Last Line (15 page)

He jogged up the stairs, absurdly reluctant to face the lift in whose antique Victorian cage he had stood, hands wedged in his pockets, cock beginning to strain at the fabric of his jeans, Michael at his side, just as conscientiously casual. He stood for a moment outside Michael’s flat. The door had a look of particular closure—of sealing up secrets, though how the plain oblong of wood managed that, John couldn’t have said. He rang the bell.

Nothing. He tried both of Mike’s numbers again, willing the dial-out screen of his phone to change to a pickup. He didn’t want to do this.

But they both kept keys to one another’s flats, and it was Last Line policy to make the check.
One last chance, mate
. He raised a fist and banged on the door as hard as he could. He knew that if he’d only thought that Mike was sick or hurt, he’d have been through the door in a flash—forgotten he had a spare key and kicked it down in his haste, more than likely.

There was more to it than fear. Quietly letting himself in, pausing in the corridor to listen, John accepted the nature of the gnawing, circling beast making itself at home in his innards. He accepted that his instant, bristling dislike of Anzhel Mattvei had been less to do with Anzhel’s national affiliations than the look in his eyes when he had seen Michael. Amused. Familiar. Intimate.

The flat was occupied. No one in the living room or kitchen, but light was spilling out from under the bathroom door. John’s foot caught on something. Reaching down, his fingers closed on Michael’s leather jacket, crumpled there as if dumped. John could hear the shower running at full blast—loud enough, he supposed, to drown out a phone ringing or even a pounding at the door if you were preoccupied enough to
want
to ignore it…

Oh, Mike, please just be in there having a wank
. Dry-mouthed, John hung up the jacket, gently smoothing its folds.

He took a breath. He had no bloody business here. The beast in his guts was jealousy, pure and simple. Turning away, John started back the way he had come. He could wait in the car if he was so sodding worried—give it half an hour or until the appearance of lights in the flat indicated the end of whatever performance was being played out in the bathroom. Then he would call again and—

A howl ripped through the flat. John stopped dead, frozen. It was worse than the cry that had made him drop and shatter the coffeepot back in the farmhouse kitchen, and that had been enough to congeal the blood in his veins. The worst sound he’d ever heard, a strong, stoic man’s raw scream of terror. “Mike,” he whispered, and the howl came again. There was nothing of pleasure in it. Uncomprehending desolation, the roar of a lion with a spear in its side. John drew his PPK, glad he’d taken time to check it out again. There’d been nothing for him to shoot and kill in the bathroom at Glastonbury. Maybe this time Michael’s nightmares were flesh and blood enough to die. Maybe they were manifest as Anzhel-bloody-Mattvei. John strode down the corridor and shoved open the bathroom door.

Through the half-drawn shower curtain, he had time to count two thrashing, struggling bodies, not one. All right. Enough. He took a step backward, meaning just to get out as fast as he’d arrived. But pain had made him blind and stupid, and he dropped the pistol with a clatter on the floor. “Fuck,” he choked out, crouching to grab it, peripherally seeing the shower curtain jerk back. Then Michael cried out again, and somehow when John surged upright, he found the gun cocked and steady in his best two-handed grip.

The curtain was semitransparent. There were bright red stains across it, blurring and washing out to pink. John saw that Michael’s arms were up, his wrists awkwardly caught above his head. What the hell had Anzhel tied him to? The fittings were solid, like everything else in the flat, but wouldn’t withstand the kind of fight Michael was putting up. The water thundered on the sides of the bath. Through plastic and steam, John slowly became aware that Anzhel had stopped the motions of a violent fuck and was staring at him—calmly, without anger, as if he had arrived right on cue. In his right fist he held a knife. Its blade was short and businesslike, the tip buried in Michael’s skin, just below his sternum. Not deep, but enough to make him bleed freely in the hot water. His flanks were already marked with narrow, deliberate cuts. Behind the curtain Michael struggled for a few seconds longer, then went passively still, his head down.

“Mattvei, you bastard. Let him go!” John heard how the command cracked down the middle, broken by the sob he couldn’t repress. Mortified, he tried again. “Untie him. Put that goddamn knife down.
Michael
!”

