The sound of shattering glass jolted Sebastian awake; his body moved while his mind was still catching up, feeling for the nine-inch knife he kept beneath the mattress.
Next to him, Jay pushed up onto his elbows, casting about blindly in the dark. His mouth opened; Sebastian quickly laid a hand over it, silencing him.
“Quiet,” he murmured, barely a whisper. Jay nodded, eyes wide.
Heavy footsteps sounded through the flat, moving in from the rear of the building. Furniture scraped against the floor; something heavy fell with a loud thud. The flat was being tossed.
Then the footsteps moved down the hall, toward the bedroom.
Sebastian rolled to his feet, motioning for Jay to hide. Jay slid off his side of the bed and hunkered down behind it, safely out of sight, as Sebastian moved to the door. He flattened himself against the wall next to the door frame, knife held down by his thigh.
The handle turned, and the door slammed open as the intruder on the other side barrelled into the bedroom. There was a gun in his hand.
He’d clearly expected to surprise Sebastian in bed, and was unprepared for Sebastian to dart in from the side and twist the gun out of his grip. It fell to the floor, and then Sebastian’s knife was up under the intruder’s chin as he pushed them both back through the doorway.
There was a second intruder down the hall in the sitting room; the man froze, took one look at the knife in Sebastian’s hand, and bolted out the back.
Sebastian would deal with that later. For now, there was the man in front of him. He wore a black balaclava; Sebastian snatched it off his head.
The man wasn’t a man at all—he was a fucking child, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old at most. He stared up at Sebastian with wide, terrified eyes brimming with tears.
“The fuck are you doing here?” Sebastian snarled.
“Nothing!” the boy blurted out—an instinctive lie. “Nothing, we just—he said to teach the bitch a lesson—”
Sebastian could guess who “the bitch” was supposed to be. The tip of his knife pricked the skin beneath the intruder’s barely-stubbled jawline.
“I’m sorry!” the boy wailed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t kill me—”
There was movement from the corner of Sebastian’s eye: Jay, emerging from the bedroom. “Did Aegis put you up to this?” he asked the boy, cold and seething with rage.
The intruder tried to nod, but aborted the motion when it jostled the knife at his throat. “Yeah,” he said instead.
Jay laid a hand on Sebastian’s arm. “You can let him go.”
Sebastian maintained his hold on the intruder. “He had a gun.”
“It’s fake.” Jay nudged the gun on the floor with his foot; it was, upon closer examination, a toy that had been painted black. “He’s a stupid fucking child.”
Sebastian’s grip tightened on the hilt of the knife. “He wanted to hurt you.”
“So what are you going to do, then?” Jay snapped. “Put your knife through his head, right here in the hall?”
The boy whimpered.
Sebastian took a deep breath and lowered the knife to his side.
Jay met the boy’s eyes with a flat stare. “You could’ve been killed tonight. Understand?”
The boy replied with a shaky nod.
“Get out of Fractal Storm,” Jay went on, “before your luck runs out.”
Sebastian grabbed the boy by the scruff of the neck and dragged him out of the flat, into the outer corridor. The boy staggered as Sebastian shoved him out the front door, half-falling down the steps to the pavement before sprinting away down the street.
Above Sebastian, someone cleared their throat.
His upstairs neighbour, Mrs. Holloway, glared down at him from the landing outside her flat. He was, Sebastian quickly realised, standing in the corridor in his pants in the middle of the night.
“Sorry.” Sebastian hid the knife behind his back. “Goodnight, Mrs. Holloway.”
He ducked back into the flat and shut the door behind him.
Jay hadn’t moved; he stood just a few feet away, his fists clenched at his side, wearing a dark, furious expression.
Sebastian carefully set the knife down on the console table by the door. There was a restless feeling under his skin, tense and hungry and violent, struggling against his efforts to shove it back into its box.
Someone came here, came into his home, to hurt Jay.
Jay’s expression softened a little. “Come here,” he said.
The hall was narrow; it took barely more than a step to close the distance between them, and Sebastian’s mouth slammed over Jay’s in a harsh, biting kiss.
Jay pushed back against him, nipping at Sebastian’s lip before grabbing him by the arms. He spun them around, and Sebastian’s back hit the wall; a breathless, wanting noise shivered out of him. Jay’s hands roved over his skin, stroking down his chest and belly until he hooked his fingers into the waistband of Sebastian’s pants, tugging them down.
