by Abigail Roux
staring at the piece as if it might get up and start dancing a tango. “Have you always done that?”
“Usually.”
“I mean, every night we’ve been together? You’ve had a gun in your fucking
underwear?” Thiago asked, his voice getting slightly higher when he thought about the amount of damage that misfire could cause.
“Not until we got to L.A.,” Carl answered defensively. “Something about
this place gives me the colly wobbles.”
“The what?”
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“Makes me nervous.”
“It’s probably the gun being held to your dick!”
“I keep it at my hip,” Carl responded with a little laugh of amusement. It
seemed to Thiago that Carl couldn’t quite understand why he was upset. Carl was
crazy as fuck, too!
“Jesus!”
“Are you going to keep bitching?”
“Are you carrying any other weaponry I should know about?” Thiago asked,
half in amusement. Carl laughed and kissed him affectionately. Thiago closed his
eyes and murmured in pleasure as Carl placed soft kisses at the side of his mouth and along his jaw line, and all the way down his neck. “Is it loaded?” Thiago asked
curiously as he enjoyed the soft nibbling and kisses that were now at his collar bone.
“Depends on which one you’re talking about,” Carl murmured happily
before grinding his erection against Thiago’s hipbone.
It had amazed Thiago their first time together, how gentle Carl was. After
sitting through hearing Brandt make Carl scream like he had, Thiago had been almost reluctant to get into it. But Thiago had very little resistance when it came to such matters, and he’d been pleasantly surprised.
Thiago did not often wander far from the duties of being a top, and when he
had in the past it had been with fairly brutal men who he’d ended up having to kill, so to find a man as deadly as Carl and feel nothing but pleasure when he was with him was indeed a treat.
Thiago wasn’t a particularly proud man either. He had the unusual and
amazing ability to admit when he was wrong, ask for help, and beg another man to
fuck him if he thought it would make it happen sooner. He trusted Carl, with both his safety and his pleasure, and he also knew that the needy sounds he tended to make turned the younger man on. He had no problem with begging Carl to fuck him.
Carl reached up and pinned his wrists to the bed, his grip so hard that Thiago
knew there would be bruises there in the morning. Thiago, though, didn’t really care.
XXI.
THE Archer was completely and utterly confused. He’d become severely attached to
the man with whom he’d spent the last three months, and just the thought of the other four in danger now made his skin crawl.
He had a new problem. He not only had to get the other five to join him, but
he had to get them out of the game and as far away from danger as he could. All of them.
Even if he couldn’t turn them in the end, he knew now that he wouldn’t be
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able to kill them. If it ended up costing him his own life, then so be it. The battle would go on with or without him. Without him, though, his side didn’t have a chance at victory.
Was victory worth the lost lives?
He reached through the darkness and gripped the other man’s hand tightly.
He looked down at their joined hands and could see the bruises from their earlier escapades on the pale wrist even in the moonlight coming through the sheer drapes.
He closed his eyes and sighed heavily.
Would he still feel the burn for that all-important triumph if the man beside
him ended up dying because of it?
The Archer really didn’t think so.
XXII.
CARL shot out of bed and immediately reached for the gun at his hip, but the gun
wasn’t there and he stood staring wide-eyed at Thiago as the other man knelt at the opposite side of the bed in a defensive position.
“What wassat?” Carl demanded, his mind slowly clearing of the fog of sleep
and finally registering the high-pitched droning sound that woke them.
“¿Teléfono? ” Thiago suggested hoarsely as he hurried to his bag and began rummaging through it in search of the prepaid mobile phone Shawn had bought them.
“¿Hola? ” he answered in a shocked voice as soon as he found the thing. Carl had discovered very early on that Thiago only spoke English after a certain hour in the morning. It made mornings interesting since the closest thing Carl knew to Spanish was Croatian.
Carl walked up to stand beside him and watched him intently, waiting for
any sign that something had gone wrong. There was a very specific time that Remy
was supposed to contact them, and that wasn’t for another four days. Hearing from any of the others before then meant something was wrong. Something couldn’t be
wrong.
‘Please don’t let something be wrong,’ Carl pleaded mentally.
Thiago turned to look at Carl with a little frown on his face, and Carl raised
his eyebrows inquiringly. After a few more seconds, Carl made an impatient noise in the back of his throat and Thiago nodded in understanding
“It’s Remy,” Thiago informed him finally as he listened to the voice on the
line. “Hold on, I think there’s a speaker phone option on this thing… Remy… Remy!
¡ Parada! Jesus,” Thiago muttered as he studied the buttons. Finally, he found what he was looking for and Remy’s irritated voice echoed hollowly through the speaker.
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“I think the son of a bitch hung up on me,” he was saying.
Carl grinned happily at hearing the younger man’s voice, and at the fact that
he was obviously talking to someone. That meant that Remy and Nikolaus were both
intact, at least.
