Splendid Isolation

by Helena Maeve

  Cole buried his mouth into the curve of Manuel’s neck and shattered with a groan, as quiet now as he’d been ten years back, in that tiny shower cubicle in Havana.

  Manuel moaned louder than he did, backside stinging where Cole’s cum branded him with thick, hot ropes.

  They were still for a long beat in the aftermath, fingers twined in the bed sheets and Manuel’s thighs quaking around Cole’s hips. At length, Cole groaned and rolled off. The mattress dented, making it all too easy for Manuel’s arm to brush his heaving flank.

  “We shouldn’t have done that,” Cole remarked after a long beat. He didn’t wheeze. It would have been beneath him.

  “Right.” Manuel swallowed past the lump in his throat. Here it comes. The fallout. The dismissal.

  The it was nice, but.

  “But,” Cole added, “we did.”

  Manuel directed his nod to the ceiling. A crack bisected the plaster, paint peeling along the rift. He thought of the Cottage and how easily it had crumbled. He thought of black body bags and cheery nurses telling him he was lucky.

  With the very last of his strength, Manuel pushed himself up onto an elbow and took Cole’s chin in his hand. He spent only a fraction of a second acknowledging how beautiful he looked with heavy-lidded eyes and soft, thinned lips. Kissing Cole was a far better use of his time than fretting about the future.

  It didn’t take much coaxing for Cole to kiss him back.

  * * * *

  Manuel woke up before Cole—or thought he had. By the time he was done with the shower, Cole’s side of the bed was empty and the gurgle of the electric kettle echoed from the kitchen.

  As he had yet to zero in on where Jennings had secreted his suitcase, Manuel tugged yesterday’s clothes on and made a passing effort to put on a brave face. He followed the rasp of knife-on-toast the way he might have done a breadcrumb trail.

  “Morning… You’re up early.”

  Cole twisted around. “It’s six o’clock.” A stack of perfectly square slices of toast sat on a plate at his right, crusts going from light brown to charred black, as though the cook had improved his technique after the first three tries or so.

  “I’m not complaining.” Manuel scratched a damp palm over his face.

  His bandages needed changing, but he’d been unable to find scissors in the bathroom, much less any gauze to replace them with. Whoever was meant to welcome them at the safe house had at least hidden the potentially lethal white arms. Gauze, after all, could make an excellent garrote.

  “You didn’t find any coffee in that pantry, by any chance, did you?”

  Cole shook his head, a borderline apologetic cast to his features. “Only instant, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m not choosy.”

  Manuel had a feeling he would need the dose of caffeine before Cole launched into whatever lecture was coming.

  The elephant in the room was impossible to ignore.

  We slept together. We shouldn’t have, but we did. Now we pretend last night never happened and go on as before. It should have been easy to agree on that much, for both their sakes, but where was the fun in that?

  “Did you sleep well?” Manuel wheedled, stirring milk and sugar into his coffee.

  “Yes.”

  He was fairly certain he didn’t imagine the way Cole’s shoulders went rigid as he waited for the other shoe to drop. Was he ashamed? They hadn’t spooned, but sharing a bed with an asset must have been against regulations, even if it was done for old time’s sake and nothing more.

  “I didn’t wake you with my snoring, I hope?”

  “You don’t snore,” Cole shot back, once again settling into cool detachment.

  Manuel followed him to the kitchen table. “You do. Not loudly. Nothing you should see a doctor about… I suppose it’s better than being woken by nightmares.” He couldn’t help wince as he sat down. It wasn’t done to rile Cole.

  Last night’s vigorous romp had left its mark on his tired body.

  Cole stiffened. “You’re sore.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You shouldn’t have let me—” He cut off abruptly, the angles of his face sharpening. “What’s your game here?”

  “Right now? Coffee,” Manuel answered beatifically. “And toast, if there’s any for me.”

  Cole pushed the stack closer to him. “What else?”