Sebastian rolled his hips forward in encouragement, his own hands clutching greedily at Jay, wrapping around his waist—but Jay’s fingers closed around Sebastian’s wrists, holding them still.
“Please,” Sebastian groaned, “God, please, please—”
The corner of Jay’s mouth crooked into a wicked smirk, and he pushed at Sebastian’s hands until they were pressed at his sides against the wall. “Don’t move.”
Sebastian flattened his palms and kept them there, heat flooding through him.
Jay turned his attention back to Sebastian’s pants, tugging them down just enough to touch his cock. His grip was light and teasing, working him slowly, and Sebastian couldn’t help a desperate whine. His fingertips curled against the wall, nails scratching at the wallpaper.
He wanted to touch Jay in turn, feel the heat of his skin, drag him in close and crawl inside—but Jay had told him not to move. And Jay was watching him with burning eyes, breathing raggedly through his mouth, enjoying Sebastian’s helpless frustration. Revelling in it.
Careful to keep his hands on the wall, Sebastian bent to close the distance between them in a frantic kiss. Jay allowed it for a moment, lips moving eagerly against Sebastian’s—then his hand was on Sebastian’s throat, shoving him back against the wall. He kept him there like that, not squeezing, but holding him firm.
Sebastian’s mouth fell open, every breath a harsh moan as he stared down at Jay, at his hands working him harder now, coaxing him to the edge.
“Jay,” he choked out—a strangled warning.
Jay’s only response was a vicious, toothy grin as his grip tightened, palm dragging hot and tight up Sebastian’s length—and then Sebastian moaned, hips arching up off the wall as his climax crashed through him.
His knees buckled, but he managed to stay upright with his hands still pressed to the wall.
Jay’s grin eased back into something slightly less feral, radiating satisfaction and approval as his grip on Sebastian’s throat loosened. His thumb stroked across Sebastian’s lower lip before he grasped the back of his neck and dragged him down for a deep, possessive kiss.
Sebastian’s mouth opened into Jay’s with a soft sigh, even as he kept his hands where they were.
Jay breathed a soft laugh into the kiss. “You can move now.”
Sebastian groaned in relief and wrapped his arms around Jay, crushing their bodies together. All the killing tension from before had drained away into pleasant exhaustion. Jay couldn’t possibly have come, and yet there was an air of contentment about him—whatever he got from all that, it was exactly what he needed.
The rest of it—the break-in, the intruders, whoever had sent them—could wait until morning.
Jay woke in Moran’s bed, alone. From the other end of the flat came the now-familiar sounds of Moran moving around the kitchen. The low murmur of his voice indicated he was talking to someone; the lack of a second voice suggested it was over the phone.
Dragging himself out of bed, Jay made his way through the sitting room toward the kitchen. The two intruders hadn’t had much chance to toss the flat before their confrontation with Moran and his very large knife. Usually the goal was to grab anything small and valuable, but Moran’s flat offered a disappointing shortage of fence-able or hackable tech; he had a laptop for work, but that was kept in the spare room, which the intruders hadn’t had a chance to search. Moran had since put the room to rights, shoving his furniture back into place and picking his toppled and discarded possessions up off the floor.
The kitchen was where the intruders had got in, hopping the wall from the back alley before smashing the sliding glass doors that opened out to the garden. Jay had helped Moran sweep up the broken glass last night, and they’d taped a spare blanket over the broken door. It wouldn’t really have stopped anyone who actually wanted to get in, but then again neither had the glass.
Moran stood with his elbows resting on the kitchen island, phone to his ear. He glanced up as Jay entered the room, giving him a nod of acknowledgement before he turned his attention back to the call. A few more quick words over the phone, and he hung up.
“Someone’s coming by this afternoon to fix the doors,” he said. “Coffee?”
Jay nodded, and Moran poured a measure from the pot on the counter into a mug, sliding it across the island.
He waited until Jay had come to some semblance of full awareness before he asked, “Who’s Aegis?”
“You already know him,” Jay replied, “sort of. It’s the handle Lucas Knox uses.”
He’d pointed Knox out to Moran at the charity gala in Medway Castle, not long before the sequence of events that had put a bullet in Moran’s arm and set the hotel ablaze.
