Where Death Meets the Devil

by L. J. Hayward

  It all felt unreal, flawless. The disruption to the room, the empty compound waiting for them, a dune buggy exactly where Blade needed it, the search parties walking right by them. Out of memory came Blade’s response when Jack needled him about not killing Valadian in the torture shack.

  “Killing Valadian wasn’t the only objective.”

  What else was there?

  Wish you were here?

  Jack brought the rifle back up and eased out of the parlour, covering the foyer and corridor before pointing the weapon up the stairs. Was there something up there Blade didn’t want him seeing? Was that why they had to split up?

  Christ, he was stupid. If he got out of this alive, he should probably retire in all good conscience. He didn’t deserve his job when he’d let Ethan fucking Blade lead him around by the dick for a week. How much of what Blade had said was real, and how much was meant to trick Jack into . . . what? Following him around the desert while he pretended to go after Valadian? Why? What reason could Blade have to do all this? And where, Jack couldn’t help but think, did letting Jack fuck him fit into it?

  Feeling his combat awareness start to be overtaken by anger, Jack forced his mind off unanswerable questions and focused on finding Blade. Wherever he was, there were bound to be answers, surely.

  With slow, cautious steps, Jack ascended the stairs. The second storey was laid out much the same as the first floor: two rooms at the front of the house, the rest at the rear. The corridor ran side to side, though. At the top of the stairs, Jack crouched in the cover of the railing and tracked towards the north side of the house first. Mr. Valadian’s room was that way. Nothing. Likewise to the south. Rising, Jack paced carefully towards The Man’s bedroom. There were thankfully no nooks or embrasures to launch an ambush from, just the hallway and a couple of closed doors, prints of desert landscapes on the walls. A large window at the end of the hallway filled the space with fading orange light.

  The door to Mr. Valadian’s room was locked. If Blade had been in here already, he wouldn’t have bothered to lock the door when leaving. Jack checked the hallway again, finding it as empty as before. Then he stepped away from the wall, reared back, and kicked the door open. As it banged inwards, Jack spun and pressed his back to the wall beside the doorway, prepared for an attack.

  Nothing.

  Leading with the rifle, Jack entered the room. As below, it was artfully disrupted with an unmade bed, a few clothes scattered across the floor, drawers ajar. Another picture shifted to expose a hollowed-out wall safe.

  Too textbook.

  Jack left the bedroom and, forgoing stealth, busted through the door opposite. A large bathroom, empty. The next door was another bedroom, no sign of life and no hint of Blade. Another bathroom, two more bedrooms, all the same.

  “Fuck,” Jack hissed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  Where had the mongrel gone?

  Alert levels skyrocketing, Jack quickly backtracked downstairs. Swinging around, he scanned the corridor with the rifle and headed for the study, which was locked as well. It would take more than a forceful boot to open this door. After slinging the rifle, Jack took out the Eagle and aimed, then hesitated.

  Blade definitely hadn’t been here, either. Which meant whatever he was up to had nothing to do with what might be in here.

  Jack left the study untouched. He made a quick recon of the kitchen, just to make sure it was empty, and then crept back to the foyer. Scanning around showed it to be as empty as it was when he left it.

  Tension coiling like a snake in his gut, Jack reached for the handle on the front door.

  “I wouldn’t do that, Jack.”

  Jack spun, raising Assassin X, and pointed it unerringly at Blade. He stood on the staircase, several steps up. Whether he’d just come down or hopped up there from wherever he’d been hiding on the first floor, Jack didn’t know. All he was aware of was the barrel of the Desert Eagle, aimed directly at him. Blade’s white eyes were as unreadable as ever, but his hand didn’t waver, his voice steady.

  “What the hell is this, Blade?” Jack ground out, curling his finger over the trigger. “What the hell is going on?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Like fuck it is! Just tell me what you’ve been doing with me.”

  Blade didn’t answer, just kept his gun trained on Jack, going as still as a statue.

  “Jesus Christ, Blade,” Jack snarled. “This is worse than when we fucked. How hard is it to tell the truth?”

