by Peyton Bogue
“What about your men over there?” Mikalina asks, narrowing her eyes as she easily avoids Kharkovy's question.
“Do you know them well? Do you trust them?” Kai finishes for her, crossing his arms.
“I run tight ship, Detective,” Kharkovy replies, eyeing Kai with disdain. "I hire only the best, and only after members of my team pass excessive background checks. In fact, I’ve had to say no to police,” a glance back to Mikalina, and then Richards, who tries not to cower, “and even FBI agents.”
“Yeah, but it’s like The Hurt Locker over there, right? Very Zero Dark Thirty, yeah?” Kai asks, shrugging nonchalantly. Kharkovy gives him a haughty look.
“It’s a war zone,” Sage interjects, giving Kharkovy a calculating once-over of his own. “Rules go flying out the window over there. Any chance somebody did something they weren’t supposed to do?”
“What are you saying, exactly, Detective Kaelan?” Kharkovy asks, bringing his hands down to interlock them as he stares coldly up at Sage.
“It must be very tempting, that’s all,” Sage replies, shrugging his shoulders in feigned nonchalance. "You know, your people have a certain window of time where they can do as they please, take anything they want. Like those guns, for example. And they certainly have unlimited resources to cart them anywhere they want in the world.”
“People at my company do exactly what yours do, Detective,” Kharkovy says sternly, his eyes narrowing, “but without luxury of time or security.”
“Let me go back a second here,” Sage says, holding back a scoff. His blood thrums with anger. "Didn’t you just say you read the report on your plane?”
Kharkovy eyes him, refusing to break eye contact.
Sage smiles a patronizing smile. “It’s kind of hard for me to receive a lecture on luxury from someone who just used the words ‘I read it on my plane,’ you know? It muddles things, that’s all.”
“Then let me be completely clear,” Kharkovy says shrewdly, leaning forward.
“Yeah, please,” Sage replies, making a motion with his hand in the air as he smiles pleasantly. Kharkovy scowls.
“The sort of corruption you are implying is not encouraged, nor tolerated, at Sirin,” Kharkovy says, smiling dauntingly. "Clear, yes?”
“Crystal,” Kai interjects, smiling a wide sarcastic grin. Kharkovy gives him another derisive look, scoffing.
“If we are done here,” Kharkovy says unkindly, moving to stand.
“Of course, sir,” Mikalina replies, giving him a cavalier grin. “I’ll need you to sign some papers, here.”
Kharkovy scoffs again, but accepts the pen she hands him, moving to fill in the requested information on the form she also hands to him.
“Keep yourself available for questions, Mr. Kharkovy, in case we have any further topics we’d like to discuss with you,” Grayson says smoothly. Kharkovy looks up at him, scoffing.
Sage steps out of Mikalina’s office before Kharkovy can reply, unable to hold back his victorious smirk. He’s still kind of worked up though, feeling the residual contemptuousness lingering just beneath the surface of his skin. He’s still tired and can feel the exhaustion beginning to sting his eyes and doesn’t pay attention to where he’s trying to head back to his desk as he shakes his hands out, as if he needs to dispel some of his renewed energy. His hand hits a muscular arm in front of him, and he jerks back quickly, stopping in his tracks as he nearly barrels right into the person in front of him.
“I’m so—” Sage starts, immediately trying to apologize as he looks up quickly, where a familiar pair of brown eyes meets his. “Steele?” he asks incredulously, taking a step back in disbelief.
Damian Steele’s hand falls off of his elbow, and Sage hadn’t even realized that Steele had reached out to grab onto him to help keep him upright. Sage quickly glances to Steele’s hand, then darts his eyes to his desk that is directly behind Steele, before he meets Steele’s gaze confusedly. Steele is standing only a few feet away from his desk, and when Sage meets his eyes again, a feral grin breaks out haughtily over Steele’s mouth.
“Sage Kaelan?” comes Steele's reply as he brings his hand up to give Sage a hard, overly friendly pat on his shoulder. Sage grimaces slightly.
