The heavy steel service door clicked shut behind them, severing the connection to the ballroom like a guillotine. The roar of the jazz band was instantly replaced by the low, wet hum of the city night and the distant hiss of traffic.
The alley was cooler, damp with the earlier rain, and smelled of wet brick and exhaust—a scent that, for both of them, felt more like home than the perfume inside.
Mordecai inhaled sharply, the cold air hitting his gin-soaked lungs, and promptly stumbled over a crack in the pavement.
"The topographic variance of this alley is unacceptable," Mordecai complained, his words slightly slurred but his tone indignant. He gripped Viktor’s arm tighter, his claws digging into the wool of Viktor’s coat. "It is a hazard. Someone should file a grievance."
"Lift feet," Viktor grunted, adjusting his stance to take more of the smaller cat’s weight.
He moved them with a grim, practiced efficiency. Viktor ignored the main lot where the limousines were gleaming under the streetlamps. He knew better. When you walked into a room full of people who wanted you dead, you didn't park with the valet. You parked where you could leave without reversing.
His truck—a dark, heavy-set thing, courtesy of Mitiz's fling, that looked more like a battering ram than a vehicle—was tucked deep in the shadows near the loading dock, nose pointing toward the street.
"You parked in the delivery zone," Mordecai observed, squinting at the vehicle as they approached. "That is... contrary to signage."
"It is tactical," Viktor corrected. He fished his keys from his pocket, the metal jingling softly. "Marigold parks in front. I park where I can drive through fence if I have to."
He hauled the passenger door open. It creaked, a heavy, solid sound.
Mordecai hesitated, looking at the open door, then at Viktor. He looked like he wanted to argue the logic of driving through fences, but his equilibrium gave a dangerous wobble. He surrendered to gravity and basically fell into the passenger seat.
Viktor caught the door before it could slam on Mordecai’s tail, guiding it shut with a firm thud.
He walked around the hood, limping heavily now that he didn't have to hold himself upright for an audience. He slid into the driver's seat, the springs groaning under his bulk, and pulled the door closed. The silence in the car was absolute. No music. No shouting. Just the smell of old leather, machine oil, and the faint scent of juniper emanating from the passenger seat.
Viktor didn't start the engine. He just sat there, hands gripping the steering wheel, staring out at the brick wall of the alley, letting the quiet settle the ringing in his ears. Beside him, Mordecai slid down in the seat until his head hit the leather rest, his glasses now fully askew.
"Secure location achieved," Mordecai mumbled, closing his eyes.
The silence was beautiful. It was a physical weight, pressing out the memory of the saxophone and the screaming trumpet. They just breathed, the air in the car cycling between them, warm and smelling faintly of Viktor’s cheap soap and Mordecai’s expensive clove cigarettes.
Viktor watched him. He watched the way Mordecai’s chest rose and fell, the way the tension was slowly bleeding out of his frame, leaving him loose and uncharacteristically vulnerable against the cracked leather seat. He looked less like a weapon and more like a man who had been awake for five years straight and just closed his eyes for the first time.
Viktor opened his mouth. He wanted to say something—about the truce, about the leg, about how quiet the car was—but Mordecai beat him to it.
"I missed you too..." Mordecai murmured, his eyes still closed. "I am not good at expressing... feelings."
He lifted a hand, waving it vaguely in the air as if trying to swat away a fly.
"It is... inefficient. It clouds the diagnostic. Emotions are data corruption, Viktor. Usually, I quarantine them."
He cracked one eye open, the green iris unfocused and swimming in the dim light of the dashboard.
"But the quarantine has failed," Mordecai stated simply. "And the data is... overwhelming."
He turned his head on the headrest, lulling to the side to look at Viktor.
"Since I left... the equation has been unbalanced," Mordecai explained, his voice quiet and clinical, yet trembling at the edges. "I have calculated the variables. I have better funding now. I have superior weaponry. The Marigold organization offers a dental plan. Statistically, my life has improved by forty-two percent."
He let out a sharp, bitter laugh that turned into a sigh.