  The assassin flinched at the word “fucked,” then firmed up again. “Remarkably hard at times, Jack. If you would—”

  “No. No excuses. Just tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  “Right at this point in time, can’t.”

  Anger searing white hot through his veins, Jack took a threatening step forwards, the rifle never once moving off Blade. How pathetic he’d been. Played so easily. He felt gutted, ripped apart. Felt as he had in India, when he’d realised his team was never supposed to get out alive. Like he’d been betrayed.

  Which was ridiculous, because that would mean he’d, somehow, come to trust Ethan Blade.

  “What’s outside, Blade?” he asked softly, calmly.

  “Don’t go out there, Jack.”

  “Why not?”

  Not waiting for another nonanswer, Jack spun and kicked open the doors.

  “You don’t trust me.” Ethan leaned against the kitchen counter, hands gripping the polished marble behind him. He looked innocent, a puppy kicked for something he didn’t realise he’d done wrong.

  “Shit,” Jack hissed. “You just make it so damned hard. Keeping secrets from me, and when you do tell me something, nine times out of ten, it’s a bloody lie. That first day in the desert, you said you trusted me, and that wasn’t true. You were just waiting to see what I would do while you were vulnerable. All part of a job you care more about than you care about—” Jack cut that off before it got even more messed up. “More than you care about other people. You’re an unrepentant killer, Ethan, who betrayed me. Why should I trust you?”

  God, please, give him an answer that didn’t involve Ethan pulling a gun and shooting him.

  “You shagged me,” was what he got. Softly said, no touch of heat in his voice. “You touched me with gentle hands, caressed me, kissed me. You did that knowing what I was.”

  “It doesn’t take trust to fuck. Just a tight arse and fifteen months of abstinence. You were convenient. And willing.”

  Even as he said it, Jack regretted it. All those things had played a part, sure, but the biggest contributing factor had been the thought of having Ethan moving with him, sharing this amazing, brilliant thing with him. Not Ethan Blade the ruthless assassin, but Ethan the man who could make Jack laugh, who reassured with a touch and promised help when Jack was at his worst. The man who, with hindsight, had tried to stop Jack from walking into the ambush.

  “Yes,” Ethan said. “I was willing and, as I said the next day, I didn’t regret it. And I still don’t. None of it.”

  Jack huffed in exasperation, to which Ethan gave a pained wince and waved it aside.

  “I think we talked about it enough back then to cover all angles, so let’s move on. What I didn’t tell you then is this.” Ethan pulled in a deep breath, expanding his bare chest in an unconscious display of his lean, perfect body. “I don’t have sex outside of jobs. You joked last night about me bringing men back to my secret lair, and I can assure you, you’re the first, Jack. Sex is . . . was always just another skill to be used to get what I wanted, or to get where I needed to be.”

  So that was why it’d felt mechanical at first, because that was all Ethan had known before. No real passion, no lust. It was a small pinhole in the wall surrounding Ethan, but Jack felt it exposed so much more than his reaction to sex. Was life just another skill to Ethan? Mimicking the people around him, not really feeling a part of it, detached? All so he could go amongst them and kill wit
hout ending up like Jack did—burnt out and on the edge?

  Not wanting to know, but needing to, Jack indicated the rumpled bed behind him. “That was part of the job too?”

  Ethan smiled in weary amusement. “No, Jack, that was not part of the job. You know that. You’re just fishing for compliments now.”

  “A few earnest compliments do make me more willing to trust.”

  Ethan came around the table. He walked right up to Jack, then slid his arms around his neck and pressed against him. “In that case, it was the most amazing, teeth-rattling sex of my life. If you’d let me, I’d kiss you until you believed me.” He did kiss him, a brush of his lips against Jack’s jaw, close to his ear. “And thus, you’d trust me.”

  Jack put his hands on Ethan’s hips, initially to push him away, but the kiss had the bizarre result of tightening his hold and adjusting them both until things slotted together nicely.

  “That simple, huh?” he asked.

  “Why make it any more complicated?”

