There was a fierce, manic exhilaration about Jason Collier when he returned to the borrowed office on Chancery Lane.
“I have it on good authority that Halford is handing in his resignation today.” Collier fell into one of the chairs across from Jay’s desk. “I have a meeting with the prime minister tomorrow.”
“My employers will be pleased to hear that.” Jay forced a smile onto his face and glanced at the bar cart. “Would you like a drink? I’d say this calls for one.”
Collier poked through the bottles with enthusiasm—then, noticing the bottle of Ralston at the back, plucked it from the cart. Jay couldn’t help a vicious rush of satisfaction as Collier touched the bottle; he poured a measure of scotch into one glass, then a second, passing it to Jay.
“So,” Jay said, rolling the glass between his fingers. “Health minister. You’re pleased with that?”
Collier’s mood faltered a touch. “Should I not be?”
Jay shrugged. “Personally, with your background, I’d expect you to set your sights a little higher.”
Swirling the contents of his glass, Collier said, “Is that what your employers want?”
“They wanted an asset in the cabinet. They needed someone ambitious, but not too ambitious, if you see what I mean.” Jay drank from his own glass; he couldn’t help his expression of distaste, although it helped sell the hook. “Let’s call it a difference of opinion.”
“Are you proposing something?” Collier asked, taking a sip of scotch; Jay had his full attention.
“How would you like to be prime minister?”
Collier coughed into his drink. He took a moment to clear his throat, then said, “I mean, obviously, yes, but—”
“Do you know Edward Boulos?”
“I’ve heard the name,” Collier said. “He owns an oil company, doesn’t he?”
Jay nodded. “Mr. Boulos is an old friend to certain ranking members of the new government. He’s privy to all sorts of secrets—and he’s made sure to keep those secrets well-recorded and hidden away for whenever he needs them.”
“And one of those friends,” Collier guessed, “happens to be our new PM?”
“Naturally,” Jay replied. “If someone were to lay hands on Boulos’ files …” he let Collier fill in the blanks.
“And how would someone do that?” Collier asked, intrigued. “The same way as before?”
“Not quite,” Jay said with a sigh. “My employers’ resources wouldn’t be available, in this case—it would take outside funding to carry out this particular operation.”
“You’d need money,” Collier interpreted.
“Not much, all things considered,” Jay assured him. “Just enough to hire the necessary talent.”
Collier levelled a wary look over his glass. “And what do you get out of all this?”
“A healthy cut of the fee,” Jay said. “And we’ve already established you know who your friends are.”
Collier finished off his scotch, savouring it as he considered Jay’s proposal. “All right.” He set the glass on Jay’s desk. “Where should I send the money?”
“I’ll send you the account details.” Jay stood and circled past Collier to the door, opening it. “In the meantime, I’ll start making arrangements.”
Collier nodded and stepped out; Jay walked him to the end of the hall. There, Collier hesitated and said, “How will I—?”
“When I have something for you, I’ll let you know.”
Collier nodded again and made his way down the stairs, out of the building.
When Jay returned to the office, Clay was sitting on the edge of the desk. “Guess we had him convinced.”
Jay shrugged. “What have you got on Boulos?”
“He owns a mansion out in the Cotswolds,” Clay reported. “He’s out of the country at the moment, so security is quite light. I can deal with most of it, but it looks like the cameras and alarms are all on a closed network. No Wi-Fi, no connection to the internet.”
Jay groaned. No remote access meant they’d have to deal with everything on-site. “I guess I’m coming along.”
His phone rang—not the phone he’d been using to deal with Collier, but his personal phone. The call was coming from a number Jay didn’t recognise; he answered with a wary, “Hello?”
“Good evening,” said a woman’s voice. “Is this James Moriarty?”
“It is.”
“This is a courtesy call from the Metropolitan Police Service,” said the woman. “I’ve been asked to inform you that Sebastian Moran has been taken into custody.”