"But I am... unmoored. The people I work with, they are entropy. Chaos. I spend all my energy calculating their errors, predicting their failures. It is exhausting. It is infinite noise."
Mordecai reached out, his hand drifting across the center console until his fingertips brushed against Viktor’s coat sleeve.
"You were silence, Viktor. You were the constant. When I stood next to you, I did not have to calculate the floor. I knew where the floor was because you were standing on it. You were... gravity."
He tapped Viktor’s arm, a slow, clumsy rhythm.
Viktor looked down at the hand resting on his sleeve. It was a gloved, trembling thing—the hand of a man who claimed to value precision but was currently clinging to the past like a lifeline.
"Gravity," Viktor repeated softly, testing the word. It felt heavy in his mouth.
He turned his head slowly, the leather of the seat creaking, and looked at Mordecai. There was no anger left in his one good eye. The rage that had fueled him for five years—the fire he’d used to burn away the pain of the therapy and the brace—had sputtered out, leaving something much colder and much harder to look at.
It was just hurt. A deep, confused, festering wound that had never scabbed over.
"Mordecai," Viktor said, his voice dropping so low it was barely a vibration in the quiet car. It wasn't an interrogation. It was a plea.
"If I was 'constant... if we were this 'sym-metry'..."
Viktor swallowed, his throat clicking. He reached over and covered Mordecai’s hand with his own. He didn't squeeze. He just held it there, trapping the trembling.
He paused, searching Mordecai’s face, looking for the man behind the glasses.
"And why..." Viktor’s voice cracked, just a fraction. "Why did you have to leave like that? You didn't just walk away, Mordecai. You walked through me. You broke me to get to the door. Like Obstacle"
"An obstacle?" Mordecai choked on the word. He looked as if Viktor had slapped him. "No. No, Viktor... you were the entirety."
He pulled his hand back, gripping his own knees, his knuckles creaking in their gloves
"You were the only thing in that godforsaken organization that made sense. You were the anchor...."
He looked up, his eyes wide and unguarded behind the crooked glasses.
"You were my partner. You were the only reason I stayed as long as I did. I calculated every day based on you. Where you were. If you were safe. You were the entire equation."
"Then why?" Viktor asked, his voice rough, the hurt plain in the single syllable.
"Because you wouldn't come with me!" Mordecai cried out, a sudden flare of drunken misery. "I was leaving a sinking ship, Viktor. And you... you were chained to the deck. You wouldn't let go...you'd never leave her, for his sake."
He squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head.
"I had to stop you. If I just ran, you would have chased me. You would have hunted me down. And then..."
"Then one of us would have had to kill the other. And I knew... I knew I couldn't kill you. The probability was zero. I looked at the gun, and I looked at your head, and the math returned 'error.' I couldn't do it."
He gestured vaguely at the leg brace hidden under the dashboard.
"So I... compromised. I aimed low. Because I am a coward. And because I needed you to stay alive, even if you hated me for it. Having you hate me was... statistically preferable to having you dead."
Viktor watched him. He saw the frantic calculations spinning behind those green eyes, the desperate attempt to justify heartbreak with arithmetic. He knew Mordecai. He knew that when the little man started talking about probabilities and equations, it was because the truth was too big to fit in his mouth.
"We could have—" Viktor started, his voice a low rumble, reaching for a reality where things had gone differently.
"Could we?" Mordecai cut in, sharp and defensive. He turned away, staring out the windshield at the brick wall of the alley, his jaw tight. "Look at us, Viktor. Look at the variables. These are the men we are. We are implements. We spill and clean blood. For the men with power and coin. We do not get happy endings. We get severance packages or shallow graves."
"Stop," Viktor said. It wasn't a command; it was an anchor. "Stop acting like you are machine. Like you are without choice."
"I am a function of my environment!" Mordecai snapped, his hands fluttering in agitation. "To pretend otherwise is a logical fallacy. I operate within the constraints of—"
"What do you want?" Viktor interrupted, leaning across the center console. The leather creaked under his weight.
