before, but his body still sparked up with hot-white pleasure when Nikolai touched him. “I’m not tired. I’m just…resting. For round twenty.”

It hadn’t been twenty rounds. Oliver knew that much. As blurry as the haze of sex he’d gone through the night before was, he knew that not even years of celibacy would give him enough energy to fuck for that long. It had been years since he’d gone all night, sprawled out on his stomach and drawing lazy patterns on his partner’s side, resting and waiting for his cock to perk up again. He’d been younger then, too, when he and Nikolai had been intimate, and the years that had passed had dampened his libido.

Mostly, he corrected, tipping his head down and sliding his hand from Nikolai’s shoulder and down his back, thumbing riding over the bumps of his spine. There had been people Oliver had slept with, shedding the last of his shame off his shoulders when he’d stepped off the plane and told himself he could never go back to America. What was the point in feeling shame about what he liked when he didn’t need to be Oliver Kennedy Hayes anymore?

This was different. This was Nikolai, the man he’d known since he was a child of merely ten, and he was the one who’d built him up, made him into who he was today. Or, at least, had a part in it.

Oliver pushed up onto an elbow, fingers digging into Nikolai’s shoulder as he sat up, hips stuttering up with a jerky movement. “We’re not going anywhere if you have your hand on my dick,” he said, fingertips dancing down his spine again. “No shower, no coffee. We’ll probably never leave this bed. Hell, I might end up dying of starvation mid-fuck.”

His hand flattened against his shoulder, tipping his head down to brush his lips across Nikolai’s cheekbone. He’d missed touching. It wasn’t easy to touch people so intimately when you were constantly on the run and glancing over your shoulder, and Oliver had never been particularly touchy-feely. It wasn’t how he was raised. His parents had never put much stock in touching beyond what was socially acceptable in public. A pat on the back, a one-armed hug. Nothing which lasted more than a few seconds.

Touch with Nikolai was different. It always had been. He had known Nikolai since he was a child and their relationship had always been an odd one. He had twenty years on him, had been through harder times than Oliver could ever dream of, and he’d seen and done things Oliver hadn’t been able to deal with—but he’d been the only one to touch him constantly. Even when they weren’t sleeping together and Oliver was just a teenager, Nikolai had been the one to touch him. Even when it was just training, it had been touch, and Oliver had felt like a dying man in the desert tasting water for the first time in years when Nikolai touched his skin.

Touching him now was like feeling sunshine on his skin for the first time. Oliver didn’t know how he lived without it, how he survived without touch and taste and Nikolai against him, pressed close and hands wandering across his body.

[silverliars]

Nikolai made a dismissive noise, nuzzling stubbornly against Oliver's jawline. He knew he'd gone soft. He'd carved out a place within him to make room for Oliver, the harsh corners of his being eroding into a gentle holding where Oliver had settled himself. That didn't mean he needed to point it out. He brushed his fingers back up the inside of Oliver's thigh, laughing low into his ear. "Weren't you just complaining about me being hard?" 

It was a cheap distraction and Nikolai knew it, an out to keep him from baring the feelings he'd gone years without speaking of. When he'd still been Oliver's handler they couldn't say anything at risk of upsetting their balance. To be more than they were or to acknowledge that they were lovers was to court disaster. Nikolai never could have kept Oliver on the path set out for him without silence. If they were in love, even if Nikolai was in love with Oliver, then there was a future for him besides the CIA. He would hide him in his skin without a second thought and Nikolai wouldn't turn him out. Even when they parted Nikolai didn't tell Oliver he loved him. There was no need to break that streak.

Wrapping an arm around Oliver's waist, Nikolai tugged him down, rolling to pull him onto his chest. It was unequivocally cheating. He couldn't bring himself to care. Not when Oliver was warm and firm and solid on top of him, his mouth close enough to be kissed until his lips parted willingly. "You won't starve," he murmured. "Don't whine."

God, how he'd missed this man. Nikolai missed the span of his hands and his smart mouth, his clever eyes and the softness of his sleep. He'd never had a relationship that lasted this long, twenty years since they'd first been introduced. Oliver was far more valuable than any fortune he could ever have amassed, and he'd spent a small one finding him. Not that Nikolai would say such things. Maybe someday.

Reluctantly, he pulled his mouth away from Oliver's, head resting back against the pillows. His gaze skated over him, all hot appreciation. Nikolai's palms ran down Oliver's back to grab his ass, luxuriating in the touch. He raised his eyebrows. "Are you sure you want me to get up?"

[silverliars]

thirty miles behind enemy lines

[v-engence]

“No,” Miles said, and he was already regretting the words spilling out of his mouth, “that would just be mean. I didn’t fuck up your life. You fucked up mine.”

She had. God, she had. Miles had never hated his life for being mundane and easy to glide by on, because it meant that nothing unpredictable happened. Sure, his dad dying had been unpredictable and his mother’s car tended to have a mind of its own when it decided to break down, but those were every day, normal things that could happen in life. No pretty girls with guns and cold, snake-life voices were part of his every day routine.

Miles’ fingertips twitched against his thigh. He flattened his palms against his jeans, letting out a deep sigh and forcing himself to focus on her.

He’d never seen her before. He was sure of it. Living in New York meant that he came into a lot of contact with a lot of different people, but he would remember her face, if only because he’d forced himself to look back in his memories of the past year, picking out anyone with her chin, her eyes, her lips, her height and hair. Nothing clicked, which meant she probably hadn’t targeted his taxi in specific. Which meant he was collateral, and he didn’t want to tack damage onto the end of that.

“Phone? Oh, phone, yeah.” Sliding his hands off his thighs, he stood slowly, every movement careful and deliberate, eyes steady on her. He wouldn’t attack her, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t look at any sudden movements as an attack. Miles dug a hand into his back pocket, pulling out his phone—a model from a few years before and not a touchscreen—and handing it out to her, the SIM card and battery following.

“Do you have a name?” he asked suddenly, voice unwavering as he straightened his spine. He felt a little better when he wasn’t on a different physical level than her, feeling more like a child than anything else. Miles hadn’t been a child for twenty years; he had no intention of feeling like one again. “Or, like, a code name or whatever? It’s just weird calling you ‘girl’ in my head.”

[silverliars]

"Don't be dramatic." Ree rolled her eyes, barely looking at him. "This is not fucking up your life. Fucking up your life would be dumping you with the taxi and leaving you for dead. If you do what I say, your life will be back to normal soon enough, give or take a few months." They would forget, soon enough, about the taxi she'd escaped in. The driver was a minor loose end, of no concern to anyone, so unlike Ree herself. More men than she could count would love to get their hands on her, if they didn't just shoot her on sight. Compared to her, Miles was nothing. She had made him when she climbed into his taxi and she could almost as easily unmake him. Return him to the nothing from which he came. 

For a brief second, Ree wished she could tell Vaughn. But Vaughn would want her to shoot Miles and throw him in the Hudson, not necessarily in that order, which would be no help to anyone. Of the two of them, Vaughn was the planner, the strategist. Ree had no mind for the bigger picture. She couldn't predict what fallout her actions would cause beyond the immediate. Ree's head spun. 

If she kept Miles, would he be safer than if she returned him home, or would dropping him back on his doorstop be a death sentence? How much did the Americans, local thugs who fancied themselves international mobsters but still had a weighty pull, care? She could take Miles home and make herself known somewhere else as soon as possible, draw the heat from his trail. Of course, that might just end in his execution for the sake of cleanliness, and Ree bringing a pack of slavering gunmen to Vaughn's door. If she kept him, who knew what other family members she'd have to save or sacrifice. Pick your poison, Rhiannon. There's no one to tell you your next move.

The soft thump of a disassembled phone startled her back to the now, only the tiniest twitch of her hand giving her away. Ree examined the pieces - battery, SIM card, relic of a cell. Hardly a danger, but she appreciated the safety precaution. Ree plucked the SIM card out and slid it in her pocket, handing the phone back to him. 

"I'm Ree." The nice thing about her nickname was that no one would believe it. Ree wasn't a name, really, just a sound. It suited her perfectly.

Stepping around Miles, Ree sat back down on the sole bed, settling her gun beside her hip and leaning back to tug her shoes off, placing them on the floor. Disorganization saved seconds in the moment but cost her precious minutes when she needed to move fast. For now she and Miles were stuck, but the morning would look entirely different. Ree crossed her legs under her. 

"Is there anyone you know you can't live without?"