Hurrying north along the Embankment toward the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police was, possibly, the last thing Jay should have been doing. The woman on the phone had refused to tell him anything about Sebastian’s arrest, or even the charge—simply that he was being held at New Scotland Yard.
Which was, in itself, an implication.
Sebastian could have been arrested for just about anything. The options ranged from petty theft to treason—and if he was being charged with anything approaching the latter, Jay didn’t have much time. He’d have to get Sebastian out before he was moved to a more secure lock-up—or before MI-5 whisked him away to some black site. After that, they’d have to get out of the country somehow. They’d need to stay away from the airports—too many cameras, too much security—but transport by ship would leave more time for something to go wrong—
Jay stopped dead at the sight of Sebastian walking, unhindered, out of New Scotland Yard, pausing on the steps to light a cigarette. He looked tired, although not as if he’d just escaped a brutal interrogation. The skin above one eye was bruised and split, but not bleeding.
Sebastian finally glanced up and looked surprised to see Jay standing there.
Although the question seemed inadequate to encompass the scope of his confusion, Jay asked, “What happened?”
Sebastian stepped past Jay, walking south—back the way Jay had come. “Got into a fight.”
Jay hurried after him. “A fight?”
“Some drunk arsehole,” Sebastian explained in a disinterested tone. “And his friends.”
Jay couldn’t quite parse what he was hearing. “They hauled you into New Scotland Yard over a pub brawl?”
Sebastian shrugged. “It was the closest police station.” He glanced at Jay. “It’s fine. No charges.”
Fine. Jay had spent the better part of an hour preparing to burn his life down so he could get Sebastian to safety, and it was fine.
“They called me,” Jay said, fighting to keep his voice level. “All they’d tell me was that you’d been arrested.”
“They asked if they should let anyone know.” Sebastian shrugged again. “Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”
He was walking too fast; Jay was nearly jogging to keep up, and he couldn’t see Sebastian’s face. “Fucking slow down,” he hissed, and grabbed Sebastian’s elbow.
The next thing he knew, his back was hitting a brick wall. Sebastian had a hand fisted in Jay’s lapel, pinning him in place.
It was a shock, but not exactly a surprise. One of Jay’s earliest interactions with Sebastian had involved a knife to his throat; he was well aware what Sebastian was capable of, especially when his control slipped. Sebastian, though, seemed surprised enough for both of them: he stared down at Jay with wide eyes, mouth hanging slightly open, as if he knew he should say something but was at an utter loss as to what.
Victoria Embankment wasn’t exactly a dark alley. Sebastian had crowded Jay into the relative shelter of a recessed doorway, but it was far from private; already, they’d attracted a few stray glances of concern. Sebastian didn’t seem to notice. He leaned in closer, chest pressing to Jay’s, pinning him in place.
Jay held still, waiting to see where this was going.
Sebastian’s breath blew roughly into Jay’s ear as his lips brushed against it. Jay couldn’t see his face except as a vague blur in his peripheral vision. Sebastian’s chest rose and fell in fast, shallow breaths.
Voice low and quiet, he said, “Are you afraid of me?”
Sebastian Moran was a dangerous man, and if Jay had been in this situation a year ago, he might have said “yes.” Now, though …
“No,” Jay said. “Never.”
A shiver rolled through Sebastian’s body, but he stayed where he was—hiding his face where Jay couldn’t see it.
“Do …” Jay licked his lips. “Do you want me to be afraid of you?”
“No,” Sebastian breathed, as if it were the most awful thought in the world, and buried his face in the crook of Jay’s neck.
Jay relaxed a little, resting one hand at Sebastian’s nape. Sebastian sighed under the touch, nuzzling closer. His lips moved against Jay’s skin—kissing him, slow and hesitant.
It wasn’t the direction Jay would have guessed this was going. “Sebastian?”
Sebastian exhaled harshly into Jay’s neck—and then he was falling to his knees, right there in the street, reaching for Jay’s belt.
Oh, god. They were practically on the Met’s doorstep and a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament. This could not fucking happen here.