  A suspicious Cole was a dogged Cole. Denying him straight answers only served to whet his appetite.

  “You work in intelligence, don’t you? Figure it out.”

  “If you expect me to facilitate your release—”

  Manuel plucked a slice of toast and bit into it with gusto. “Am I that good in bed?” He grinned, because it was easier than giving into the bitterness festering in the pit of his stomach.

  Cole’s expression betrayed nothing beyond a thin veneer of resentment. It was possible he felt used. It was likely that in the hours since he’d striped Manuel’s skin with his semen, he had somehow convinced himself that he was the victim—that there was a victim at all.

  “Your handlers should arrive any minute now. I trust you’ll be careful what you tell them?”

  Ah, so that’s what you’re afraid of.

  It was a prudent man who put career before all else. Cole had been married to Section long before he started wearing a ring. He’d been wed and committed when he first hooked up with Manuel. That didn’t take the sting out of his threat.

  “Of course,” Manuel retorted, nonchalant and even-keeled. “Who would believe me, anyway?”

  He was an enemy of the state by the mildest definition of the term and he had everything to gain from tarnishing the reputation of a loyal agent of the Crown.

  All he lacked was intent. He had no desire to subject himself to invasive cross-examination designed to disprove his allegations. He took a scalding sip of coffee to force down the bile that had risen to the back of his mouth. “One word of advice?”

  Cole hoisted his gaze to his with thinned lips and the beginnings of a sneer on his sharp features. “What?”

  “Next time,” Manuel advised, “wear a condom. We wouldn’t want any evidence to…compromise your position.”

  He wanted nothing more than to take his coffee into the living room—or perhaps upstairs, where he could punch a wall without Cole to see him do it—but he made himself stay put. He made himself smile when Cole scowled.

  The rumble of an engine outside cut short their staring contest. His torturers had arrived.

  Memories of Cole’s lips on his, his generous touch and harsh-bitten breaths were once again a thing of the past. Britain would have his blood.

  Chapter Seven

  Cole left a little after seven that morning. The usual interrogators requested Manuel’s presence in a room set aside for their specific purposes around nine.

  An attempt on Manuel’s life was no reason to stop picking his brain.

  With the safe house empty of other assets, they set up shop right in the living room. Manuel picked at his bandages as he watched them unfurl the cables of the polygraph. He was used to the straps, the electrodes.

  “You forgot the handcuffs,” he noted, when his jailers decreed the torture chair ready.

  “Have a seat,” the young woman repeated. She had introduced herself as Chelsea—no mention of a first name, let alone rank.

  Manuel pushed away from the wall and did as he was told. He tried not to think that they’d picked Cole’s chair while Chelsea tightened straps and applied electrodes to his chest with expert hands.

  She looked all of twelve years old, her hair cinched into a ponytail from which escaped rebellious auburn strands, but she moved with speedy efficiency, as though she’d done this before. She probably had.

  The service knew no shortage of uncooperative detainees, on home soil or abroad.

  Manuel spent a moment wondering what possessed a girl like Chelsea to give her best years to Section, then resolutely banished the thought from his mind.

 
; Recruitment drives had enticed him once, too. Night crawlers, those agents tasked with spotting diamonds in the rough and methodically luring them into the shadows, knew just what to say to heighten sentiments of patriotism, loneliness or, as in his case, pure mercenary inclinations.

  “Where did we leave off?” he pre-empted. He’d never seen Chelsea before, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t perfectly apprized about the state of his wishy-washy confession. He imagined her as one of a dozen Section agents tasked with getting into his head and rooting around until they stumbled across actionable information.

  Sooner or later, they—or someone like them—would get to the truth. Manuel had no illusions about holding out. There was a reason spies of generations past used to swear by the cyanide tooth.

  Chelsea ignored his volley and switched on the camera. The red light triggered a Pavlovian kick in Manuel’s pulse.

  “What,” she wanted to know, “is the nature of your relationship with Stephen Cole?”