[v-engence]

speakeasy

Music poured out from the open windows and door, filling Ally’s ears with a thrumming buzz of bass and running notes. She had no idea what the hell the song was, but it was something upbeat and catchy and had been playing nonstop on the radio and MTV for the past three weeks, so she figured it was party-appropriate. She didn’t care. She had her rum and coke, her blunts and maybe Kennedy.

Hopefully. Maybe. Ally didn’t know. Kennedy was a mystery to her. Sometimes she swore Kennedy liked her, and other times she was pretty sure Kennedy would rather stab herself with rusty needles than sit in the same room with her. It was a toss up and it made Ally mad.

Maybe she should take some psychology classes and learn how to read body language. She had always been crap at it. Her mother’s cocked hip and clenching jaw escaped her until she blew up on Ally for missing an entire week of school.

She leaned against the railing, swirling her drink in its bright red solo cup, glancing over to the boys loitering around in the driveway. They were talking among themselves, the smell of pot curling up in the air. Ally knew a few of them from school, but two or three of them looked too old to have graduated any time soon, and she figured they’d been the ones to supply the booze and weed in the first place.

This wasn’t Kennedy’s scene. She probably wouldn’t show up. Ally sighed, lip curling up and glancing down at her cup. What had she been thinking? Loud music and people didn’t scream Kennedy. Why had she thought she would show up just because Ally had invited her? She probably wouldn’t. Getting her hopes up once again, she thought, taking a sip of her drink and turning her head, looking back into the open door.

There was probably someone inside to hold her attention for a while. Or maybe she should wait for Kennedy a little longer. Just a few more minutes before she gave up and got drunk enough to dance on tables without shame, Ally decided.

[silverliars]

Kennedy could count on one finger the number of high school parties she'd ever been to. Simply put, she did not get along with other people her age. Not in the gentle, inner-beauty white girl way of Jane Austen novels and cups of tea and a soul that had been waiting lifetimes for its true match but in the way that boys skirted around her in the halls and thought her name was bitch. Kennedy didn't get invitations to go off campus for lunch with other girls and probably wouldn't have wanted to, but that didn't stop her from memorizing the shapes of their bodies when they walked. She hated the way people around her acted, hated that they seemed to think they could do what they wanted when they wanted, without any concern for anything besides themselves. She hated that part of her envied that.

All told, there were women in the aquarobics class she lifeguarded with more exciting social lives. On any other friday night Kennedy would have been working, studying, or bumming liquor off some older dude and getting shitfaced in her room. She had no taste for public intoxication, especially not the sort this party offered. 

She could already hear the music from a block away. Kennedy had taken the bus, because cars were for girls whose parents didn't feel the bite of tuition into their paychecks or lock up the keys. Kennedy's did both. She had no idea how she'd get home, but that could be figured out later. Whenever she came back to herself and stopped acting crazy for a girl.

Ally wasn't even Kennedy's type, if Kennedy could be said to have a type. On paper they would never work. Ally was disruptive, first of all. If one had to be delinquent, they could at least do so quietly, so as not to irritate everyone around them. She was brash and loud and acted out just because she could, while at the same time playing a role to fit in. 

On the other hand, Kennedy thought a lot about Ally's mouth. And her hands. And her waist. And her body in general, preferably naked. Instead of pissing Kennedy off, she turned her on, something like insecurity wrapped up in a fierce and unstoppable charge that she was just brave enough to let slip. One stupid night on a roof after Ally had shooed her friends away and Kennedy was hooked. Enough to have her mounting the steps in front of the house, thumbs curled in the belt loops of the low slung skinny jeans plastered to her body, baring more than an inch of midriff.

Ally loomed out of nowhere. In the time it took for Kennedy to ascend three stairs, or maybe just the gap between looking at house numbers and the ground and the door, Ally seemed to have materialized against the railing, red cup in hand, as if she'd been there forever. Maybe she had.

"Ally." When had Kennedy's voice gotten so breathless? She was far from out of shape but she felt winded, her chest seized up with her proximity to a girl she'd let run her hands over her bare breasts, learn the topography of her skin by feel. She hated her heart for the treacherous beat it skipped. Kennedy pressed her palms against her thighs to settle herself. "Have you been waiting?"

[v-engence]

god, where have you been?

[v-engence]

He was going to strangle her—or something like that. Hayden doubted Zoya would ever let him lay a hand on her, even if it were by accident. She didn’t strike him as the type to cower in fear or accept a flimsy apology. He doubted she’d wait to call her father before knocking some sense into him.

With a graceless shove of his elbow into a college-aged boy caring a beer stumbling backward into him, Hayden move with purposeful, angry strides. Why did she had to do this to him? It wasn’t like Hayden breathed down her neck every minute of the day. He didn’t even force her to shower with the door open, or sleep in the same room as him. There were some bodyguards who took their jobs too literally, in his opinion, and he didn’t. Giving her the freedom to go out at all was a fucking privileged, and constantly being defied was starting to gyrate on his nerves.

When she stopped, Hayden pulled back, spine straight and shoulders pushed  back. Neither Zoya or Ana were particularly short women, but he still had enough height on them, and he made a point to fill out as much space as possible. If she wanted to make a run for it around him, he wanted to be within grabbing distance.

“Zoya,” he said, lips pressed into a thin line as he glanced at Ana. She didn’t look a single shade of pleased to be stuck in front of him. Hayden flicked his gaze back at Zoya. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You just disappeared. I thought you could’ve been in actual trouble.”

Ana didn’t say anything, eyes rolling up and finding something suddenly very interesting about the ceiling. At least she wasn’t fighting it.

Hayden looked Zoya over, scanning her from head to toe for any signs of distress. Ignoring the fact that she’d slipped out of his sight again and probably wasn’t going to be skipping and jumping to the car, she looked fine. Hayden’s shoulders slipped a notch. It was always a worry for him, that when Zoya slipped out to go to a club or a bar or a party or wherever she wanted to go, she would end up hurt, kidnapped or even worse.

He didn’t now much about her father’s situation, but he figured that men didn’t hire bodyguards with his salary for no reason. “Now,” Hayden said, taking a step toward her, “do you wanna walk to the door or should I just throw you over my shoulder?”

[silverliars]

Hayden squared his shoulders and Zoya's eyes narrowed. She hated when men did that to her. Her whole life, they'd been trying to make her smaller by making themselves large. From the first Krav Maga lesson her father had taken her to, when all the boys turned to stare because a girl didn't belong in with them, men had been trying to intimidate her. Hayden had no right to try and cow her just because she'd done something he didn't like. 

In response, Zoya drew her legs together and straightened her spine, hips balanced for a solid stance even on the thin points of her stilettos. She was neither a lady like her mother nor a fighter like her father, but Zoya had taken pieces of both of them. She had her father's confidence and her mother's poise. Between the two of those things, she would make herself a match for Hayden at his most domineering.

"Hayden." Zoya crossed her arms. "You could have just texted. My phone's on vibrate." Tucked into a holster on her knickers, in fact, plastered to her thigh, but Hayden didn't need to know that part. In a darkened club, people were less likely to notice someone putting her hand up her own skirt, but with the halo of space that had formed around their confrontation, it would be hard not to pick up on. "You didn't have to come get me."

She'd known he would, of course. That was what Hayden did. Zoya left, he tracked her down. Zoya went to class, Hayden stood outside her lecture hall lurking and reading one of her romance novels with a blank cover slipped over it. Zoya went to the store, Hayden went along with her. Zoya knew it was necessary. The easiest way to get to her dad was through her. Not as many people knew about Mishka, and her mom was safe at her dad's side. Until whatever political storm her father was at the eye of died down, Hayden was around. That didn't mean he couldn't have a little fun. Everything short of a test thus far had confirmed his allergy to populations higher than one person per square meter. 

If she thought too much about it, Zoya felt a little guilty. It could be PTSD that made him hate clubs, and much as she tried not to, she understood that. The flashing lights and driving bass probably stressed him out more than necessary, and if he wasn't staring her down like some amped up Alpha male, Zoya might have been a little nicer about it.

"Stop acting like a caveman." With the help of her heels, Zoya didn't have to tip her head back to meet Hayden's eyes, though her gaze did flick up. "I'm not a kill to drag back to your cave."

[v-engence]

yellow flicker beat

[v-engence]

He heard her voice and nodded. It was a pointless gesture, but one he felt the need to do anyway. Kiara wasn’t someone who could be easily ignored, and even wrapped in bandages and needing cared for like a newborn child, she still deserved the kind of respect she had held when she had walked on her own feet or danced across a stage.