Jay caught Sebastian’s hands in his own, holding them still. Sebastian’s fingers flexed, but he didn’t try to pull away. He didn’t look up, either; he was staring at the ground, eyes unfocused, his breathing loud and ragged. The cut above his eye had reopened, leaking blood down his face.
“Let me take you home,” Jay murmured, and Sebastian closed his eyes and nodded.
It took Jay few tries to hail a cab, what with the blood on Sebastian’s face. He was silent and subdued the whole ride back to his flat, head tipped back against the headrest, eyes unfocused; when they arrived, he climbed the steps up to his door and unlocked it with slow, dreamy motions.
Jay led the way into the bedroom. Sebastian kept his first aid kid in the en-suite bathroom; as Jay went to retrieve it, he told Sebastian, “Sit down.”
Sebastian was sitting on the edge of the bed when Jay returned. Jay moved to stand between his knees and doused a piece of gauze in disinfectant, bringing it to the mess of dried blood on Sebastian’s face. Sebastian winced a little at the sting, but otherwise stayed quiet and still; he moved easily under Jay’s hands, tilting his face in whatever direction Jay nudged him. Jay cleaned up the half-clotted mess as best he could and put a few butterfly bandages in place to hold the wound shut.
As his hands withdrew, Sebastian caught one of them in a clutching grip and brought it to his mouth, kissing the inside of Jay’s wrist. His other hand pressed to the small of Jay’s back, tugging him down.
Jay couldn’t bring himself to resist, sinking easily into Sebastian’s lap. He’d missed Sebastian; working without him had felt like he was missing a limb. And if this was what Sebastian needed right now, Jay would happily give it to him.
Sebastian pulled him closer, into a deep, thorough kiss. Jay moaned softly into Sebastian’s mouth, around the insistent press of his tongue, winding his arms around Sebastian’s neck and soaking up the touch of his hands, the solidity of his body against Jay’s. Sebastian’s hand moved to slide up the back of Jay’s shirt, stroking eagerly over his skin; Jay pulled away from the kiss just long enough to unbutton his own shirt, and Sebastian helped him out of it, tossing it unceremoniously to the floor. His mouth moved to Jay’s neck, dotting kisses down his throat and across one shoulder, tongue dragging along Jay’s collarbone.
Jay tugged at Sebastian’s shirt. “Take this off,” he gasped, eager to feel more of Sebastian’s skin.
Sebastian didn’t answer, and made no move to comply; instead his arm tightened around Jay’s waist as he rolled them both down onto the bed. His lips moved from Jay’s neck to his chest, drifting lower still, but Jay caught him by the back of the neck and coaxed him back up for another long, hungry kiss.
He slid one thigh between Sebastian’s legs, drawing it up to grind against his groin—but Sebastian wasn’t hard.
Jay made a concerned noise and pulled away from the kiss; Sebastian’s mouth latched onto his jaw instead, dragging up toward his ear. “It’s fine,” he muttered, “I can suck you off, or you can fuck me, or—” he scattered fervent kisses across the side of Jay’s face. “I’ll do anything. Anything you want.”
There was a manic edge to Sebastian’s voice that made Jay nervous. He grabbed roughly at Sebastian’s hair, not sure whether to drag him closer or push him away. Sebastian flinched at the touch, but he kept his mouth on Jay’s skin, kissing and nuzzling him with renewed fervour—as if to push through whatever had made him want to pull away.
“Stop,” Jay said, sharp and firm.
Sebastian froze, panting roughly into the crook of Jay’s neck. He was shaking, a fine tremor Jay could feel everywhere they touched.
Jay put his hands on Sebastian’s shoulders and pushed him back, until Sebastian was sitting on his heels with Jay kneeling in front of him. “Why are you doing this?”
Sebastian wouldn’t look him in the eye; he kept his gaze fixed somewhere around Jay’s collarbone. “I want to.”
“Bollocks.”
Sebastian’s eyes squeezed shut. “I have to.”
This was not a conversation they could have while Jay was half-naked in Sebastian’s bed. He turned and swung his legs over the side, leaning down to grab his shirt off the floor.