“He saw you,” Moran guessed.
“Most likely, yeah.”
“And you two have history.”
“We were part of the same crew,” Jay explained. “This was before I transitioned, so I was the only ‘girl’ on the team. Knox got … attached.”
Moran had a wary look. “‘Attached’?”
“Kept sending me messages, most of them sexual. I found out after a while that he’d warned all the other blokes off me—told them he ‘owned’ me. Eventually it got too bad to ignore, so I cut him off—blocked him on everything.” Jay took a sip of coffee. “Knox didn’t like that, so he started stalking me. Even got the others in on it.”
“Jay—” There was a faint tremor in Moran’s voice, even as he fought to maintain his composure. “Did they hurt you?”
“No.” Jay offered what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Worst they ever did was put a brick through my neighbour’s window. Fucking idiots got the address wrong.”
Moran failed to stifle a quiet huff of laughter, ducking his head.
“Anyway,” Jay went on, “he managed to track me down after the gala.”
“He’s been harassing you?”
Jay shrugged. “Hasn’t done much actual damage, at least so far. I keep my accounts and data locked down well enough that he hasn’t been able to get at them.”
“So you’re safe from him?” Moran asked, a note of hope in his voice.
Jay shook his head. “Every system has a weakness. You know that.”
“So what’s yours?”
“You.”
Moran blinked, processing this. “Is that why you—?”
“I’ve been trying to keep him away from you.” Despite everything, it was a relief to finally say it out loud. “If he knows what you are to me, he’ll use that to hurt us both.”
“Fuck, Jay—” Moran couldn’t seem to decide whether he was horrified or furious. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You’d have insisted on helping,” Jay said plainly. “And you have too much to lose from someone like Knox.”
Moran had, evidently, settled on furious. “What, you were protecting me?”
“Yes!”
Whatever Moran had been expecting to hear, it wasn’t that—and it really was incredible, the way a single word seemed to knock his legs out from under him.
“Why?” Jay blurted out, before he could stop himself. “Why is that so shocking?”
Moran just stared at him, eyes wide and wounded. “I’m not—” He bit down on the rest of the sentence, rubbing a hand over his mouth. “If things were so bad with Knox, why help Kitty? Why risk it?”
“Like I said,” Jay replied, suddenly exhausted. “You’re my weak point.” He sighed. “And it doesn’t matter now, anyway. I think it’s safe to say Knox knows about you. And that he’s a bit fucked off about it. I’m sure he’s the one who’s been trying to hack you—or someone working with him, at least.”
“All right.” Moran groaned, rubbing both hands over his face. “How’d you get rid of him last time?”
“I disappeared,” Jay said. “I doxxed the whole crew. I posted their names and addresses online, and then I purged all my accounts and left town. Everyone in the community knew we’d made a lot of money, so telling them where the others lived made them into targets. Knox was so busy looking out for himself, he couldn’t come after me.” He finished off the last of his coffee and slid the mug back across the counter. “By the time the dust cleared, I was at university. Used the money I made with Knox’s crew to pay for it.”
Moran had the look that meant he was doing maths in his head. “How old were you?”
“Seventeen when we started working together,” Jay said. “Eighteen by the time it was over.”
Moran didn’t seem pleased with that answer. “Are you going to disappear again?”
Something in Jay’s chest lurched at the thought. Disappearing meant leaving London behind. It meant leaving Sebastian behind.
“Knox isn’t going to stop,” he said, “and it’s only a matter of time until he figures what we’re up to with Bellamy. We need to back off.”
“And where does that leave Kitty?”
“I don’t know.”
Moran considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “I can’t,” he said, voice thick with emotion. “I’m sorry. Do what you have to, but—”
“Okay.” Jay reached across the island and squeezed his hand.
The morning rush was largely over by the time Romayne arrived at the coffee shop where Endicott had asked to meet her. It had the distinction of being across the street from another coffee shop and around the corner from a third coffee shop; this was not uncommon for London, especially Soho.
Endicott was seated at the table by the window, looking restless. “Thanks for meeting me,” he said, and glanced past her toward the counter. “Would you like anything, or—?”
Romayne shook her head. “Just tell me what’s going on.”
Endicott sighed. “There’s a problem with the film,” he said. “One of our financiers just pulled out.”
“What? Why?”