“Thiago?”
“Yeah, we’re both here now, start over.”
“Oh. Bonjour, Trigger!” Remy yelled happily into the phone.
“Hey there, Dixie. You two alright then?” Carl asked with an indulgent
smile.
“Oh, we’re just swell,” came Nikolaus’s sarcastic voice from somewhere in
the background.
“Don’t mind him, he just gets sort of queasy. Listen, we have some–”
“Queasy?” Carl echoed questioningly.
“Oui. He’s not much for the blood. Listen, I realized this morning that these things have cameras in them and–”
“Remy?” Thiago interrupted haltingly, obviously wanting to know more
about the blood and not really caring about Remy’s morning realizations.
“I mean the phones. They have cameras in them,” Remy explained
distractedly, as if he hadn’t understood Thiago’s intentions. Carl shook his head and smirked at Remy’s ability to do that so well. The younger man understood perfectly well, but only when it suited his purposes. “Niko’s uncovered another message from the Archer, sent out some time about four months ago or thereabouts, and today’s
events made it pretty apparent that we needed to get it to you fast so–”
“Today’s ‘events?’” Thiago questioned again.
“He got shot!” came Nikolaus’s distant shout. Remy hissed into the phone as
if he were in pain.
“Would you watch what you’re doing? No getting excited while playing with
the needle, s’il vous plaît,” Remy requested irritably. “Anyway, I wanted to let you know that we’re sending pictures of these two messages, in case we hit another
roadblock. Hey, can we
send other stuff too?” he asked Nikolaus curiously.
Carl was beginning to feel like a parrot as he asked hoarsely, “Roadblock?”
“Look, we’re a little short on time, so nix the questions and let me explain,”
Remy said, his tone suddenly completely different. He no longer sounded like the
cheerful and slightly oblivious young man they had just been speaking with. His
accent was almost completely gone, and he sounded like a hardened general giving
orders to his troops. It was a disconcerting change, and Carl found himself battling with the sudden urge to salute the phone. “They’ve zeroed in on us somehow and they
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have us land locked. We’re trying to slip through the net but so far we’ve not found a way. Now, we’re going to send you photos of everything we’ve been able to extract from the Organization’s files and then we’re destroying this phone and we’ll be on our way. If all goes well, we’ll meet you in Sydney on the first of March at four pm.
Repeating. Sydney, 1-3, 1600.”
“Got it,” Thiago and Carl chirped obediently
“Bon.”
There was a shuffling sound, and Carl assumed they were looking for
something as they spoke quietly to one another.
“All right, mes petits amoureux,” Remy said finally, his voice once again cheerful and untroubled. “Niko’s going to get those pictures to you. How have you two been managing? Are you looking out for one another?”
“Smooth sailing,” Thiago answered with a frown at Carl. “Remy? Are you
really okay? How badly are you wounded?”
“Hmm? Oh, it’s nothing serious. Some cowboy new recruit dickhead with
terrible aim. It grazed my arm, nothing serious at all. Have you heard from Shawn and Brandt?”
“Not a word.”
“No mushroom clouds in the desert or any such disasters?”
Carl smiled and laughed. “We did hear about a petrol station going up in
flames down in… New Mexico was it? Arizona maybe? That was about a month
ago.”
Remy laughed joyously and Carl and Thiago both grinned at the sound.
“That’ll be them, I suppose. We spoke to them very briefly, sent them the same stuff for redundancies. Barely got time to ask how they were.”
“Good idea,” Thiago agreed softly.
“They said to tell you hello. You two look after each other,” Remy
responded sternly. “We’ll see you in six day’s time Down Under,” he said with a
perfect Australian accent. “Here’s Nikolaus.”
“Take care, Dixie,” Carl murmured in parting, and he and Thiago just looked
at one another and shook their heads. It was like being hit by a wave whenever you dealt with Remy, and Carl felt exhausted from it.
“Nikolaus?” Thiago asked after several seconds of silence.
“Yeah. Yeah, sorry, I was waiting until Remy closed the door to the toilet.
Look gentlemen, we’re in the shit out here, and Remy knows it. Instead of the phones I want you to get to a computer, can you do that?”
“Uhh… does it have to be secure?” Thiago asked tentatively.
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“No. Just go out and buy a cheap laptop and find a hotel with a wireless
internet system. That’ll be enough. It’s got to be a hotel, though, those at least have some security to them.”
“Okay. Why did you have to wait ’til Remy left the room?” Carl asked
suspiciously. When it came to the computers they were all light years behind
Nikolaus, and it wasn’t easy to delve blindly into something you didn’t trust
completely.