“No,” Sebastian gasped, sudden and wrecked, and then he was plastered to Jay’s back, arm wrapping tight around his waist to pull him close.
Jay’s balance wobbled; he grabbed onto Sebastian’s arm for balance.
“Don’t leave,” Sebastian whispered into the back of Jay’s head. “Please don’t leave me.”
“I won’t,” Jay said instinctively, rubbing Sebastian’s arm around his waist, desperately trying to soothe him. “It’s all right. I’m not going anywhere.”
Sebastian woke and immediately wished he hadn’t. There was a thick, throbbing ache in his forehead, pounding behind his eyes, like the headaches he’d woken up with after crying himself to sleep as a child.
He hadn’t cried. It was a near thing. Instead he’d clung to Jay through most of the night; he had to have fallen asleep at some point, but he wasn’t sure when.
Jay was still asleep next to him, sprawled out on his front, face half-buried in the pillow.
Sebastian closed his eyes again. He’d probably botched the meeting with Franklin. News of him getting into a pub brawl—at the Tankerville, of all places—would get around fast. He was fairly certain he’d just dodged an assault charge.
And he’d had some kind of breakdown in front of Jay. Not just in front of him, but in bed with him.
He felt Jay shifting next to him; when he opened his eyes again, Jay was awake and looking at him.
Sebastian couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
After a long moment of contemplation, Jay said, “Feeling better?”
Sebastian groaned and rolled onto his back, sitting up against the headboard.
Jay sat up next to him. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off Sebastian.
“I’m sorry,” Sebastian said.
Jay’s brow furrowed. “For what?”
“I was out of control last night.” Sebastian’s throat tightened at the memory. “I could’ve hurt you.”
Jay shook his head. “I think you were more likely to hurt yourself.” He studied Sebastian for a long moment, reaching out to touch him—then stopped, hand hovering in mid-air.
“Please,” Sebastian blurted out, breathless and needy, before he could stop himself.
Humiliation coiled in his gut, but Jay closed the distance between them anyway. He stroked his knuckles across Sebastian’s temple, down the side of his face before sliding back up to run his fingers through Sebastian’s hair, combing it back from his forehead. Sebastian turned his face into the touch, greedy for it, hating himself.
This was what they’d hurt him for, at school. He was too soft. Too emotional. Too needy. Cried too easily.
“I’m sorry,” Sebastian repeated. “I’ll … I’ll get over this. I did it once already.” He nuzzled his face into Jay’s palm. “I’ll be useful to you again, I promise, I just—”
Jay hushed him; there was an awful, heartbroken look in his eyes, like Sebastian had said something to upset him. He leaned in close and pressed a brief, gentle kiss to Sebastian’s mouth before brushing his lips across Sebastian’s forehead—then he was climbing over Sebastian, settling into his lap like he had last night.
Sebastian’s arms wrapped around Jay’s waist, dragging him in close, clutching at him again. Jay kissed the top of his head.
A horrible, wrenching sob tore through Sebastian’s chest, then another; it hurt, and he pressed his face to Jay’s shoulder to hide the tears leaking from his eyes. He hadn’t cried like this since he was a boy. He hadn’t thought he could cry like this anymore.
He wasn’t even sure why he was crying, shame and mortification clawing at his insides.
Jay kept his arms around Sebastian, rocking him a little. “It’s okay,” he murmured, over and over again. “It’s okay.”
Kitty’s friend Roisin had offered to send over a sample of her latest burlesque collection if Kitty would post some photos of herself wearing it all. The parcel had arrived this morning, and Kitty’s photography equipment now surrounded the antique chaise in her flat.
She had the camera shutter set up on a timer; as she arranged herself on the chaise, in one of the half-dozen or so poses that wouldn’t aggravate her neck, the timer fired off a series of three test shots.
Her phone, resting on the desk across the room, pinged with an incoming text. It wasn’t the notification sound she used for work-related messages, and therefore could wait.