Kellan unpacked the bag, moving about the kitchen and placing the sandwiches on plates. He liked the kitchen and the little house it dwelled in. He liked Fanad, with its shores and its cliffs and its lighthouse and busybody people who sniffed around the end of the driveway whenever they passed by. Kellan could have down without them, but it was amusing enough to sit on the front porch with his coffee and book, giving passersbys looks of disdain and watching them power walk their way down the hill.

The reason for needing the cottage didn’t sit well with him. He knew it was stupid to go back to Russia just to hunt down the bitch who had attacked Kiara, but he still wanted to. He wouldn’t, of course, because he wasn’t a stupid man and that was a stupid decision, but he wanted to. Kiara was far too precious to him to not feel protective over.

Balancing the two plates on his forearms, glass of water in hand, Kellan stepped out of the kitchen and down the short hallway, moving to Kiara’s bedroom. His lips twitched into a soft smile as he sat on the edge of the bed, placing a plate in front of her. “You look better.”

And she did. When Kellan had first arrived in Russia, lost and angry and unable to communicate with most of the people he spoke to, he had truly thought Kiara had died. There had been nothing in her message to indicate that she was alive, that something good had happened, and he had assumed the worst. Why else would she send him just an address? A message like that could only mean one thing, and Kellan had been twitching with the urgency to find her before he’d even boarded the plane in Dublin.

Seeing her alive had been a relief, but seeing her in that condition had been…unnerving.

Kellan glanced to the window, eyeing the rolling waves rocking against the shore. “When you’re a little better, I’m going to take you outside,” he said, voice soft and accent thick. He sounded as backwoods and rural as any born and bred Irishman. He grinned a bit, lips pulled up as he looked at her. “Maybe get you a wheelchair—unless that idea offends your delicate Russian sensibilities.”

[silverliars]

"Already?" A small smile teased Kiara's mouth, and she scooted over to make room for Kellan on the bed beside her. It was a laborious process, pushing herself up on elbows and feet to sidle over without putting too much strain on her back. Kiara was no stranger to moving through pain, but the last time she'd put her back through even the simplest of twists she'd ripped half of her stitches and tore the knife wound wider, edges gaping open bright red and raw. She settled back down against the mattress, propping her chin on her hand to look at him. "It's only been a few hours."

Even so, she'd take it. The few scattered memories Kiara had of herself when she was first recovering were nothing good. The face reflected back at her in the mirror was pale, skin drawn tight against her skull such that she looked like a banshee. Now, at least, she had colour in her cheeks and could stay awake for more than an hour at a time. Recovery was a disturbingly exhausting cycle of eating and sleeping, leaving Kiara as helplessly reliant as an infant. Kellan had been her lifeline, the person who kept her from falling into sepsis or Niall Tierney's hands. 

Kiara could handle Niall. She'd proven that time and time again since he'd first taken an interest in her two decades ago. She'd been a serious, focused child, with the straightest spine of any of the little girls in her ballet classes. Niall liked that. He came to her classes and recitals, paid for her to keep going, to receive the sort of training Siobhan never could have afforded, Aiden a little shadow beside him, or sometimes not. When she was older, he occasionally brought Sparrow. Kiara knew, but never said, that he liked neither of them. Certainly not the way he liked her. She was the shining star, his fearless little dancer. When Niall watched her, he watched only her, so Kiara had learned to draw his eye. 

In the ten years since they'd spent time together he couldn't have changed that much. If he ever saw her like this, he would never forget it, never let her forget it. Kiara refused to let Niall know that unprotected versions of her existed. In a relationship like theirs, there was only the user and the used. If given a chance, Niall would use her in every way he could. Kiara would drain him dry first.

Picking up half of her sandwich with her free hand, Kiara took a bite, chewing contemplatively. Kellan's voice soothed her. It sounded like home and contentment, a soft Irish burr so different from the harshness of Russian voices. He might well have been raised here for how well he mimicked the local tongue while her accent was still corrupted by foreign pronunciation. 

She reached out and pushed his leg, as easy as she'd have set her chin on it. "A wheelchair will work fine. Don't you trust me to hobble?" They'd made a pretty good go of it thus far, transporting her around the house with Kellan's arm wrapped around her waist, or occasionally just hiking her up into his arms. "How far is a little better?" Open windows aside, it would be nice to get some sunshine along with her fresh air. 

[v-engence]

yellow flicker beat

When Kiara had gone off to Russia Kellan had never expected her to come back in any shape other than perfectly working condition. He had never expected her to come back with a stab wound.

Stepping out of the car, he nudged his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose, grabbing the brown paper bag from the passenger seat. He closed the door, pocketed his keys and moved up the winding stone path to the house.

It was a pretty little cottage, two bedrooms and one bath. It wasn’t particularly big, but Kellan didn’t think he needed big. Kiara wasn’t likely to toss herself across the room in her en pointe shoes, so he wasn’t worried. It was nice and warm, inviting and homey, and it would serve its function. Getting Kiara healed and walking without pain was all Kellan cared about.

He unlocked the door, pushing it open and stepping in. “Kiara?” he called, tucking the bag under his arm, nudging the door shut with his hell and moving through to the kitchen, glancing out the window.

The tide was out, sun glinting and reflecting off the rocky surface. Maybe Kiara would want to go out tomorrow or the day after. It was supposed to storm sometime within the next week, and Kellan figured she would want to soak up as much sunshine as possible.

While Kellan had been stabbed before, it had never required immediate medical attention. Flesh wounds that could be easily taken care of in his dingy bathroom, and nothing like the wound on Kiara he checked over every morning and night, carefully searching out for any signs of infection and applying fresh gauze. He may have never been so significantly wounded, but nice things tended to make recovery easier. It was probably why there was a fresh vase of colourful flowers in each room of the house.

[silverliars]

In the past ten years, Kiara hadn't once been home. A fourteen year old girl send away as much by her uncle as her own ambition, she hadn't spoken a word of Russian when she'd arrived at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet. It hadn't mattered. She learned quickly, dancing through the worst blisters of her life and speaking through a tongue that tripped, the other dancers laughing at her and talking behind her back. For the first six months, she hadn't even spoken to a single member of her family. Later, people had visited. Niall brought Kellan to check up on her about a year in. It hadn't even surprised Kiara that he left his own son behind. Brannagh started speaking again, her cousins came of age, she came of age, Kiara still lived in Russia. It wasn't as though she made a particular effort to stay in contact. Her life was her own, made ever more secretive by Vaganova and the Bolshoi.

It all unraveled so quickly. Two powerful, possessive men, one jealous member of her company with a knife in hand, and Kiara was bleeding out backstage, just minutes before she was set to go on. If she thought back on it, the few fragmented memories she had of the hospital in Russia, she was surprised she survived long enough to make contact with Kellan. The text was just an address, painstakingly typed out and checked twice over for error before she slipped back into unconsciousness. 

He'd shown up for her. In all honesty, Kiara had never really doubted he would. So many of her other family members would have asked questions she had neither the time nor energy to answer. Kellan just brought her unconscious body back to Ireland and hid her in a cottage on the coast. Kiara was silently grateful for his actions. She trusted no one else to make decisions for her - no one else made the same decisions she would have. 

Healing from a knifed organ turned out to be a long, slow process. She'd been bedridden for several weeks, relying on Kellan for everything, from feeding her to helping her stay clean to carrying her to the bathroom. The pain medication dulled humiliation's sharp edge until it barely cut into her consciousness, need overriding self awareness. Kiara had no memory of what she'd said to Kellan during those times. If it was anything too incriminating, he hadn't let on. Kiara had so many secrets locked in her head that letting even one loose could be deadly. Maybe she ought to be appreciative for Kellan still keeping her alive.

The door opened. Kiara tilted her head towards it from where she lay on her stomach on her bed. "Here," she answered. As if she could be anywhere else. Though she could at least manage to wash the front of her body now, she still needed Kellan's assistance if she intended to walk anywhere.

[v-engence]

god, where have you been?

[v-engence]

Maybe he should inject a tracking device under Zoya’s skin, do it while she was sleeping and then never bring it up. It would make his life easier in the long run if she planned on running off every time he wasn’t looking, and Hayden was pretty sure that was exactly what she was going to do.

Only he wasn’t that cruel and he wasn’t that disrespectful. He might have a tap on her phone but he didn’t read through her messages. He didn’t scour her room for anything incriminating, didn’t rummage through her drawers and her purse and catalog every object he found. Hell, he didn’t even stand outside the bathroom door when she was showering. Hayden gave her her personal space, hyper aware every time he woke up on the uncomfortable couch that this wasn’t his home and he was invading hers.

He liked to think he was giving Zoya her freedom. Apparently he was going to have to reel back on that.