“Because he thinks he’s shielding me from the fact that we’re probably
going to die. I’d like to keep his spirits up by playing into the illusion a little,”
Nikolaus said hastily. He sighed and suddenly Carl’s throat tightened as he listened to Nikolaus’s voice. “Remy’s worn himself thin protecting me, so I’d like to repay him a bit. Now, here’s what you’re to do.”
Carl grabbed the little pad of paper Thiago always seemed to have and began
copying down Nikolaus’s instructions, along with a web address that appeared to lead to a chat group of some sort.
“What is this?” Thiago asked as he watched over Carl’s shoulder to make
certain he got it right.
“If the Archer is communicating this way, we might as well do it too,”
Nikolaus explained. “The file you’ll download will include scans of everything we’ve collected so far. One thing Remy didn’t tell you though, and this is very important, is–
”
“Niko!” Remy’s distant voice called as a door banged shut. “We gotta move.
Now!”
“What’s going on, Niko?” Thiago asked as they both leant over the phone
and listened intently.
“They’ve found us again,” Remy’s calm voice informed them as he
apparently snatched the phone from Nikolaus’s hand. “Adios, lads!”
The line went dead, and Carl and Thiago were left staring at the phone in
numb horror. Finally Thiago walked back to the bed and sat down heavily.
“They’ll be okay,” he mumbled. Carl looked at him doubtfully and then back
at the phone as if it would magically bring Remy and Nikolaus back to them if he
glared at it hard enough.
To go all this time without a word, and then to finally hear from them only to
have their brief time together cut short by a life-threatening situation was
heartbreaking. To think that it could have been the last time they would hear the other men’s voices made Carl’s throat tighten miserably once more.
“They’ll be okay. Remy knows what he’s about. They’ve made it this far,”
Thiago murmured repeatedly, as if he were trying to convince himself. “Let’s get to a computer store,” Thiago finally suggested as he went about dressing himself.
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An hour later, they were all set up and the file had finished downloading.
“They didn’t leave many stones unturned, did they?” Thiago muttered as he
clicked through the pages of scans.
Carl could see lists and lists of names, scans of notes and messages, and lists
marking the suspected hits. He wondered when Nikolaus had done all this if he’d
been trying to keep it from Remy, but there were too many questions raised to linger on that now.
“What’s that one?” he asked, pointing to an unusually colored scan at the
side of the screen as he leant over Thiago’s shoulder. Thiago brought it up and they peered at it curiously.
“Is that Remy’s note?” Thiago asked in amusement. “From the cabin?”
“Is that blood?” Carl asked, zeroing in on the more important aspects.
“Hmm. Wait there’s another,” Thiago mumbled in a troubled voice. He
clicked on it and looked it over. “Looks like the back of the first one.”
Carl nodded. There were so many notes and doodles jotted down that there
was no making sense of any of it.
“Their notes are almost as hard to figure out as the original message!”
Thiago grumbled.
“They said there was another one? A new message?” Carl asked as he bent
over and settled his chin on Thiago’s shoulder.
“Yeah,” Thiago said as he found the right file and brought it up as well.
It was nothing but another note just like the original, full of jumbled letters
and numbers.
“That’s not much help,” Carl mumbled, ca
using Thiago to shiver
involuntarily. “Sorry.”
“Niko must not have had time to leave any notes to explain or anything for
us,” Thiago mumbled. “This doesn’t really get us anywhere without someone to
explain it all, does it?” Thiago asked irritably as he slumped back in the chair and rubbed his face in a tired manner.
Carl wasn’t as ready to write all this off just yet, but in the end they still
hadn’t answered the biggest question, the one they had to answer before they could go any further. Were they after the Archer or was the Archer after them?
‘Who else is after us?’ Carl wondered idly as he stared at the screen.
XXIII.
REMY had called them earlier, and the brief conversation Shawn had with the
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younger man had been nearly enough to satisfy him as to their relative safety. They were apparently having a time of it, but Shawn wasn’t too worried about them after receiving repeated assurances from Remy. The other man knew his way around a net, and besides, if Shawn continued to worry over them he would probably end up killing Brandt just to relieve the tension.
“Next time you tell me a direction, I will gladly go that way if you’ll just
shut your trap!” Shawn shouted in exasperation as the newly purchased computer
whirred away happily on the end of the bed.
Brandt stopped in mid-pace and turned to look at Shawn with an amused
smile.
“Not right now,” Shawn said before Brandt could even suggest the one
activity that was always at the forefront of his mind– aside from destruction and mayhem. Brandt huffed and threw himself onto the bed beside Shawn to peer at the
computer screen. “Have some sort of brilliant epiphany when we get these files and I’ll fuck you from here to Sunday,” Shawn promised as Brandt’s body bounced them
both on the springy mattress.
“Are we sure this is safe?” Brandt murmured as Shawn followed the
directions Nikolaus had hastily relayed as Remy had been in the bathroom tearing his shirt into strips for a bandage.