"You trivialize the complexity of—"
"What do you want, Heller?" Viktor’s voice rose, filling the small cabin of the car. He wasn't asking for a mission report. He wasn't asking for a strategy. He was stripping the wires.
"Vasko, stop," Mordecai warned, his voice trembling. He shrank back against the door, cornered by the question.
"Mordecai." Viktor didn't move. He just said the name. He put the full weight of their history into it. The railyards. The late nights. The coffee. The bullet.
"I said stop-" Heller shot back.
"Čo odo mňa chceš?!"
Something in Mordecai snapped. The wire pulled too tight and finally broke.
The scream filled the car, shocking in its volume. Mordecai stared at Viktor, chest heaving, his eyes wide and wet and terrified. The silence that followed was deafening.
Then the dam broke completely.
"I want to breathe," Mordecai rasped, the words tumbling out in a frantic, disjointed stream. He clutched at his chest, his gloved fingers digging into his tie. "I want to stop holding my breath. I have been holding it for five years, Viktor. Every day. Every minute. I wake up and I calculate the odds of survival and I hold my breath until I am back behind a locked door."
He leaned forward, desperate, his glasses slipping down his nose again.
"I see you," he whispered, frantic. "I wait for you. In every crowd, in every job. I scan the perimeter and I am looking for the eyepatch. I watch for you. I check the obituaries. I check the hospital admissions."
He reached out, grabbing Viktor’s coat with both hands, shaking him slightly.
"I want to know that no matter what, you are okay because I am sure of it. Not because I estimated it. Not because I hoped for it. I want to be the one who ensures it. I want to stand next to you and know that the variable is secure."
He choked on an exasperated breath, his head dropping until his forehead rested against Viktor’s shoulder
"I want the silence back," he mumbled into the wool. "I want the constant."
Viktor sat there, a statue carved out of conflict.
His knee throbbed—a sharp, hot line of pain that shot up his thigh, keeping time with his heartbeat. He shot you. The thought was a jagged stone in his throat. He crippled you. He left you. The logic was sound. The anger was justified. It should have been enough to make him shove the smaller man away, to open the door and kick him back out into the cold reality of the alley.
But Mordecai was shaking against his chest.
The vibration of those sobs traveled through the layers of wool and cheap cotton, sinking straight into Viktor’s ribs. It was a terrible, undoing sensation. To hear the most composed, arrogant, precise creature he had ever known reduced to this—a shivering, weeping mess begging for a constant.
It was unfair. It was cheating.
Viktor let out a long, ragged breath that rattled in his chest. The fight went out of him. It didn't leave with a bang; it just drained away, leaving him tired and aching and unable to deny the truth.
He lifted his hand. It hovered for a second, heavy and scarred, a final hesitation.
His palm landed on the back of Mordecai’s neck, his fingers curling into the fur at the base of his skull. It wasn't a gentle touch—it was a grip. Solid. Heavy. Grounding.
It wasn't a command to shut up. It was a command to stop breaking.
He pulled Mordecai closer, tucking the smaller cat’s head firmly under his chin, shielding him from the world, from the logic, from the consequences.
"Damn you," Viktor whispered into the silence of the car, his voice thick. "You make it very hard to hate you, Heller."
He shifted his leg, wincing at the pop of the joint, and leaned his cheek against the top of Mordecai’s head.
"You want constant?" Viktor grunted, his hand rubbing a slow, heavy circle between Mordecai's shoulder blades. "I am here. I go nowhere."
Mordecai stiffened slightly under the weight of the hand, then melted. He pulled back just enough to tilt his head up, the leather of the seat creaking softly behind him.
In the dim, amber light filtering in from the alley’s lone streetlamp, Viktor looked like a landscape carved out of granite.
Mordecai’s eyes traced the lines of him with a drunk, hungry fascination. He usually detested asymmetry—it was an error, a flaw—but on Viktor, the damage was compelling. The scar tissue around the eyepatch wasn't ugly; it was history. It was a topographical map of survival.