It was easy to scan over the crowd. Being a good four to six inches taller than most people in the club had a lot to do with it, and being intimately familiar with what Zoya looked like at all angles was another. He knew her when she was sleeping on her stomach and her side, what she looked like when her head tipped back and she looked at the sky, what she looked like when she was bent over her laptop doing homework. Hayden didn’t pride himself on knowing what she looked like at all angles; it was simply his job.

Moving through the throngs of people grouped together on the floor, he squinted past the flashing lights from above, eyes scanning over everyone with dark hair and enough height to be Zoya. Hayden wished he knew what the hell she was wearing, if she was in heels or flats, and how many inches of heel she was in if she were.

He saw her. She was moving away from him, and Hayden swore under his breath. Had she seen him? Probably. She knew he would come looking for her, that he would track her down eventually, and Zoya wasn’t a stupid woman. Even when she broke the rules he’d set down for her own safety, he knew she could take care of herself.

“Zoya!” he called, pushing and elbowing those who collided with him, ignoring their shouts of fuck off and ouch. Hayden didn’t care about what kind of bruises he left on them. The only thing that mattered was getting to Zoya and getting the hell out of there. There was something entirely discomforting about being in a club with dimmed and flashing coloured lights, where spiked drinks happened and it was easy to get lost in the crowd.

He grunted as someone’s elbow jabbed into his ribs, using a hand to shove them away as he pushed through the crowd closing in. “Zoya!” he shouted over the music, teeth catching on his lower lip as he finally broke free of the crowd closing in on him. He wouldn’t grab her shoulder and spin her around, or wrap an arm around her waist and pull her back to his chest. Hayden wasn’t stupid. Sasha had told him what Zoya was capable of, that she’d studied high-impact self defense for years, that she wasn’t a damsel in distress. He wasn’t opening himself up to be smacked in the face or thrown to the ground when she reacted.

[silverliars]

Even over the music, the thundering bass and the yells of every other person trying to communicate in the din of a club, Zoya heard Hayden's voice. She could probably identify him in her sleep at this point. They talked more than she spoke to her parents, more than she spoke to Ana, more than anyone else in her life, by sheer force of proximity. Even when she and Hayden spent hours silently, while she studied and he read, there were still a million things to say when you lived with someone. What do you want for dinner, my cousins are coming over so wear a shirt, I'm out of shampoo will you get some from the closet (the last one yelled through a bathroom door.) Zoya had more than enough occasion to become familiar with Hayden's voice. And right now, it was telling her she was in trouble.

"Fuck." As much as she just wanted to go out and have fun with her friends, there was something almost fun about knowing that Hayden would come after her. Zoya would prefer if he stayed, even if he had to stay glued to her side, and give her more time to dance, but the spike in her pulse as she grabbed Ana's hand and dragged her through the crowd was undeniably exciting. Zoya knew from experience that it would only make the disappointed drive home worse.

The next time his voice sounded, he was closer. A lot closer. Zoya almost thought she could feel his heat on her back, looming without touching. They'd sparred often enough for her to know if they got into it in the club they'd cause quite a scene. Not that Zoya wanted to fight back. Hurting her bodyguard because he was doing his job just seemed incredibly ungrateful, both for the time he was putting in and the money her father was spending for her protection. She didn't really remember the time before they'd been wealthy, young as she was, but the appreciation stuck.

Resigning herself to the inevitable, Zoya dropped Ana's hand. Flicking her hair over her shoulder, she spun around on her heels, edge of her lip caught between her teeth. "Hayden."

[silverliars]

thirty miles behind enemy lines

[v-engence]

She was speaking but the words made little sense to Miles. How the hell had he ended up in this position? He’d always thought himself relatively normal. His last name was a pain in the ass to spell out to people and teach them to pronounce properly, but other than that he was normal. Just another face in the crowd trying to get by without falling down.

God, his mother was going to kill him.

He blinked. “Right. Right.” Sighing, he shoved a hand through his hair, tugging at a chunk and trying to focus on what was going on. Miles might have been a lot of things, but he wanted to live. Preferably to see the next morning. “This is so fucked.”

It was. Fuck, it was. Maybe if he had been like every other kid in his class and just taken out student loans that would take him twenty years to pay off he wouldn’t be in this mess. Maybe if he’d convinced his mother to move to a smaller town, open up her own business, try for somewhere new, this wouldn’t be happening.

Shit luck for him, because it was happening, and the only person he could trust was the girl in front of him who’d pointed a gun at him in the first place.

And now the girl looked more like a hissing cobra than a human. Miles drew back sharply, eyes narrowed and wary as he spoke. “No,” he said, the word clipped shorter than he intended, his voice harder than he’d wanted. He was exhausted and pissed off and worried and exhausted, and he didn’t have the energy to deal with king cobras masquerading as college-aged girls. “You might’ve turned my world upside fucking down but I’m not stupid.”

He’d pulled the SIM card and battery from his phone while she’d been renting a room. He’d seen enough reality TV to know that phones were actually traceable, and as much as he was thinking of his own ass, he was thinking of his mother’s, too. Miles knew she’d kill him for what was happening now, but he’d rather she be alive to do it instead of smacking him over the head from beyond the grave.

[silverliars]

"Fucked would be me throwing you back to the people who want us both dead. This is survival." Diplomat, Ree was not. You didn't get anything but a broken skull from playing pretty on the streets. She had no time to spend coddling Miles until he got used to this. The next few days were going to be do or die, as far as he was concerned.

When he told her he hadn't left anything in the cab, Ree let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. She didn't trust him - that would have been insurmountably stupid. But if he knew enough not to take his stuff with him, he wouldn't be as much deadweight as she was expecting. If he'd forgotten something, that was on his own head.

For the second time since she'd entered the room, Ree looked around. That first search had been pure security, making sure no one had any nasty surprises where she didn't want them. This time, her gaze was more assessing, lingering on the stained green drapes over the large window. She flicked the safety back on her gun, shoving it in the front of her leggings as she stood. Good gun protocol? Absolutely not. But for the moment, it would do. Ree practiced vigilance often enough that she had the confidence to make reckless choices and know they'd turn out alright. 

The room darkened as soon as she pulled the curtains shut, light taking on a yellower tint reflective of the overhead light. It was the best she could do. She had no doubt that the windows in this place weren't bulletproof, but the likelihood of a drive by shooting, with a view that faced only the dumpsters, was slim.

"Alright." A few short strides brought Ree back in front of Miles, holding out her hand in front of his face. "Phone?" Hers wasn't a worry. She went through burners faster than she did condoms, but if he had left something in the taxi, if they managed to look him up by the license plate, she had no desire for someone to get a trace on it. Better safe than dead.

[silverliars]

thirty miles behind enemy lines

[v-engence]

She didn’t look happy. Hell, she didn’t look like anything remotely positive, and Miles could feel the little prickle running up his spine, the hot slip-slide of something bad creepy his way when he looked at her. Maybe he had been in shock when they’d been in the car, because he sure as hell hadn’t felt like this there.

He’d been calm there. Cool and collected, maybe, even with a girl with a gun sitting so close to him and telling him to drive like his life depended on it. Miles was pretty sure that he was going to have to quit driving after this for good; picking up strangers off the street for cash, even with the potential for good tips when he got a suited man or woman with flashy watches, didn’t seem that appealing anymore.

Miles bit the inside of his cheek, watching her, looking her over. She had a gun, he knew, but what else did she have on her? A knife, another weapon that could make his heart pick up and ram against his ribcage in fear? He didn’t know. That was the worst thing for Miles. He hated not knowing. Not knowing meant that he was open and vulnerable, left for the wolves and vultures to circle and slam into him without warning. Miles had never been a fan of the unknown when it came to the big picture, and right now the big picture was a pretty girl—and it was always pretty girls—holding him possibly hostage in a motel room with questionable stains of the carpet.

He swallowed, head jerking up as she spoke. Shit, she didn’t sound happy either, and Miles drew back. Not like a snake would but like a frightened deer in headlights. He’d probably end up jumpy and freaked out over the littlest noises after this. God, he was so fucked.

Smoothing his hand on the bedspread that he had been picking at, Miles shrugged his shoulders, trying to look as nonchalant as possible, as if all this wasn’t affecting him at all, as if it were just a little rain he could shake off his coat. “Miles,” he said, leaning back a little on the bed, eyes sweeping over her, trying to gauge if any bumps and lumps in her clothing were more guns. “Why? You wanna stick a name on my grave?”

[silverliars]

He jumped sharply, all startled animal and wild eyes. Ree didn't have the time to sit still and coax him into trusting her. He'd just have to get over that.