  Spluttering a startled snort, Jack pulled back enough to look at him in disbelief. “Aren’t you the one who goes out of his way to make things complicated? I refer you to that entire fuckup in the desert, for starters.”

  Ethan frowned. “It wasn’t a failure. It was going perfectly swell until you complicated things. I refer you to the night in the cave.”

  Jack had two options. He could reignite the argument, or he could keep Ethan pulled against him, their dicks hardening at the contact between their bodies. The latter would, incidentally, keep Ethan’s hands on the back of his neck, his fingers playing in his hair. Well, there was a third option, where Jack could rib Ethan for using a word like “swell,” but he dismissed it in favour of option two.

  Snugging Ethan a little closer, he lowered his head and breathed against his ear. “I say again, you were willing.” Still was, judging by the soft moan escaping his throat.

  “And I repeat, it was part of the job. At first.” His arms tightened, then slid down Jack’s back and up again, under his shirt. Hot skin against hot skin had them both drawing in sudden breaths. “You didn’t let it remain professional for long. I resisted, but you . . . kept at me until I couldn’t help it. It was the first time, ever, I felt that way during sex.”

  If Ethan kept talking, he was going to feel that way again, very shortly.

  Resisting the urge, Jack said, “So, you could say, I was your first.”

  With a little gasp, Ethan stiffened against him. When he let the breath out, it was in a long sigh, relaxing his body as it went. “Yes, I suppose you could say that.”

  In the end, neither of them said anything apart from each other’s names and pleas for more, harder, faster, for some time after. Ethan’s grip on his control was nonexistent from the start, and Jack honestly thought he might expire from the sheer wildness of it, the lines between their bodies blurring and mixing until even the colour difference was lost to him.

  “Well,” Jack huffed when his heart slowed enough to let him breathe once more, “I think that cherry’s well and truly popped.”

  Ethan, face buried in a pillow, moved enough to thump him on the chest.

  Jack wheezed out a laugh and shoved his hand away. They lay in relative silence for a while. For once, Jack was satisfied thoroughly. He had no wish to try for another fuck. At the same time, it felt wrong to just lie there, happily spent, feeling the warmth of another body not far away, listening as Ethan’s breathing evened out, softening towards sleep. Just yesterday, Jack had been running from the law. He shouldn’t be here, like this, while the traitor kept betraying them all.

  But if there was anything they had to do, Jack was fairly certain Ethan wouldn’t have let them go this far. Surely. From the corner of his eye, he looked at the back of the dark-haired head, at the breadth of those shoulders, the faint scars crisscrossing his back. Maybe he would if, like anyone discovering the joys of sex, all he could think about was the next fuck.

  No. Ethan Blade was too long in the job to be easily waylaid. He’d proceeded with his plan after that night in the cave, after all. The sex hadn’t stopped that. Which made Jack wonder just what could have kept Ethan away for a year. He’d been hell-bent on finishing his job when he left Jack in the desert, so what had stopped him?

  Meaning to roll off the bed, Jack found himself going the other way instead and landing half on Ethan.

  Ethan grunted but didn’t push him away. Rather, he turned his head to press his face into Jack’s shoulder. “Hello,” he said, voice muffled.

  “Hi.”

  “This is nice.”

  “My man sweat?”

  Shoulders shaking with silent laughter, Ethan shook his head. “No, you tosser. The cuddle. Almost better than the sex.”

  Jack huffed. “Remember what I said about compliments?”

  Lifting his head, Ethan smirked at him. “I did say almost.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” Jack mashed Ethan’s face back into the pillow. He let him up before his stifled laughter suffocated him. “Ready to talk reason now?”

  Ethan shook his hair out of his eyes and turned in the confines of Jack’s hold, pressing against him, legs sliding between Jack’s. He kissed his way along Jack’s collarbone. “Do we have to talk? Can’t we just . . . shag?” He punctuated his question with a wriggle of his hips that had Jack’s eyes rolling back in his head.

  “No.” It cost him a lot to say it, even more to pry Ethan off and get at least a few centimetres of space between them. “I don’t want to argue about this, but I’d like to know. Why can’t you tell me about the past year?”

