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As the door closes behind me, disassociation starts to wear off. The murder, the interrogation, the torture, the threat, everything starts to take me. Maybe I stood up too quickly. Maybe I’m overwhelmed. Maybe I am completely incapable like they think.

I am definitely dizzy, the room spins and the lights fade in and out. Nik tries to hold me up, and to steady me. And I vomit, all down his front. Three times. I start to apologise and he just holds me in. I don’t sob, but the tears run free. My whole body shakes. All the feels, it’s too much.

How can I suddenly understand almost perfectly who I am, whilst simultaneously losing all grip of what I am? Nik guides me to the bed and sits me down. My head spinning, thoughts and feelings of guilt, rage, betrayal, despair, frustration all hit me at once making my whole body feel intolerable. I want to crawl out of my skin, out of my life. The thought hits too viscerally for just a second when I realise crawling out of my life would mean crawling away from Nik.

My anchor to everything that stabilises and builds me. The only person in the whole world.

Dan… I hadn’t thought about him or how he thinks or feels… I hate him, but my heart cracks thinking that I am all he’s got left. The reason he’s enduring fuck-knows-what in prison, because he thinks Harry will hurt me. No matter how much he deserves it, that one stings. You can’t just turn love off, even if it switches to hate. Strong feelings don’t disappear, but they might change shape.

I don’t want him, I don’t ever want to see him again, he could drop off the face of the earth. But knowing he’s suffering in the hopes it somehow keeps me safe, that’s wild.

How do we even get out of all of this? How is Nik so fucking calm? Can’t he just flap with me for like two minutes and make me feel even a little bit more adequate?

I have this awful feeling I’m about to get so, so much deeper before I get out. If I ever make it out alive.

Twenty

Nik

I fucking knew that slimy cunt was setting me up when he suddenly had specifics about how he wanted the security arrangements handled. That’s why you wear a vest, that’s why you never trust your operational security to someone who just pays you. Prick.

I look down at my puking princess, my sickly seraphim. She’ll be fine. It’s been a big day for her, but I cannot crack not even an inch. Not that I would but this is considerably more Guy Ritchie and less Paddy Mayne than I’m used to. She might not realise it yet, but she’s already stronger than any woman I’ve ever encountered. Blood and suffering are… acquired tastes to which I shamefully concede she will grow accustomed.

I try to organise everything in my head properly. To make sense of a situation, if I can’t organise and categorise I can’t plan, and if I can’t plan, I can’t control. If I’m not in control bad shit happens.

Remembering back to my counter-insurgency training. Harry is my high value target. He’s got to go at all costs. Nearly all costs. We’ve got intel working from the inside. Unreliable, probably, but it’s better than nothing. I can probably trust what he told me in interrogation. I’m not sure how workable he is going to be once we cut him loose.

I go through the risks in my head, trying to form something that looks and feels like an actual assessment. If I send Craig back I could gain intelligence and leverage, and have some kind of route to speaking with Harry and keeping things diplomatic. But maybe Craig tells him what we are up to, what things are like in the house, and reveals to Harry that Sawyer has become my weakness. I lose the initiative and gain a vulnerability. That’s a very high risk, high reward strategy.

I don’t think Harry is going to be all that pissed about Key. He is replaceable and low-level. If Harry has already gone into hiding because the streets are too hot, then he probably isn’t going to want to just go into another war right now.

Alternative: I kill Craig, tie up the loose end, and it lights the fuse. That could work, but it rules out any way out of all this without significant bloodshed. Killing Craig is a very different proposition to killing Key.

Send Key back with Craig, no declaration of war. We sent a man back alive. No missing persons, Harry will keep it quiet. Craig can get information, and we control another variable.

I try to imagine myself as Harry. Going through his reaction, his thoughts. I analyse his character, his ego, alliances, patterns, everything I know about him to best predict how he is likely to respond. After an almost brain aching depth and duration of thought I come to the conclusion. He will sit tight, he can never be trusted, but you can trust a man to act on his self-interests more often than not. Open warfare would be a spectacularly bad idea for him right now. For all his defining traits, he isn’t stupid.

There’s one vital piece of information missing from all this, though. I need to know what he has on Sawyer. And I need to know that yesterday.

Twenty One

Sawyer

Kneading the mattress, unable to replay anything from today. Finding some kind of infantile comfort from sitting in the softness in a world visibly absent of struggle, violence, and danger. Except my Nik, of course. But that’s a different danger. He’s like an X-ray machine, the lady is all casual and everything’s safe. She sets you up and frames you all pretty, then dives behind cover before pushing the button.

“Little Darling…” Nik gently brings me back to the room, knelt in front of me. Still covered in my sick, Key’s blood, and a slight piss patch on his shin from where he crushed Craig’s nuts to hurry his storytelling along.

I look up at him and manage a faint smile and a nod, letting him know I’m ready for my next grand sin, to continue our play in purgatory.

“I’ve got good news, a favour to ask, and a quite pressing conversation we need to have. Is that okay?”

I nod again, words just escape me right now.

“Which would you like to do first?”

“Erm… I… uh… the good news?” I almost manage an eyebrow raise at the concept of good news on a day that has so far involved me not getting laid, getting threatened, assaults, being party to a murder, a definite war crime, and then throwing up on the sexiest man I’ve ever met.

“There’s a few positives today, okay?” he offers a comforting smile, I can tell he’s putting it on for me, but from a man who exclusively excludes facial muscles from his whole-body workouts, it’s reassuring in a very weird way “So firstly, no more murders today, that’s good, right? Yay!” and he does a little faux-cheer with his fists up to his chin, which cracks the cement my face has been set in. “But there’s more, I’ve got a plan - and if it pays off, well that means no more Harry or Dan to worry about… but might involve a murder or two but it’s kind of on them really, but yeah, some killing maybe… boo” his humour is actually cracking me here. “And one more, you still get to clean, and it’ll be a really good one this time, not even just sparkling clean, it’s a CSI: Fuck Off kind of clean… so that’ll be fun, right?” punctuated at the end with the fakest most ridiculous grin and double thumbs up I have ever seen. But it does get me.