“What are you doing here?” Sage asks him, taking another step back as his eyes run over Steele’s clothing. He’s wearing a dark suit with a navy tie, and Sage can’t help but think that it looks out of place on him. Sage has only ever seen Steele in Army green fatigues, and the darkness of his suit looks out of place against his tan skin.
Sage shifts slightly, trailing his eyes back over Steele's face. The large scar on his left cheek looks exactly like how Sage remembers it—brutal and vicious. He's aged more, especially around the contours of his tanned face as hollow cheekbones and full lips take the place of the precocious soldier Sage only knew in passing, but Steele looks just as callous and merciless as he did the last time Sage had seen him. Sage doesn't ever remember a time when he spoke to Steele and didn't see that sanguinary grin on Steele's face. There has always been something dark and mysterious lurking beneath Steele's haughty smirk.
Sage meets Steele’s brown eyes again as he angles his body away from the man in front of him. Damian Steele wasn’t ever someone Sage particularly wanted to be close with.
“Do you work here?” Steele asks him, glancing behind Sage’s shoulder towards Mikalina’s office, shrugging off Sage’s disconcerted gaze.
“Uh, yes,” Sage replies. "I’m a Detective.”
“Law enforcement, really? You?” Steele asks, and the look he settles Sage with is decidedly not a nice one. His lips curl in derision and he eyes Sage with a harrowing pinch of his eyes.
“I’m not the same person you remember, Steele,” Sage says, and the contemptuous feeling that is still lingering in his veins spreads out around his chest. "What are you doing here?”
“Hey, you’re the one who ran into me,” Steele replies, chuckling.
“Right, sorry about that,” Sage says, shaking his head. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“It’s all good, Kaelan. I’m here to pick up my boss. He’s helping out on a case with the police and the FBI,” Steele says, smiling a lecherous grin.
It clicks for Sage, then, and he looks at Steele scornfully.
“Your boss is Aleksander Kharkovy?” Kai suddenly asks from behind Sage before Sage can open his mouth. Kai crosses his arms and stares at Steele, his face unyielding.
“I’m sorry, who are you?” Steele asks, eyeing Kai with the same derisive glare Kharkovy had given him only a few moments ago.
“Detective Malakai Tate,” Kai replies, but doesn’t move to shake Steele’s hand politely like he would for anyone else he was just meeting. "I’m his partner.” He nods his head towards Sage, clenching his jaw.
“Never took you for the whole policeman persona, Kaelan,” Steele says, crossing his arms and eyeing them both with a raised brow.
“Like I said, Steele,” Sage replies. "I’m not the same person you remember.”
“Clearly,” Steele says, his eyes trailing over Sage once more. Sage resists the urge to shiver uncomfortably from his calculating gaze.
“Damian, we are leaving,” snaps a sharp voice behind them, and all three men turn to see Kharkovy staring at them with a nasty purse of his lips.
“Good seeing you again, Cap,” Steele says, giving Sage another lascivious smile as he steps forward and pats Sage with an open palm on his collarbone. “Watch where you’re going next time, yeah?” Sage flinches slightly, stumbling a little at the blow to his clavicle, and watches as Steele takes a step back, aims a spiteful glare at Kai, and turns around, following after Kharkovy with a smirk before Sage can reply.
Both Sage and Kai watch them disappear behind the doors of the precinct, where the sun is already beginning to set.
Sage rubs the area on his collarbone, as if he’s trying to rub away Steele’s unwanted touch, as Kai turns back to him, asking, “That guy was from
your Army days?”
“Yeah, but I haven’t seen him in years,” Sage replies, shaking his head. “What the hell is he doing working for a man like Aleksander Kharkovy?”
“He wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine, Sage,” Kai says, scoffing. “There’s nothing innocuous about that guy. Dude was a dick.”
Sage nods in agreement. Even back during the war, Steele had always been troubling. He often subtly challenged Sage’s orders, undermining him in front of Sage's superiors, and had been extremely difficult to work with. While Sage hadn't been in charge of Steele's team, he encountered Steele often enough to know that Steele wasn't ever someone that could easily be relied on. Seeing him now already makes Sage feel kind of unsettled, as if Steele has undermined him yet again.