“He’s not pleased about the change in casting,” Endicott explained in a weary tone. “He wanted your role filled by the actress who had to drop out. When we told him that wasn’t possible, he decided his investment wasn’t viable anymore. So he’s out.”
Romayne, still unsure how this applied to her, asked, “What are you going to do?”
“Well, we need to make some cuts to account for the lower budget.” Endicott gave her an apologetic look. “I’m afraid the new script eliminates your character entirely. I’m sorry—I know that’s disappointing to hear.”
Romayne’s hands clenched into fists on the table, manicured nails digging sharply into her palms. Rage boiled in her chest. It was so stupid—her big break snatched away, all for the lack of a few million pounds.
Well … how many million pounds?
“Your financier,” she said. “The one who pulled out. How much was he putting in?”
“Two million,” Endicott said. “Not all that much, usually, but with our budget already as restricted as it is—”
“What if I covered that myself?”
Endicott raised an eyebrow, intrigued. “You’d have to sign on as one of the financiers,” he said. “There’s some financial risk if the picture fails, but if it turns a profit …”
Romayne hadn’t even considered that part; even if the film failed, she’d been counting on the publicity to draw in a proper agent and get the industry’s attention. But if it was a hit, she’d get her money back—and more. “What would I have to do?”
Endicott’s mood had rapidly improved. “I just need to talk to our solicitors. There’ll be some paperwork for you to sign—and, of course, you’d have to transfer your funds into the production’s holding account.”
It all sounded so easy. Romayne grinned, wondering why she hadn’t thought of this before.
“Of course,” she said. “Now, let’s work out the particulars. I’ve got some ideas for the film.”
After all, Endicott now worked for her.
The cafe across from where Moran was meeting Bellamy had a patio; from his table, Jay could see them through the coffee shop’s large front window. It was an exposed position, so he’d worn sunglasses and a cap to keep Bellamy from recognising him at a glance.
It wasn’t a good enough disguise to hold up at close range, as evidenced when a familiar figure dropped into the seat across from him.
Lucas Knox hadn’t changed much since he and Jay were both teenagers: still thin and sharp and sullen, although he dressed quite a bit better and had figured out how to shave properly.
“I figured he was a mark, at first.” Knox had a smug, knowing air. “But he’s not, is he? You actually went and got yourself a boyfriend.”
“Fuck off, Lucas.”
He did not fuck off. “I thought you were a dyke,” Knox said, the words dripping with disdain.
Jay rolled his eyes. “I cannot imagine a greater waste of time than explaining the finer points of my sexuality to you.”
“All those years you were a girl, you only dated other girls,” Knox reflected. “Now you’ve hacked your tits off and jumped on the first cock you could find.”
“Let’s be honest,” Jay shot back, “all the cock on offer back then was dogshit. Yours included.”
Fury flashed across Knox’s face; he glanced across the street, through the coffee shop window. “Looks like your man’s got a wandering eye, though. I don’t like your chances—she’s actually fit.”
Jay shrugged; nothing Knox had said was worthy of a rebuttal.
Knox’s gaze lingered on the window, though—and then his eyes narrowed. “Hang on. That’s Romayne Bellamy.”
Jay quickly schooled his reaction.
Knox’s smug look returned. “So you’re running a game after all,” he said. “Not on Moran—on Bellamy. How much are you taking her for?”
“Stay out of this,” Jay warned him, choosing his words with care. “This job’s out of your league.”
Knox sneered at him, his chair scraping across the pavement as he stood. “We’ll see about that.”
“That takes care of everything,” said the voice on the phone, as Romayne paced back and forth across her office. “Is there anything else you need from us, Ms. Bellamy?”
“No,” Romayne said, “that’ll be all.” She hung up just as her phone rang again; it was from the call box at the front door, and she answered with a brisk, “Hello?”
“Ms. Bellamy?” said a male voice she didn’t recognise. “I work with Mr. Endicott.”
Romayne checked the time; Endicott had informed her he was bringing some paperwork over, but he wasn’t supposed to arrive for a few more hours. Warily, she buzzed the man through.
A minute or so later, she opened the front door of her flat to admit a young, gangly man carrying a satchel.
“Hi,” said the man, with a shy smile. “My name’s Shane. Mr. Endicott couldn’t make it, but he sent me—I’ve got some papers here for you to sign, and the account details for that fund transfer.”
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