  Bewilderment translated into a twitch of muscle that Manuel couldn’t quite school into obscurity. Wait, what?

  Chelsea’s pretty face showed no sign of having noticed, but the lie detector picked it up at once.

  Don’t think, just answer. The truth couldn’t save him, but it could buy him breathing room.

  “We were lovers,” Manuel blurted out.

  The polygraph needle danced on an LCD screen angled away from his curious eyes. Truth. It had to be. But what if it wasn’t? What if his baseline heart rate was much, much slower and any deviation from that impossible norm was enough to incur suspicion?

  Silent, Chelsea scratched the nib of her pen along the notepad. She could have been filling out a crossword puzzle for all that Manuel knew.

  He’d seen this game played before—dossiers filled with scrap paper to imply years upon years of surveillance, altered photographs used to implicate loved ones. A well-timed phone call to jolt the heart rate.

  But knowing the tricks at Chelsea’s disposal made it no easier to avoid the trap she’d laid.

  “Were or are?” she pressed in her soft, kindergarten teacher voice.

  “Depends on your definition of lovers.”

  Chelsea shifted a small hand to the switch that would, if flipped, discharge a bolt of electricity through Manuel’s body. “Please answer the question, Mr. Sosa.”

  Her predecessors would have given him the chance to comply.

  Chelsea didn’t have such patience.

  Agony struck deep, tendons pulling taut as Manuel’s limbs locked with a sudden, full-body contraction. It didn’t last more than a second, but in that second, Manuel understood he had no way out of this.

  Section knew—or they suspected—and holding out would only see him thrust into a world of pain.

  And for what? He doesn’t give a shit about you.

  Chelsea peered down at her notepad through horn-rimmed glasses. “Do you and Mr. Cole have a sexual relationship?” She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t call him names.

  She didn’t have to. Two weeks of intense verbal and emotional abuse at the top of his stay with the SIS had effectively scrambled Manuel’s ability to pick apart innocent questions and opening volleys. The most innocent offer of tea could disguise a battery of plausible threats. The ugliest promise of violent torture could simply be a practical joke.

  “Yes.”

  “When did this relationship begin?”

  Manuel contemplated lunging for her throat. His wrists weren’t cuffed this time, though his ankles had been. He’d take the chair with him if he flew at her. Not that most efficient assault he’d ever performed, but needs must.

  Didn’t they? He could at least knock off her spectacles before the rest of his handlers came down on him like avenging angels.

  “What’s it to you?” he asked instead. And he grinned, because Chelsea was young and she was pleasantly straightforward, but she was also very, very predictable.

  He was still grinning as another burst of current arced through his aching body.

  * * * *

  Manuel’s new minders went by Grange and Ibrahim. They were thickly built and had little compunction about using force if he failed to comply with an order. Their sheer strength of limb came in handy when he couldn’t quite keep upright after his morning session. It was even more helpful in the evening, when Manuel took a fall in the shower.

  Ibrahim stayed with him until the doctor arrived—a new one, obviously on Section’s payroll and quick to reveal that nothing was wrong with him except, perhaps, low blood sugar.

  “You had a CT in London?” he asked, peering at Manuel over his glasses.

  “Is that the one where they stick needles under your fingernails?”

  The doctor’s eyes widened. Too easy.

  “Don’t know,” Manuel confessed. “Don’t care.”

  “I will recommend further investigation—”

  “You do that.” For all the good it’ll do.

  Unless he was falling apart at the seams, there would be no additional medical tests on his behalf. Section had already tagged him for handover.

  Exhausted, Manuel fixed a point above the doc’s shoulder with his eyes and refused to look away for the rest of the consultation.

  Ibrahim was charged with making sure that Manuel enjoyed a high-carb supper before the doctor took his leave.

  “Here.” Ibrahim’s culinary skills didn’t extend beyond a cheese sandwich and to say he’d addressed two words to Manuel put together would have been a generous estimate, but he seemed oddly willing to comply with the doctor’s instructions.