There is no way that it’s a coincidence that Steele is back stateside and working for the guy Sage is investigating, but before he can read more into it, the buzzing of his phone draws his eyes away from the entrance of the precinct.
“Kaelan,” he answers, and he’s immediately met with the sound of police and ambulance sirens.
“Hey, Sage, it’s Hazel,” Hazel says, and Sage looks confusedly towards the stairs leading down to Hazel’s lab. She’d been down there just half an hour ago.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“I’ve got good news and I’ve got back news,” Hazel replies, and Sage can hear her sigh. "The good news is, I think I found our gun.”
“What, how?” Sage asks. "What’s the bad news?”
Hazel pauses.
“There’s been another murder.”
◆◆◆
When Sage, Kai, and Richards pull up to the new homicide, the liquor store they’ve been called to is crawling with about five squad cars and two ambulances, all with their lights blaring and reflecting off of the bars on the windows.
Sage can see Hazel’s coroner’s van backed into a parking spot across the parking lot from where he’d parked the Camaro, but it doesn’t look like there is anyone inside of it.
The sun has completely set, and the red and blue lights of the squad cars make Sage’s eyes burn when he looks at them.
Grayson is back at the precinct with Mikalina, and they are both peeling over the evidence log to see if there is any way that they can tie Kharkovy to either the crimes in Tehran or the crime in Prospect Park. Sage doesn’t know if they are going to be able to do either, but he wants to see that smug look be wiped off Kharkovy’s arrogant face almost as bad as he wants to wrap up this case. He'll help them in anyway that he can if it means that they can put this strange homicide behind them.
Sage, Kai, and Richards all step out of the Camaro and head up to the building quickly.
Hazel is standing behind the cash register when they walk in, wearing gloves and a forensic vest with her long brown hair pulled back into a low ponytail. There are thick lines of blood spatter behind her, and the cash register below her fingertips is covered in blood.
“Hey, Hazel,” Kai says, and she looks up at them, smiling tentatively.
“What happened?” Sage asks her, looking around.
There are bullet casings all around his feet, and many of the liquor bottles behind the counter are shattered from the force of the cartridges.
“A nineteen-year-old kid came in to rob the place. The clerk refused to empty this register, and the kid’s weapon spits out about fifty of your magic rounds. The shooter said he found it behind a dumpster on Fifth Avenue and Dean Street,” Hazel tells them, motioning to the gun on the counter.
“That’s like, a block away from the 78th precinct,” Sage says, his brow furrowing. “What’s this thing doing all the way over here?”
Hazel shrugs, her eyes pinched, and purses her lips, looking back at the blood in front of her.
The EL-J46 gun that lays seemingly innocuous on the top of the counter looks even bigger and even deadlier than it had in the pictures, and Sage eyes it warily.
“Did anyone else get hurt?” he asks, glancing up at Hazel.
“Hell, yeah.” She nods at the gun. "The clerk took half a dozen. He’s loaded up into the back of my van.” She motions to the corner of the liquor store, and all three of them turn around to see a male teenager on an ambulance stretcher, his gaunt face screwed up in pain. “And our rifleman over there literally shot himself in the foot. I’m just glad he ran out of ammunition.”
“I think it might have been a little bit too much gun for him,” Kai says, looking at the gun on the counter warily.
“Would be for me, too. That thing’s a monster. I’m glad it’s off the streets,” Sage says.
“I’m going to head back to my lab and start analyzing it here in a few minutes. I’ll call you when I’ve found something,” Hazel offers, and Sage gives her a nod.
He can see some other detectives from their precinct already working and processing the scene, and he doesn’t want to step on anyone’s toes if he and Kai try to take over for them. So, he nods again, lifting a hand up to give Hazel a polite wave. "Okay, we’ll see you later, Hazel. Keep us updated.”
Both he and Kai turn around and begin to walk back the way they came, but Richards stands frozen to his spot by the counter, looking around the liquor store with wide eyes.
Kai turns back to him, snapping his fingers in front of Richards’s face. Richards flinches at the sound, but he still doesn’t move.
“What’s the matter?” Kai asks him, crossing his arms and fixing Richards with a confused look.