Kitty clambered off the chaise and checked the test shots on the camera’s tiny screen. The composition was all right—she could always crop the photos later—but the lighting was overexposed. Kitty tweaked the aperture and shutter speed, then took up position once again on the chaise.
The phone pinged again—then two more times, in quick succession.
Kitty ignored it, and the timer fired off three more test shots. The last one was a blurry mess, as that was the moment her phone started to ring.
Storming over to the desk, Kitty snatched up the phone; the call was from Moriarty. She answered with a snarled, “Fucking what?”
Without any preamble or apology, Moriarty replied, “I need you to look after Moran tonight.”
“What do you mean, ‘look after him’?” Worry quickly overrode her irritation. “What’s wrong?”
“Well, for starters, he was arrested last night.”
“What?”
“Pub brawl,” Moriarty explained tersely. “No charges.”
“So the police don’t know about …?” Kitty quickly found herself at a loss to summarise what she could only assume was an extensive list of crimes.
“If they do, they’re keeping it to themselves.”
Kitty had more than a few friends who’d been subjected to the tender mercies of the Met. “Is Sebastian all right?”
Moriarty exhaled loudly. “I don’t know. After I got him home, he … I’m not sure what happened. I think it was some sort of episode.”
Kitty considered what an ‘episode’ might entail for a man of Sebastian’s size and training. “… Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Moriarty replied, unconcerned. “I’ve been with him all day, but I have to help Clay with security at Boulos’ house tonight. And I can’t leave Sebastian alone.”
It didn’t make sense, that he’d choose some fucking job over Sebastian—and then the pieces started to come together. Moriarty already had an interest in Collier before they found out about the women he’d violated. And Sebastian had been out of commission the whole time. “Is this about what happened to Sebastian?”
Moriarty was silent for a long moment, his slightly exerted breathing crackling down the phone line. “So you know.”
“I guessed.” The sound of traffic had started to intrude on the call. “Wait, where are you now?”
“Fetching dinner from the takeaway.”
And Moriarty was taking that opportunity to call Kitty—which meant he didn’t want Sebastian to overhear their conversation.
“He doesn’t know,” Kitty realised. “You didn’t tell him about any of this.”
“Sebastian can’t even stand to be in the same room as Collier,” Moriarty shot back, confirming her suspicions.
“So how do you know this is even what he wants? Just what do you think you’re accomplishing here?”
There was another long silence, until Moriarty said, “He came to me. He was scared out of his mind and came to find me. He knew I’d keep him safe. And I want him to be right.”
Kitty’s fingertips drifted to the faint surgical scars across the back of her neck. It hadn’t been long after she woke up in hospital that a pair of police officers showed up to take her statement. She’d only been a few sentences in before they warned her, in patronising tones, that pressing charges against the man who’d done this to her would also require confessing to a crime on her part.
Namely, being a whore.
Kitty had told them it was an accident. She’d fallen down the stairs. And when the coppers left, she’d heard them laughing in the corridor outside.
The worst thing about being grabbed by the hair and dragged down two flights of stairs wasn’t the pain, or the fear, or the helplessness. It wasn’t the looming threat of paralysis or the multiple, nightmarish surgeries.
It was how nobody afterwards seemed to care. It was how they all wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened—and if they couldn’t do that, they’d just pretend she didn’t exist. It was finding out there were people who mattered, and people who didn’t—and that she fit firmly into one category, never the other.
It was feeling like she was screaming at the top of her lungs, but couldn’t make any sound come out.
Moriarty cared about what had happened to Sebastian. He was a demented, vicious little freak whose emotional spectrum ranged between anger and more anger, but he cared. He was, quite possibly, one of the only people who ever had.
“Fine,” Kitty said, with a weary sigh. “I’ll be right there.”
The office on Chancery Lane reeked of bleach. Moriarty insisted every surface that could hold a fingerprint had to be wiped down, and so he and Clay had gone over the place top to bottom with gloved hands and rags soaked in the harshest cleaning solution they could find.
As he finished with the desk, Clay turned to the bar cart.