"If I wanted you dead," Ree snapped, "I'd have shot you in your taxi, dug out the bullet, and been on my merry way." Another thing she had no time for right now was smart-mouthing. Quips had their time and place. Namely: not now, and not here. Miles could crack wise all he wanted on his own time. On Ree's, she expected him to take this seriously.

"Okay, Miles." Create a connection with the hostage, make him feel as though he was part of the proceedings, rather than a simple bystander. "Here's the plan. You and I are going to stay the night here. As long as you do what I say, you'll be safe. Tomorrow morning, we're going to leave out the back. Follow my lead exactly. From there you have a choice. You can go back home and take your chances, or you can come with me. Whatever you do, you can never affiliate yourself with that taxi company again. Quit, steal all records of your employment and anything that might lead back to you, and burn them. Burn a few others while you're at it. Do you understand me?"

The whole time Ree spoke, she remained still, hands resting on the gun in her lap and eyes fixed on Miles' face. Like a wire inside her pulled sharply taut, Ree stiffened suddenly, leaning towards him. Her voice dropped to an urgent hiss. "Did you leave anything in your taxi? Any ID, pictures of you, anything?" She didn't care if she scared him. He should be scared. This was life and death, with his neck on the line.

[v-engence]

god, where have you been?

For the life of him, Hayden couldn’t understand how one girl could be so much trouble. When he had gotten the call from Sasha Orlov, he had been wary. It had only taken a quick Google search to figure out exactly who the man was, and considering the cryptic phone number that had been patched through to his home phone, he knew that he wasn’t going to be a client like the others that he’d had.

Hayden had worked with a lot of people since being discharged. Irrationally paranoid housewives that had eventually been admitted to upscale psychiatric hospitals that looked more like resorts, justifiably paranoid politicians and businessmen that wanted to keep their affairs and political plans under wraps—if they were worried about something, Hayden had been paid to shadow them, to keep them safe.

He had never expected to be hired to look after a mob princess.

It wasn’t as if Zoya could be called a princess, really, he thought, elbowing his way past a group of half-drunks near the front door, shoving his wallet into his front pocket, keys jammed just below. She didn’t seem to expect him to wait on her hand and foot, for which he was grateful, but she had a fucking awful habit of sneaking out when he wasn’t looking. And it wasn’t as if he wasn’t always looking, because he was, but there was only so much that he could keep an eye on when he was in the shower or sleeping.

Maybe he should install security cameras all through the apartment. Hayden hadn’t considered it before, trying to preserve some sort of her privacy, but fuck it—she wasn’t making this easy on either of them, so he wasn’t going to make it easy on her.

Stopping short of the bar, Hayden scanned over the heads and bodies moving around the club. He was starting to wish he had taken up his father’s offer to hire someone on retainer to track Zoya’s phone. He hadn’t thought he would need it. He really, really did.

[silverliars]

As far as personal bodyguards went, Hayden was pretty good. He sparred with her, read her romance novels without comment, he was fun - to an extent, and he was more attractive a man than Zoya ever thought her father would allow to live with her. He never complained when her cousins came over. No matter how much Zoya liked to watch him when he'd just gotten out of the shower, that would have been a deal breaker. There was only one problem.

Hayden hated going out. More specifically, he hated her going out. If he had his way, Zoya would never go to another club or bar or house party. He'd probably restrict her to the library, bookstores, coffee shops, class, and other places where Zoya's dad-unfriendly clothes would stay in the closet. Within a few minutes of her and Ana going somewhere fun, Hayden would pull her away and insist they go home. Zoya had no doubts that he'd carry her if she resisted.

So she'd devised a different solution. Zoya had never snuck out of the house in high school, never even broken curfew. Student of Krav Maga or not, she knew it would have been hard to defend herself in the high heels and fashionable clothes demanded just to step onto Russian streets. On her first day of university in England, she'd been shocked to see more than one person wore sweatpants to class.

Even now, Zoya was sometimes taken aback by the lax standards of dress here. She'd been told several times to just sneak out of her apartment in plain clothes and change in the car, but she refused. Bad enough to let Ana and her friends see her barefoot, heels in hand. It was just wrong to undress the way they suggested she should. Besides, then she wouldn't have to go get her original clothes from the car when Hayden inevitably came to find her. She'd never had a walk of shame, but Zoya imagined it felt something like Hayden pulling her out of a club, face stormy.

While she danced, she kept an eye on the front door, looking for the wild, tall blondness that would announce Hayden's arrival. At first Zoya had tried to pull him into the crowd, bodies pressed close on all sides. It would do him good to let loose a little. If anyone here wished her ill, they'd be a kidnapper, not an assassin. Zoya was most valuable alive.

On one of her glances around the club, Zoya saw what she'd been keeping an eye out for. Hayden was a distinctive man, hard to miss or confuse someone else for. She'd only made a mistake once.

Swearing violently in Russian, Zoya turned her face from the bar, making her way through the crowd. She slid between strangers, dancing instead of pushing and batting off hands that tried to make her stay. If she could find Ana, they could get out of here before Hayden got to her.

[silverliars]

thirty miles behind enemy lines

With a snapped goodbye in Welsh, Ree dropped her cell phone on the bed. It bounced a few inches into the air, propelled by the shoddy springs of the Motel Six mattress. On the other side of the bed, where there should be no one at all, sat the taxi driver she'd kidnapped, right where she'd left him before she dialed Vaughn's number. Fuck.

Carefully schooling her face into an impassive, tight mask, Ree dropped onto the bed, legs crossed and gun cradled in her hands. Ready to fire at a moment's notice. She hadn't fucked up a job this badly since she as nineteen, on the botched mission in Prague that ended with four extra men dead and a pregnant woman clinging her her young daughter's hand, staring at Ree in abject horror. She'd saved the woman for the sake of her unborn child even as she hated her for it. 

She ought to just kill the driver where he sat. No one had seen him come in; Ree made sure of that. She'd paid with cash, kept her face turned away from all the cameras. It would take only a few seconds to draw a knife and throw it. At such a close range, Ree couldn't miss. Twist it to obscure the entry wound, clean it off on his clothes and pocket it. No one would be able to catch her. Ree couldn't even say what stayed her hand. She'd had more than enough opportunities. If she'd left him with his taxi, even, someone else would have done the job for her, clipping up loose ends.

It didn't matter. Unless he fought, Ree had resolved to keep him alive. This was her mistake, her choice whether to have another casualty or not in an underground war.

"What's your name?" Too late, Ree heard the harshness in her voice, making the question a demand. She pressed her lips together, drawing a slow breath through her nose. She was not Vaughn's diplomatic ambassador for a reason. Politeness had never been Ree's forte. Her strength lived in her body and her weapons, not honeyed words. As far back as the seedy alleys of Ree's childhood, one could either be desirable or frightening. She'd picked the latter.

[v-engence]

live in the bedroom

[v-engence]

When Oliver had fled, he’d had no plan. How could he? His entire life had been planned out for him. His parents, Nikolai, the faceless people behind them who pulled his strings and made him do what they wanted. The life that he’d been born into had been planned, too. He knew for a fact (despite his parents never saying so) that he had been created through into in vitro fertilization, that they had used gender selection to have a male because he’d been snooping through his father’s office when he’d been fifteen and stumbled across it.

No plan. No choices of his own. The one thing that Oliver had done truly for himself had been to climb into bed with Nikolai, and it wasn’t as if he could rely on him to tell him what to do. Nikolai was supposed to terminate him. Nikolai was supposed to erase him from existence, and Oliver had been too terrified at the prospect of dying to stop and examine the situation.

Ending up in Greece hadn’t been what he’d meant to do. It had been the first flight out and Oliver had figured that, although he didn’t speak the language, it was far enough away that anyone who would come after him — Nikolai included — would have to comb through closer countries so he could have a moment to breathe. A moment had turned into three months in a tiny coastal town, living with an elderly woman who made better food than anything he’d ever had before.

After that, everything he had done had been in the moment. Flights and stealing, the first time he’d charged someone for sex, getting his way onto cruise ships and pretending to be someone he wasn’t were all done without plan. Oliver hadn’t had a plan. Surviving was all he needed to think about, and he figured that as long as he did that it wouldn’t matter.

This sure as hell hadn’t been planned, but he still felt a lot better about it than most of his other choices.

He didn’t know what it meant, and with the way Nikolai was pressed against him, face pressing against his shoulder, he probably wouldn’t be able to think about that until later.