  “We can’t call for pizza?” Manuel asked hopefully.

  He wasn’t the least bit shocked to see Ibrahim shake his head.

  Disappointment was short-lived. He wolfed down the sandwich, partly because he was hungry and partly because he didn’t want to tempt his handler into force-feeding him.

  Within twelve hours of Cole taking off, Manuel’s world had once again settled into the simple routine of prison life. If he was lucky, it would stay that way—no extradition, no more assassination attempts.

  It was the best outcome someone like him could hope for.

  At eight-thirty, he made his daily call to Robin. At nine, he was put to bed, his ankles cuffed to the foot board. Ibrahim asked if he wanted the curtains open or shut before he left, and that was it.

  The door closed, footsteps receding down the creaking floorboards.

  Manuel stared at the ceiling.

  Despite the bone-deep fatigue that had slithered into his bones, sleep found him slowly. It might have been an hour or three before the faint, barely-there suggestion of movement teased at the edges of his awareness.

  Feigning sleep, Manuel made as if to tuck a knee to his stomach, the haze of sleep quickly falling by the wayside. His pulse hammered at his eardrums.

  Ibrahim had gone through the motions before taking his leave. He’d done a good job of it, too. Manuel distinctly recalled the clink of metal when he tried to get comfortable. There had been ankle cuffs binding him to the foot board.

  Unless that was another night, at the Cottage. Unless someone came in and undid Ibrahim’s good work.

  “You could run,” a voice said, from the darkness. “I wouldn’t stop you.”

  The voice wasn’t Ibrahim’s.

  Manuel blinked his eyes open. He didn’t particularly want to, but it seemed necessary.

  He found Cole casually leaning against the windowsill, twisting the two pairs of handcuffs around and around absently between his fingers.

  “You’d chase me.” You have to.

  Manuel had left the business because he resented the orders. Cole needed them. He was a bird-catcher through and through. He swore by hierarchy and backroom dealings. It was one of the most attractive things about him. Yet the man silhouetted in a shaft of moonlight by the window was only a pale imitation of the Cole who’d pinned Manuel to this very bed and fucked him raw.

  Manuel pushed
himself up against the headboard. His senses prickled with the sound of rustling sheets.

  Was Ibrahim keeping watch on the other side of the door? Would he burst in if he heard movement?

  He struggled to dismiss those wretched fears. Painkillers and sleep left him sluggish. His protracted encounter with Cole’s trigger-happy colleague didn’t help much, either. What he needed most was time—to figure out what Cole wanted, how to play him.

  Time to suss out how much he knew.

  “Why are you back?” Manuel wondered, for once casting himself in the role of the interrogator.

  “I can’t figure out why you’re still here,” Cole admitted. His gaze was hooded, squarely trained on the silver bands in his hands.

  “Did you hit your head and forget about our deal?”

  Cole huffed out a breath. “We both know that’s a farce. I may not be as familiar with Sam—sorry, Robin—as you, but I can’t believe he wouldn’t spring you if he had an inkling of what’s been done to you so far.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Robin valued loyalty and obedience like every other good Section-brainwashed spook, but the SIS’s elite service had yet to figure out a serum that could strip him of his moral compass.

  “You’ve been lying to him,” Cole observed. Shadows burned in his eyes. “Why?”

  “Spy,” Manuel deflected with a shrug.

  “You’ve been lying to him.”

  Specificity in all things. That was Cole’s mantra. He was a details man, the kind of agent Section sent in when they wanted a clean extraction, an assassination that was so perfectly executed no one thought to wonder if it hadn’t been an accident.

  Manuel had met him in the field, the two of them as taken with the comfort of meeting someone who understood as they were with their illicit little affair. He didn’t know how to handle this sudden glimpse at the broken, vulnerable man behind the silencer.

  He deflected. “They asked me if we’re sleeping together.”

  Cole’s expression shuttered. “What did you tell them?”

  “None of their business,” Manuel lied.