“Wait,” Moriarty said. He strode over to the cart and picked up the bottle of Ralston, holding it carefully around the neck between gloved fingers. Carrying it back to the desk, he crouched to place the bottle on its side beneath it, fetched up against one of the legs.
It was exactly the position in which the bottle might have landed if it had fallen under the desk and been forgotten there.
As they finished up and disposed of the cleaning supplies, Moriarty retrieved the black bag from the cabinet behind the desk and slung it over his shoulder. A clean car waited downstairs to take them out to the Cotswolds.
For all Moriarty’s dramatics over the phone, the hand-off at Sebastian’s flat had been brusque and banal. It was Sebastian who’d come to the door when Kitty rang the bell; he’d greeted her with a smile, but it was strained. He looked awful; there were dark circles under his eyes, a row of butterfly bandages across his eyebrow, and his latest attempt at shaving had been perfunctory at best.
Sebastian didn’t look surprised to see her; evidently, he and Moriarty had already discussed her coming over. Moriarty exchanged a few quiet words with Sebastian, then left, nodding to Kitty in acknowledgement and thanks as he walked past.
It wasn’t long before Kitty found herself terminally bored. Sebastian wasn’t in much shape to entertain and Kitty didn’t have the energy to hold up both sides of a conversation, so she sat in an armchair in his sitting room and scrolled mindlessly on her phone while he sprawled across the sofa. There was a nature documentary playing on the television, but neither of them were really watching it.
Into the awkward silence of the room, Sebastian said, “I’m not going to kill myself.”
Kitty gave him a confused look from behind her phone. “What?”
“That’s what this is, right?” Sebastian hadn’t moved, still staring through the TV. “Suicide watch.”
“It’s not suicide watch.”
Sebastian gave a worn-out sigh. “Then what are you doing here, Kitty?”
“Apparently,” Kitty replied dryly, “I’m here to stop you getting into any more fights.”
Sebastian finally looked at her. “He told you about that.”
Kitty nodded.
“What else did he tell you?”
“Nothing I didn’t already know.”
There was a flicker of fear in Sebastian’s eyes, quickly shuttered away. “So Jay suddenly disapproves of me fighting people?”
“When it might land you in prison? Yes, I suppose he does.”
That made Sebastian go quiet for a minute or so. Finally, more subdued, he asked, “Is Jay working a job without me?”
Worry dropped a weight in Kitty’s gut. “It’s not like you’re thinking.”
“It’s fine.” Sebastian rubbed a hand over his eyes. “It’s not like I’m much use to him right now, anyway.”
The fear was back. Because when everyone who was supposed to protect you—parents, teachers, the police—had apparently decided you weren’t worth the effort, it was hard not to believe them. And now Sebastian was terrified that Jay saw him the way he saw himself.
“He doesn’t think you’re useless,” Kitty said, scrambling for something to say. “He’s trying to … I don’t know, protect you. He came up with this whole plan to rob some oil billionaire in the Cotswolds just so he can—”
Sebastian sat up with a start. “Which oil billionaire?” he asked, sharp and alarmed.
Kitty paused to recall the name. “Boulos, he said.”
“Edward Boulos?”
“I think so.”
Without another word, Sebastian heaved himself off the sofa and made for the hall closet, grabbing his coat and shoving his feet into his boots.
Kitty, with a sense that something she didn’t fully understand was happening, tottered up out of the chair. “What’s wrong?”
“I need to go,” Sebastian replied. “Right now. Jay’s in danger.”
“Look, it’s all right,” Kitty said, trying to calm him down. “Boulos isn’t even in the country right now. His house is empty most of the time.”
“Which is why he likes to lend it out to his friends, like Sabine Rietveld,” Sebastian replied sharply. At Kitty’s blank look, he added, “Sabine Rietveld the arms dealer.”
Chapter 5 of “A Reckoning in Whitehall” will be published on March 23. To get it delivered directly to your inbox, subscribe here:
… And if that’s too long to wait, you can also get the completed story as an ebook.
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