“Don’t tell me you wanna go again,” he murmured, giving up on his quest to crawl out of bed. He settled onto the bed, stretching out slow and easy underneath Nikolai’s weight. His body protested, thighs straining as they stretched, and he let out a noise of disappointment. There was no way he was going to be able to walk down for coffee, and he didn’t have any in his loft.

It was small and more than a bit cramped, a warehouse bought by a contractor and turned into apartments. Oliver had never been to New Zealand before, but he figured Napier was a good a place as any to hide out from the weird, tattooed man who had seemed to be stalking him. He wasn’t sure who he was, what he wanted or what the hell he thought he was doing hunting him down, but he didn’t appreciate it. At all. New Zealand seemed inconspicuous enough. A nagging suspicion of Nikolai being the one to hire him had been niggling at the back of Oliver’s mind since he’d first walked in on him, but he hadn’t thought about it. Hadn’t let himself think about it.

Pressing his palms underneath himself, he shifted, turning over with a heavy sigh. “You’re going to have to get up eventually,” he said, voice soft as he curled a hand into Nikolai’s hair, brushing his thumb down the side of his neck. He’d missed this. Touching wasn’t something that Oliver had been used to in the first place, neither of his parents being particularly affectionate, but he’d always craved it. “I’m sticky and it’s kind of gross. And you need to go get me coffee.”

[silverliars]

A chuckle, or a sound very like it, escaped Nikolai’s mouth. It had been a long time since he’d completely outlasted Oliver. It was the nature of their relationship. He’d been twenty, almost exactly, when Oliver was born. Perhaps a little older. Though more often than not, Oliver took Nikolai’s cock, or came with his fingers crooked inside him, the only way they could keep pace most days was to have Oliver at least halfway to his second orgasm before Nikolai had his first. Even with the way he’d pressed him up against the wall the previous night, pulled at his clothes and bit at his lips with the same fevered urgency Oliver showed, Nikolai still wanted more. He wanted every part of Oliver’s body, the long line of it pressed up against his until he’d sated himself on skin and heat.

Want was a good way to describe what Nikolai felt for Oliver. Desire like this was rare enough for him, the sort of thing he’d experienced a few times during his life, but never really marked him. Most of the time, when Nikolai had sex, it was a fight. Teeth and nails, grabbing and pulling and shoving and taking to the point of orgasm. Beyond that, he and his sexual partners had little to do with each other. They went on their ways, Nikolai went on his, and their paths didn’t cross again. Maybe once before had he desired someone the way he did Oliver, the way he wanted to bury his cock inside him, bracket him with his arms and feel Oliver’s limbs around him, shaking with need. It burned inside his skin, the knowledge that Oliver was here, that Nikolai could have him in every way he could think of and then some. He wanted to go again, and again, and again, leave the mark of his teeth on the insides of Oliver’s thighs and the feel of his cock inside him, so that Oliver knew where Nikolai had been with every step he took. That was new too, the spark of reaction to Oliver’s limp. Every place Oliver and Nikolai intersected was uncharted territory, and yet when Oliver stretched himself out, Nikolai’s mind cleared of all that. Oliver was here, in his arms and under his chest and Nikolai’s, for as long as he could keep him.

“Why not?” Nikolai nipped his collarbone, kissing open mouthed at the little white mark left behind where his teeth had been, already fading into his skin. “Ты красивая. Я хочу тебя.” He hummed, running his hand down Oliver’s side, from his ribcage over his thigh, fingers dipping in between his legs, stroking the inside of his knee. “Don’t tell me you’re tired already.” Oliver, insatiable as he was, worn out after one night. After they’d been fucking for months, so far over the line of handler and agent that Nikolai could barely imagine what it would be like if he’d done what he was supposed to, there were times when he’d just lay in bed, pull Oliver back against his chest or kiss him breathless and finger him, stroke his cock until he spilled between them, arching and demanding and so full of energy (and beyond that, stamina) that Nikolai could only watch appreciatively, pressing Oliver onto his back once his cock perked up again. And now he was tired after one night. Nikolai was too, but the fullness of his bladder had him half hard, and it seemed like a better idea to fuck Oliver again than get out of bed.

Curling his hand around Oliver’s thigh, a small smile raised the corner of Nikolai’s mouth. He’d never say as much, but he liked the way they touched. It had been disarming when he first started waking up in bed with Oliver, another person’s body tucked close to him, his right arm asleep where Oliver’s weight rested on it, but when they’d parted, Nikolai missed it more than he’d expected. It made him weak, whatever lay between Oliver and him. If he stayed true to his training, he would have given up on it long ago. Specifically when he should have killed Oliver instead of letting him go.

Nikolai groaned contentedly, pushing those thoughts from mind in favor of tipping his head back and kissing beneath Oliver’s jaw, brushing his hand up to trail his fingers over his cock. “We can shower.” Technically, they could both shower on their own, but he saw no reason to mention that when Nikolai and Oliver had never showered together before. It sounded, in execution, much like showering alone, but with less room and colder, yet he’d still take it for the experience of cleaning his come from Oliver’s body, moving his hands in slow circles over his skin. Nikolai was beginning to think he had a fetish of some sort, maybe for Oliver. Without clothes on. It would have been unforgiveable if anyone else knew of it, but inside the walls of his or Oliver’s apartments, Nikolai gave himself a pass. “I’ll get you coffee later.”

[v-engence]

my strangling fingers wrapped around tight

Val shot him a suspicious look, eyes narrowed. How could someone walk around this ignorant and still be alive? Was he stupid? Val had met a lot of different types of people in his time in the Resistance’s service, but he’d never met a stupid person. Stupidity wouldn’t be suffered in times like these, although Val had no idea what that even meant anymore. He could barely remember a time when the world wasn’t this way, with the sand and forests swallowing the cities and towns back, androids and robots walking the Earth and humans being executed left and right. There was a constant struggle for food and clean water, and just to make it to the next day. Val knew he was lucky, in a way. The Resistance was better equipped at keeping people alive than empty, crumbling towns.

There were issues with the Resistance, of course, but Val wasn’t blinded by loyalty to follow them without question. There was a difference between John Connor and the Resistance, and Val only trusted one of them without too many questions. He had met him a few times before but never spent long in his presence, but the man gave off an air of leadership and confidence, and unwavering optimism in the face of certain death. That probably had something to due with the fact that Skynet had captured him and Val and the others had been sent to retrieve him by his left lieutenant. Val had found that ,when faced down with an unstoppable killing machine, he tended to look on the brighter side of things. Sometimes the brighter side of things was clean water and sometimes it was the nearest warm mouth around his dick, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Val doubted that John Connor was thinking about men sucking him off, considering he was married with a child on the way, but he had a sort of hope in him that he couldn’t deny was infectious.

Val’s faith in John Connor was what had kept him in the Resistance, but it didn’t make him happy to be part of it. Half the time he resented the way that Connor could manipulate people into joining, into staying and fighting what felt like a dying cause sometimes. Most of the time, if he were honest to himself. But it had kept him educated, and although he understood why the kid wouldn’t know all of the series of Terminators, he didn’t understand how he could not know what the fuck they were. Even when they didn’t know their official names, there was always some nickname that floated around the masses and into the nomads travelling around and just trying to survive. He may not understand why the hell anyone wouldn’t want to join the Resistance, but he knew that people had to be aware and educated on what the new line of machine was being produced from whichever machine-operated factory.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” he said, shaking his head as he glanced down back at his leg, letting the kid eat in peace. His leg hurt, he wanted to be back in his room with a book or an old CD player, and instead he was out in the warming desert with an idiot boy who was eating his food. Val didn’t mind the latter so much, but if his unit didn’t come to collect him soon and he was forced to make a run for it, he’d need all the supplies he could get his hands on. He was just hoping that his unit came before then. He’d hate to rely on someone who clearly would rather put a knife in his shoulders than stick around.

Val rolled his eyes. “Because the Resistance is the fucking evil monsters. Of course. It’s not like Skynet is the bad guy here at all. It’s the Resistance, who protects and fights and feeds and keeps safe idiots like you whocan’t fight.” His lip peeled up, as he shook his head again, one hand pressed to the side of his thigh as he looked at the kid. “You talk about the compounds like they’re prisons. They’re safe houses, where you can live in – gee, I don’t know – safety. Has the Resistance wiped out most of the humans? Has the Resistance done anything other than try to protect you?” Val didn’t want for an answer. He just snort and pushed a bloody hand through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes. “No. It hasn’t. So shut the fuck up. There’s no reason to be mouthing off about the Resistance when you’re just a selfish little prat who’s going to end up dead because you wouldn’t just suck it up and go to them.”