“He can’t hear you.” Anzhel, one snake-muscled arm tight round Michael’s waist, studied John with interest. His sculpted face was flushed, his hair soaked but still in rich gold waves, as if he could never be anything other than beautiful. He grinned at him, panting. “Hello, Griff.”

“Don’t you fucking call me that. Mike!” John jerked the PPK’s muzzle up. “Tell me this is…” Rage briefly stole his words. “Tell me this is
consensual
, Mikey, or I’m gonna shoot this fucker, I swear!”

“He won’t hear you. Only me for now.”

“Why the fuck can’t he hear me?” John took one nervous diagonal step, keeping the muzzle at a point between Anzhel’s eyes. From here he could see that Anzhel had stopped at the pitch of a thrust. That his thighs were corded, tense, clamped hard to Michael’s backside. “What have you done to him?”

“What he wants. What he has to have from time to time, if you don’t want him to do worse to himself…” Anzhel tailed off. His eyes became abstracted, their light turning inward. He turned his face away from John and stood for a moment trembling, muscles flickering in tiny, strained movements under his flawless skin. To John’s disbelief, he tipped his head back, eyes closing. His hand closed tight on the haft of the knife, and he jerked the blade downward with terrible, exquisite precision. “Oh, Griff, you came at the wrong moment. Or the right one. Mikhaili, wake up,
moya liobov
! Show John how we come…how we
come
…”

Michael reanimated. He hauled with all his strength on his restraints. He groaned as if his soul was leaving him. Anzhel gave a kind of bark of atavistic triumph, grabbed the shower curtain, and ripped it down off its rings so that John could see everything. Rigid, the gun still clenched in his hands, John stood helpless and transfixed while Anzhel thrust to wild-eyed, shuddering climax, and Michael, after a shuddering moment, convulsed and sent a hard white jet from the tip of his belly-flat cock, washed away an instant later in the shower’s downpour.

Anzhel pulled out of him. John noted—as if from five miles out, as if he were watching this scene from a satellite in low orbit—that his long, lax cock was naked.
Couldn’t even put a condom on for him
. He holstered the gun. To his bewilderment Michael subsided onto his knees. John looked in vain for the handcuffs or belt that had been holding him.

Anzhel turned the shower off and stepped unconcernedly out of the bath. He laid the knife down by the washbasin, pulled a towel off the rail, and dumped it over Michael’s shoulders. He smiled at John, who had involuntarily backed away until stopped by the wall. “And that,” he said, picking up a towel for himself, “is how you fuck the daylights out of—what do you call him?—
Mikey
South. For future reference, you don’t even have to tie him up, though he told me you’d had a go. You just need to make him think you have.” He turned and caressed Michael’s bowed head. “Hey, Mikhaili. John’s here.”

John stood rooted—long enough to see Michael look up with perfect horror dawning on his face, long enough to see and understand for himself that his wrists were free. Then he turned and stumbled out.

John felt sick, and that was bad—the bathroom was spectacularly occupied. The kitchen sink would have to do. When he got there, though, his stomach locked tight and all he could do was cough and choke miserably. The dark room spun around him, floor heaving under his feet. He had to get out.

A padding of bare feet on tiles. A hand on his shoulder. John jerked out from under it, dragging a hand across his mouth. He checked the sink to see he hadn’t made a mess and quickly ran the taps.

“John.”

“I’m all right. Leave me be.”

“Oh God. Why did you come here?”

“I came because of…” His throat was raw. He coughed again and reluctantly took the pieces of kitchen roll Michael was holding out to him. John could barely look at him. He’d put on a dressing gown, and he looked like the man John knew, but everything had changed. “I came because of code seven.”

“Code…”

“Seven. If an agent fails to answer his door or his phone. That’s all. Will he see to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“To your cuts. You’re—you’re still bleeding. It’s coming through your robe.”

Michael glanced down at himself. “Oh God. No. I can do it for myself.”

“All right. I’m going. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Michael caught him up in the hall. Again John evaded his hand. He let himself out into the corridor and started walking.

“Griff, wait.”

“No!” John barked, whether in denial of the request or the name he didn’t know. He stopped and swung round. Michael was out in the corridor, dripping wet and pale. Having started shouting, John found he couldn’t stop. Were there cameras in this section? He couldn’t remember, didn’t care. “What happened to
I could never let another man fuck me
, Mike? What happened to
only slaves and prisoners get fucked
?”