  Ethan pulled back a bit further but kept one hand on Jack, his fingers rubbing lightly against his biceps. “It’s complicated.”

  “How?”

  “How is anything made complicated? By too much history, by too many hands in the pot, by too . . . By not having enough control over things you wish you did. Please, Jack. Don’t ask me about this. It has little to no bearing on this job. Yes, it delayed me, far longer than I thought it would, but it was personal. And while I might wish to be able to share it with you, I simply can’t.”

  The moment Ethan said “personal,” Jack didn’t need to hear more. Fantastic sex aside, betrayals and rescues forgotten, Jack knew he shouldn’t be investing emotionally in this disastrous relationship. Enough hurdles stretched out in front of him without adding any sort of commitment to a mentally unbalanced assassin into the mix. Ethan could talk all he wanted about the fucking not being part of the job and Jack could believe it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t encapsulated within the confines of it. Once the job was done, Ethan would leave and Jack would . . . Well, he’d sort that out when it happened, but he wouldn’t pine for Ethan Blade. He hadn’t last time. He wouldn’t this time, either.

  “All right,” he conceded. “No more questions about it.”

  “Thank you. For what it’s worth, I am sorry it upset you. If I’d had a choice, I wouldn’t have stayed away so long.” He rolled over, hauling Jack’s arm across his chest as he did.

  Sliding up behind him, Jack forced himself to relax. “So, you couldn’t come here, but you could race all over the world looking for the remains of Valadian’s group?”

  “Jack.” Said with more than a touch of warning.

  “What? It’s not about the other thing.”

  “Not directly. And stop doing that.” He pushed Jack’s face away from his neck. “You breathing on me like that isn’t going to encourage ‘reasonable talk.’”

  “You’re the one who wanted to cuddle.”

  Ethan harrumphed. “Must you always deflect blame?”

  “Only when I’m blameless.”

  “Hmm, which seems to be all the time.” He wiggled against Jack. “Either let me sleep or shag me again. Those are your options.”

  “Compromise. You answer the question, and I’ll let you sleep afterwards.”

  Ethan pretended to consider it, then nodded. “As you wish. Yes, because I could
n’t get here, chasing down Valadian’s group seemed to be the best option. There was every chance someone else knew just who was protecting him.”

  “But you didn’t find anything.”

  “Only that the traitor was within the Office. Hence, why I am here now. Good enough?”

  “Is it the truth?”

  Ethan didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he burrowed into the pillow, pulling Jack’s arm against him tighter. Jack had resigned himself to not getting an answer, and thereby getting one, when Ethan spoke again.

  “Yes. That is the truth.”

  But not all of it. At least, that was Jack’s interpretation of the guarded words. Christ. Ethan was going to drive him insane.

  Within minutes, Ethan was asleep.

  Jack tossed between staying or getting up. He closed his eyes and tried not to think how good it felt, right now, like this. It wasn’t personal. It couldn’t be. He should be annoyed at Ethan’s refusal to tell him about the past year, not worried. But still his mind kept going back to that thought—what could stop Ethan Blade doing what he set out to do? The man had undertaken a dangerous trek across the desert to test Jack, had put himself at Jack’s mercy to see what he would do. He’d convinced Valadian to give up forty of his troops to get the job done.

  What problem, personal or otherwise, could be so great Ethan couldn’t think, shoot, or sneak his way past it?

  Then Jack made the mistake of opening his eyes and looking at Ethan. Curled on his side, the smooth expanse of his back pressed to Jack’s front, chin tucked into his chest. Here and now, sleeping deep in this secure place, he didn’t look as if he needed to think, shoot, or sneak his way past anything. Didn’t even look as if he could. Ethan just looked young and innocent, peaceful.

  In this quiet, safe moment, the masks fell away and revealed the man Jack had caught glimpses of in the desert. This was Ethan. Not Ethan Blade, assassin, but Ethan, a young man doing the only thing he knew how to do. This was the man Jack was drawn to, who attracted him, who made him listen and take risks. The man whom Jack wanted to protect and help. The man Jack trusted.