There was a smear of blood across his forehead from a cut on his palm, but Val didn’t care. He was getting worked up all over again, right when he was winding down and letting his blood pressure drop. Staying calm was an issue for his when he was an invalid dependent on some miscreant boy who was flicking his knife all over the place. Val gave him a sour look, pressing his tongue against the backs of his teeth, fighting the urge to start grinding them together. He was loyal. He was a loyal man to the Resistance and the urge to protect its name was odd and new, and Val had the urge to reach out and smack the boy across the back of the head like a mother would to a child. He doubted he’d get away unscathed it he did, but the urge lingered all the same. “Do you think there’s something wrong with my name?” he asked, taking a deep breath and holding it, counting back from ten before exhaling. “Because there’s sure as fuck nothing wrong with my Goddamn name.”

There were some people who didn’t have family names. Val understood that, saw the way people looked at the others when they didn’t have a name of their own. He hadn’t understood that part of it all, the way people somehow thought that having a word tacked onto the end of your name meant you were somehow better than someone else. He knew a young girl in his precious compound who Rachael had been fond of. Julia with blue eyes. That was what everyone had called her, even though she was so many things other than that. It was better than what the older women called her behind her back. Orphan Julia. Humans were gossipy little creatures no matter the day and age, apparently, and no matter if there were people dying or not. Somehow Julia had been less of a person because she had no parents or last name. Val had thought it stupid until Rachael had reminded him that the only reason people didn’t say the same about him was because he had family he could call his own. Most of his family had survived the initial attack by Skynet and had survived through the years, and he had a surname to prove it. It was stupid, but it worked in Val’s favour.

“I have a better shot than that,” he said with a snort, grabbing his bottle of water and uncapping it once again, taking another swig and swishing it over and under his tongue before spitting it out onto the ground beside him, on the opposite side of the boy. He turned back to look at him, eyebrows hitching up. “The cocks I’ve been sucking made sure of it.”

[silverliars]

Scipio scowled venomously, hunched over the food he’d been given as though he was afraid Val would take it back, even with half of it in his mouth already. Shifting the partially chewed mass to the pocket of his cheek, he spoke around the fullness. Some people got irritated at him if he talked with his mouth full. They were usually older. When Skynet could kill you any day, manners stopped mattering. “I’m a fucking idiot?” he demanded, gesturing to the downed plane. Scipio swallowed hard, freeing up his mouth. “I’m not the asshole who got shot down from the sky and then held someone prisoner to watch him die.” If he could act first – and if murdering someone didn’t completely disgust him – Scipio could end this now. Except he’d probably get shot if he did. Scipio didn’t plan on living forever, but he’d prefer to make it at least to twenty. He’d gone on this long on his own. He could last a few more years.

“The Resistance hasn’t done shit for me,” Scipio snapped. “Maybe you all live and die in your fucking tiny rabbit holes, and that’s fine until you get raided and wiped out, but you don’t feed me. You don’t fucking fight for me.” He tossed his knife to the ground, watching the blade bury itself beside Acosta’s arm before yanking it back. “What I do, I do for myself, so don’t expect me to get on my fucking knees and choke on the Resistance’s cock for saving the world.” His eyes, narrowed in skepticism and against the blistering sun, scanned the barren desert around them. “Great fucking job, by the way.”

Lips pulled into a scowl, Scipio stared at the ground, back to flipping his knife without conscious thought. Rumors travelled fast when it came to the Resistance. Ever victory over Skynet came through on the radio with everyone gathered around listening raptly. Scipio sat on the periphery of his group during Resistance hours, those times that he didn’t have somewhere better to be. Spending half an hour on his back or on his knees was a lot more profitable than spending it listening to “news” that never told them anything new anyway. If the Resistance knew about a raid that was coming, one of Scipio’s cohort would tell him about it, and he’d have some food, a weapon, a new piece of clothing to show for his work. More than one man had told Scipio that he was the best fuck he’d ever had. Even a woman, once, though Scipio considered that an abject failure. She’d been as warm inside as an ass, but the noises she made were completely different, and he found her breasts massively distracting. Never again. Scipio had learned his lesson. He liked men and men only.

Men like Acosta, if he was perfectly honest with himself. All men were a possible payout, from the hideously old to those around his age, more likely to be whores than johns. Under different circumstances, if they’d met without a massive fucking hole in Acosta’s leg and a gun in his hands trained on Scipio, he would have batted his eyes and pressed up against him without a second thought. Rubbed his thigh against his cock through his pants, whispered an offer, and pulled away to see if he’d take the bait. Scipio didn’t fuck without getting paid anymore. He’d done that at first, if a man was attractive, if he had the build of a survivor and hands that could span Scipio’s then terrifyingly skinny waist with barely a thought. All he’d ever gotten from that was a limp. The whole thing easily fell under the heading of not worth it.

Turning his sharp gaze back to the man laying prone, Scipio wrapped his arms around his knees, settling more comfortably onto the sand. His shadow provided a hint of a cooling effect, just enough that he could sit without feeling as though his ass had been set on fire through his pants. “You’re a fucking Acosta, yeah? All snuggled up in the Resistance’s ass. “

Scipio hated him a little bit for even having a name. A proper name, last and probably first too. No one else had those. Scipio’s own name had been chosen from a book he found, and not all of his friends could read. They didn’t have the luxury of last names, of belonging to someone or something. He handed out names like coinage, just so they all had something to trade in when asked what they were called, for those who didn’t know. And Acosta was here, parading around with a family name – with a family, and some kind of secret code pertaining to that family – acting like it was a point of pride. Like pride had anything to do with it. It probably did. He was so disconnected from the real world, living in the cradle of the Resistance, that he thought there was still time left after surviving to be prideful. “Forget about it.” He scoffed, flipping his knife high and catching it in midair. The trick had taken him years to master, scar after scar in the middle of his palm to show where he’d failed, where infection had seared his blood when there wasn’t proper care for it. That was reality. Grabbing a knife by the blade and accepting whatever came afterwards.

Greedily, Scipio watched him take a drink. What he wouldn’t give for a fucking water bottle that didn’t have to be held a certain way to keep the water from spilling out, that hadn’t been salvaged and didn’t contain god knew what kind of germs. An indignant noise escaped his mouth when Acosta spit, the hungry desert sand swallowing the water in seconds. “What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded. “That’s water!” In between defending the purity of the resistance, this fucking moron was sharing his rations and wasting water. Water. Scipio would have drunk it straight from his mouth without question. In a barren world, you took what you could get. He couldn’t remember the last time it had rained. A day’s walk could strip someone of his size dry, and here this moron was, pissing it away like it grew on trees. Like trees grew.

 Even the revelation that Acosta was as much of a fag as Scipio – and that he thought sucking cock had anything to do with firearms, which Scipio could guarantee with absolute certainty that it did not – was nothing in the face of wasting water. Everyone knew water was precious. Retarded children knew water was precious. Yet here this brainless Resistance goon lay, spitting it out and acting as though Scipio was the crazy one for not going face down and lifting his ass for the Resistance to fuck. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” In anger, Scipio had stopped flipping his blade, holding it by the hilt so tightly that his knuckles turned white. “That was water.”

[v-engence]

while your friends all drown

Never one to run from a fight, all Liam wanted to do, standing in front of Grayson with a gun cocked and pointed at his skull, was to turn and flee. He could run barefoot through the Alaskan ground and feel fucking fine about it as long as he was away from Grayson and his fucking eyes. Liam had once thought that he knew what was going on in his head, could read his eyes when he caught Grayson looking at him, but now he knew he didn’t know anything at all. Five years in a small room wasn’t enough to rid himself of memories that festered like infection in his body. Five years in a small room wasn’t enough to wipe himself clean of knowing who Grayson Pierce was, but it was enough time to realize that he hadn’t really known Grayson at all.

He had known his body, had touched him in every way he could think of, with his hands and mouth, his tongue and cock. Liam had learned every part of Grayson’s body, had dragged his lips down his spine and bruised his hips, shoved him into the bed, the floor, up against the wall. He had torn him apart and built him up, had ripped him apart and exposed him, but he had never really known him. Liam had never known Grayson, even though he’d been inside his head and skin, touched him in every way he could think of. He had thought that – maybe, just maybe – Grayson had cared enough about him, loved him enough to not tattle on him for what he did, but he had. And Liam had thought that maybe with enough time and patience, Grayson would have been able to accept that part of Liam that he hid.

He hadn’t. Grayson had told and Liam had wound up imprisoned and almost murdered because of it.