It wasn’t the kind of building where people had public arguments. A door clicked in the ringing silence that followed. Glancing down the stairwell, John saw a wedge of light as the lady downstairs stuck her head out.
Great
. He could round off his evening by exposing himself as a hysterical queer. He threw Michael one last uncomprehending look, then turned and began to take the stairs four at a time.

Chapter Eleven

“Why didn’t you tell me there was someone else in your life?”

Michael started. He and John were leaning with their elbows on the South Bank rail, a fanciful medieval dolphin grinning down at them. For the past quarter hour they had been watching the Thames in silence. Outside of business and civilities, these were the first words John had addressed to him in the three days of their undercover. And Michael couldn’t for the life of him think of an answer.

“If you had, I’d never have chased you round the way I did. I must’ve been a real pain in the arse.”

John hadn’t taken his eyes off the water. Michael turned and glanced around them, making sure he did so with the weary stiffness of the hungry down-and-out he was meant to be. There was no one within earshot. “He wasn’t in my life,” he said grimly. “It was a long time ago.”

“Three years. Or quite a bit less than that, if we’re counting from Thursday.”

Thursday. Michael’s shoulders sagged. He was cold beneath his duffel coat in spite of the warm June sun. He’d wondered if John would consign
Thursday
to the same pit of oblivion he himself had tried to prepare for it. Shouldn’t have underestimated him. Michael remembered it in scraps. A fast ride home in the BMW, then arrival at the flat. Arguing with Anzhel in fierce muted Russian, telling him—begging him—to go back to the safe house and let him alone. That whatever there had been between them was over, long dead and buried. He had given up and gone to take a shower, feeling filthy from the marrow out.

The door had clicked. There had been a weird, sweet music. Then he had been burning up into violent orgasm, with someone—Christ, with Anzhel—fucking him hard. Blood all over the place, his skin striped by shallow cuts. And somehow John had been in the room.

“
Wake up, Mikhaili. John’s here
.”

“Did you see much of that?” Mike asked miserably.

“Enough to get the gist.”

“It wasn’t…”

“If you tell me it wasn’t what it looked like, I think I’ll chuck one of us into the river.”

“No. It was what it looked like. It’s just not what you… I can’t explain.”

John gave up his perusal of the river and turned to face him. “Mikey, I love you, but he had his cock up your arse. He wasn’t in there looking for the soap.”

Michael’s mouth opened. For a long moment, he and John stared at one another. Then pained, involuntary laughter tore from both of them. “Don’t,” Michael said. “It’s not bloody funny.”

“No, I know it isn’t. Is he coercing you? Forcing you?”

Yes. Yes, surely
. But when Michael had checked himself over on Thursday night, apart from the cuts there hadn’t been a mark on him to excuse what he had done. And then there had been the times since… “No.”

“Are you still fucking him?”

A silence, too deep for the purr of passing pleasure boats and the splash of the Thames to penetrate. At last John said, with difficulty, “All right. Like I say, I just wish—I just wish you’d told me.”

Michael studied him. Three days into their undercover, John looked the part with startling thoroughness. There was more to it than stubble and Salvation Army coat. Webb tended to send John on ops that needed dash and verve. He made a good expensive rent boy or con man, a bad down-and-out. It was hard for him to conceal his lights. Now it seemed to Michael that they had gone out of their own accord. “Griff…”

“Don’t. Here he comes.”

“
Dobroye utro
.”

Michael concealed a twitch. He needed to pull it together. The op they had set up was a delicate one, requiring all his attention, and he had just let a six-foot Russian stroll up to him unnoticed. Anzhel was resplendent in the kind of suit a low-level
Russkaya mafiya
man would wear, heavy gold chains at his throat and wrists. Hard to miss as Michael and John were hard to spot. Michael asked flatly, “Did you get us an in?”

As arranged, Anzhel opened his jacket in a none too subtle display of the cash swelling its inner pocket. “Are you two hobos ready to do anything for money, then?”

“Any time,” John returned cheerfully, making a convincing grab for payment in advance: a junkie needing his next fix, an alcoholic desperate for the next drink.