Richards gulps, and Sage turns to mimic Kai’s pose, looking at the agent expectantly.
“If that one weapon got out,” Richards says hesitantly, biting his bottom lip, "there may be more to follow.”
“This gun is the stolen supplies you were talking about?” Sage asks, his eyes widening in surprise.
“That’s the problem we’re here to fix,” Richards replies, looking around the store and gulping audibly.
“Let me get this straight,” Kai says, clapping his hands together loudly before turning and dramatically pointing at the gun still sitting on the counter. "That gun? The cuts-people-in-half gun? That’s the missing supplies you and Grayson are here to retrieve?”
Richards nods numbly, his eyes pinched timidly.
“How many guns are we talking about?” Sage asks, his voice sharp, serious. Richards turns to him, swallowing audibly.
“Two hundred and nineteen."
Kai rounds on Richards, fire in his eyes. He’s absolutely livid. “Two hundred and nineteen of these?” He motions to the gun with an aborted movement of his hand, clearly frustrated.
Richards nods again, his panicked eyes widening.
“That’s not a problem,” Kai says. His voice is dangerously low, and Sage sees him shake his head in frustration.
Sage looks at Richards, a horrified curl to his lips.
"That’s a war zone.”
◆◆◆
“I cannot believe that kid,” Kai says, opening the door to his apartment with a sigh.
Sage follows in after him, closing the door behind himself with his own echoing huff of agreement.
Kai’s apartment in Park Slope is quaint and homey. It’s easy to tell that it’s a bachelor pad, fit with an Xbox resting on the second half of his T.V. stand, a massage chair in the corner closest to the fire escape, and mini ping pong paddles that they bring out occasionally when they feel like it resting in a game basket by the left side of the couch.
It’s still cozy and welcoming, though, not unlike Sage and Rhys’s place. Kai has pictures everywhere, some hanging up on the walls, some decorating the mantle behind the couch, and some even stuck on his fridge with magnets, making his place feel inviting and open.
The photos all range from pictures of his family to pictures of his friends. He’s got a framed picture of he and Sage from the day they graduated high school together sitting on the end table on the left side of the couch, and Sage always feels fond when he looks at it. He’s got that same picture on his own entryway tab
le in he and Rhys’s brownstone.
There are a couple more pictures of Kai’s relatives scattered around the house, too: he and his mom posing together happily at some black-tie event, a photo of him when he and his sister were eight years old and dressed as cops for Halloween and even another picture of he and Sage hugging when they’d been able to see each other again after Sage had returned from basic training, complete with Sage in his Army uniform and all.
The one picture that always gets Sage smiling is the one Kai has pinned on his fridge—a photo of himself, Kai, and Rhys smiling widely in front of Lake Tahoe when they’d taken a trip to California a little over a year ago. There are more pictures that he feels his chest tighten at, like the one of he and Kai, their arms wrapped around each other in glee as they'd celebrated their graduation from the academy—or the one of Kai and Mikalina singing karaoke at Mikalina’s surprise party a few months ago. None of them make him smile as much as the one on the fridge does, and he knows it’s because Rhys looks so relaxed and comfortable and breathtakingly beautiful surrounded by the beautiful scenery of the mountains, and Sage’s breath catches in his throat every time he looks at it.
Kai is standing next to Sage in the photo, a big grin on his face as he slings his arm around Sage’s neck. Sage is hunched down a little to accommodate Kai’s arm around his shoulders, but he’s smiling widely, and his eyes are bright as he looks into the camera, leaning into Rhys’s chest. Rhys is standing right next to the water on Sage’s right, his own smile more withdrawn compared to Sage’s and Kai’s, but just as bright and open, and his arm is slung around Sage’s waist protectively. He’s not looking at the camera like Sage and Kai are; his eyes are glancing to the right, away from the lens of the camera, so that his eyes don’t cause a camera flare in the picture. Rhys can’t really explain it, why his eyes flare if he looks into a camera lens, but he just adjusts accordingly anytime he takes a picture, and many of the photos of he and Sage have Rhys looking away from the camera or at Sage so that the flare from his eyes doesn’t ruin the picture.