The idea that he was better than Grayson and could overlook their issues in favour of being let out of his cell and breathing air that wasn’t filtered through a system so he wouldn’t suffocate on his own carbon dioxide. He wasn’t. He really fucking wasn’t. He was a mix-up of emotions, a hurricane of anger and violence mingling in with sadness and a desperate need to tear Grayson apart. Love had never come easy to him, and neither had trust, but he had been sure that what Grayson and Liam had had, and it had been blown out of the water. Liam wanted to both strangle Grayson with his bare hands and shove him down and fuck him, taste the back of his neck and bite down on his skin, leaving violent marks on his skin.

Slowly, he turned his head to the side, glancing at Cormac and flashing him a cocky grin, tongue flicking against the fronts of his teeth. A muscle in Cormac’s jaw twitched and Liam could swear his finger twitched on the trigger. That would be funny, in a way, because although the Marshall didn’t trust Liam for shit, he probably wasn’t the type to turn a blind eye to him being killed by a trigger-happy lisping asshole who couldn’t keep his nerves in check. Sure, Liam didn’t want to die, but he would be laughing all the way to Hell while Cormac got his ass handed to him.

Upper lip peeling back from his teeth in a scowl, Liam crossed his arms over his chest, looking between Grayson and the Marshall. “He’s right here,” he said rather petulantly, unhappy with being talked aboutinstead of being talked to. He had never liked it when people spoke about him as if he wasn’t in the room, starting from when he was a child. Not much had changed since then, except for the amount of blood on his hands. “And does anyone give a shit about what I want? Maybe I don’t wanna Drift with a fucking traitor.”

Liam knew he was going to be chewed out for that comment. Or, at least, he was going to be snarked and told he didn’t have an opinion on that matter, because he’d killed someone and apparently that mean all his opinions and thoughts were null and void. Which was completely bullshit in his head, but the Marshall was king of the fucking domain, and his word was law. It had always been that way, and when Liam had been clear of murder he hadn’t cared that much. He could listen to the Marshall blather on about laws and rules, about how what he said went, and he could do what he wanted – usually fucking Grayson in a utility closet when he got the urge – without worrying about getting a bullet in the skull or cuffs on his hands. He couldn’t do that now. Because of Grayson. Because Grayson hadn’t even fucking heard him out and stopped looking at him like he’d just opened the gates of Hell long enough to listen to Liam. He acted like he knew it all, that because Haiming had died at the hands of Liam that Liam was a monster.

Tucking his palms against the sides of his ribs, he lifted an eyebrow and gave a look to the Marshall, ignoring Grayson. He didn’t want to look at him anymore. It hurt to look at him. It hurt to remember all the things he’d done with him, all the Kaiju they had taken down together, and then remember that he had been tried and judged, charged and almost executed, just because Grayson was a little bitch who couldn’t handle the truth. Liam should have known better than to trust anyone, but he’d trusted Grayson and been intimate him in every way that he could think of, and Grayson had tossed that trust to the ground and curb stomped it. Fucking obliterated it into the metal of their Jaeger. Looking at him again would just make him want to attack, to launch himself at Grayson and tear into his skin, rip him apart in ways that had nothing to do with how deep he could press his cock into him and everything to do with prying open his rib cage and setting his heart on fire – literally.

Even with that anger, that violence building in his throat and chest, every single person in the room knew that Liam would accept any and all terms the Marshall threw at him. Years in solitary confinement had left him restless and – for fuck’s sake, he couldn’t believe he was admitting to this – needy. Liam was desperate and needy for physical contact and fresh air. He wanted the sun on his face and a maze of rooms to walk around in. He wanted to do everything that came with living in a world that involved more than three walls of concrete and one of bulletproof glass.

[silverliars]

In his still fairly short life, Grayson had made himself a stranger to foolishness. He did not feel the fool, he did not play the fool. He thought things out before he did them, and when he acted, it was with nothing so much as measured purpose. He’d been an idiot for thinking that he and Liam could drift together again. The very air between them was thick with bad blood and worse intentions, eyes locked on each other like predators about to spring, though if Liam so much as moved, he’d end up with a bullet through his skull. Grayson surprised himself at how desperately he didn’t want that. It had nothing to do with reason, with the idea that each man was responsible for his own crimes and actions, and everything to do with the fact that it was Liam. After ripping apart Kaiju, it wouldn’t much bother Grayson to see a man’s brains scattered on the floor, save that they might get on his clothes. Liam was different.

Grayson didn’t get close to people easily. When he’d been told he’d drift with Liam Grant, at first he thought it had to be a mistake. Liam was different from Grayson, the kind of extravert who fucked everyone in the program and then some, at least. They both had their oddities – Grayson had once caught Liam examining Kaiju remains while everyone else was at dinner (to be fair, that was the reason Grayson had chosen that moment to go to the lab, and after all this time, he knew that they were compatible) – but Grayson never thought that Liam could become such a huge part of his world.

Nothing else compared to sharing your head with another person. Having Liam inside his mind and thoughts, filling up the spaces inside him that Grayson hadn’t even known were still there. Everything was open between them, their families and childhoods and every strain of training, every person they’d ever fucked. If Grayson had wanted to, he could delve into every part of Liam’s consciousness, and he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t thought of it before. But that was different, just a passing idea when they were locking into a neural handshake that fucking while drifting would be a surreal experience. Before everything had fallen to shit, that was the sort of thing Grayson thought about. Sharing Liam’s mind while riding his cock, feeling everything from them both, and drowning in sensation. He probably shouldn’t have been surprised that they got there eventually. Cedar and Fiona curled up together in the corner, purring quietly, while Grayson and Liam fucked for hours, sometimes to the point where the only thing Grayson could do was flop on his side afterwards and pant, little hurt noises escaping his mouth while Liam played with his cock, because Liam was a goddamn asshole and took advantage of Grayson’s hypersensitivity just to make him squirm.

He’d been in love with him. Not just with his naked body, stretched out above and against Grayson’s, but with every part of Liam. His capricious, unpredictable nature, his heartlessness interspersed with stunning bursts of affection, the way he was so fucking human, where Grayson sometimes felt that he’d been set back from the messy reality of existence. Grayson was in love with Liam’s selfishness, with the way there was nothing he could dare expect from him, and sometimes that was just the way things were, and sometimes that hurt more than Grayson could have ever expected. But then he found out that Liam killed Haiming. Just… killed him, and dumped his body, and never told Grayson. So Grayson told the Marshall. And then five years went by with Liam in prison and Grayson in the middle of the forest, and Grayson wasn’t in love with Liam anymore. He could just still feel the thread stretching between them, the empty place where they’d been connected in every way that humans could be.

“No.” Grayson and the Marshall spoke with one voice, which would have almost been funny if it didn’t make Grayson curl his lip. He rarely shared the opinion of the authority figure in any given situation. Grayson was the outlier, the statistical flaw on the edge of any group, a book open in his hand and his eyebrows raised, Cedar rarely far. No one would describe Grayson as cool, automatically removing too cool to care from the list of possibilities. He just didn’t care, a facet of his personality that collided sharply with the Marshall’s on more than one occasion. The order to not let Liam do this or that fell on deaf ears, Grayson shrugging and saying okay, though everyone in the room knew that Liam would do whatever he wanted, and Grayson would be right there with him, not even faking an apology for being a liar and making things difficult. Agreeing with the Marshall – that it didn’t matter if Liam wanted to drift with him or not, because this was what they were doing and they’d better pretend to be happy about it – was a new feeling.

While the Marshall went on about second chances and necessity, or something of the sort, Grayson tuned out. He didn’t like it. Nothing about this situation sat right with him. Liam was still human, still had as much of a right to agree or disagree with everyone’s plans for him as Grayson did. God only knew, Grayson didn’t want to be here. He’d rather be curled up with Cedar and Fiona next to him, telling someone else it was their fucking turn to save the world, and he’d be here to make sure it wasn’t in complete ruins when they finally managed that. The “choice” he was given was no more an option than Liam’s, but at least no one was telling Grayson to shut up. Or pointing a gun at his head. Some days, you had to take what you could get.

Eventually, the Marshall stopped speaking, which Grayson took as his cue to move on. Unless he and Liam needed to pick up their batons and go another few rounds – at the end of which, Grayson was fairly certain someone would end up bruised – they could head to whatever was next. Returning to their rooms most likely, and the interesting conversation that would result when Grayson told Liam to come with him and pick up Fiona. If Liam chose to listen to him at all. That had never been one of Liam’s strong suits, yet here they were, and here Grayson was, and if Liam wanted to be an asshole, Grayson would just keep his cat. “Are we done here?” He glanced back at his old – and apparently new again – drift partner, who was still dripping on the floor. “I think Liam needs a towel.”