He looked at the heavy, square line of Viktor's jaw. It was stubborn. Immovable. A load-bearing wall that could hold up a collapsing roof. Mordecai felt a dizzying rush of appreciation for that sheer structural integrity. In a world of variables and fragile things that broke under pressure, Viktor was built to last.
Mordecai’s gaze drifted lower.
It snagged on the rough texture of Viktor’s coat, then moved to the throat, thick and corded with muscle, and finally, inevitably, settled on his mouth.
It was a stern mouth. It wasn't designed for smiling. The corners were usually pulled down in a grimace of concentration or irritation. It was broad, the lips slightly chapped from the cold and the cheap cigarettes he insisted on smoking.
There was no softness there, and that was exactly what pulled at Mordecai’s chest. It was a mouth that issued commands. A mouth that didn't waste movement.
Mordecai stared at it, his own breathing shallow. He found himself calculating the distance. The friction. The impossible, terrifying variable of what it would feel like to press against something that solid.
"You still look.." Mordecai murmured, his voice barely a ghost of sound, his eyes locked on the line of Viktor’s lower lip. "...structurally sound."
Viktor didn't need his missing eye to see the trajectory of that stare. It was a tangible thing, heavy and electric, landing on him with the weight of a physical touch.
He sat motionless, trapped in the amber-lit stasis of the car cabin, feeling the air between them thicken until it felt like breathing syrup. He watched Mordecai watching him. It was a revelation. For years, Viktor had been looked at in two ways: as a threat to be neutralized, or as a tool to be utilized. He was a battering ram, a shield, a wall of meat and fur to stand between expensive people and bad consequences. Even Mitzi looked past him sometimes, looking only at the safety he provided.
But Mordecai? Mordecai was looking at him.
Viktor felt a low, involuntary thrum start deep in his chest—a purr he suppressed before it could reach his throat. He studied the wreckage of the man in front of him. The Mordecai he remembered was sharp edges, starched collars, and eyes like polished emeralds that deflected everything. This Mordecai was soft. He was blurred. The gin had melted the ice, and what was left was something terrifyingly open.
He saw the way Mordecai’s pupils had blown wide, swallowing the green iris until his eyes were dark pools of want. He saw the slight tremor in the smaller cat’s jaw, the way his ears were swiveled forward, shutting out the rest of the world to focus entirely on the frequency of Viktor’s breathing.
And he saw where that gaze had settled.
Viktor felt the heat of it on his mouth. It made his lips tingle, a phantom pressure that was almost painful. He realized, with a sudden, lurching clarity, that Mordecai wasn't analyzing a target. He was starving. He was looking at Viktor’s mouth the way a drowning man looks at oxygen.
It shifted something in Viktor’s foundation. The bitterness of the betrayal, the chronic ache in his knee, the years of cold silence—they didn't disappear, but they were suddenly dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of this moment. The man who had broken him was now looking at him as if he were the only thing holding the universe together.
"Structurally sound," Viktor repeated internally.
It was the most romantic thing the idiot had ever said.
Viktor felt a sudden, fierce possessiveness surge through his blood. He didn't want Mordecai to look away. He didn't want him to sober up and remember his equations and his shame. He wanted to keep him right here, in this dark, quiet car, where the only truth was the gravity pulling them together.
He shifted his hand on the back of Mordecai’s neck, his thumb digging deeper into the soft fur, feeling the frantic pulse hammering beneath the skin. He looked down at the smaller cat, his single eye half-lidded, dark and heavy with his own confession.
"You look..." Viktor started, his voice a rough scrape against the silence, struggling to find words that fit. He abandoned them. He didn't have Mordecai’s vocabulary. He dealt in actions.
He leaned in. The leather groaned. The space between them vanished. Viktor tilted his head, bringing his face inches from Mordecai’s, close enough to feel the warmth of the other cat’s breath, close enough to smell the clove and the gin and the sharp scent of rain. He let his gaze drop to Mordecai’s mouth, returning the stare, answering the hunger with a silent, heavy promise of his own.
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