Love is a Bloodhound

by Reid Astor

  He gasps through the tendrils of pain reaching up inside his ribcage, glances up and finds a decisive snapping boot come up- and barely blocks it with the tender inside of his arm, though his shoulder brushes down with the sheer force of it. “Fucking hell,” he whispers, grabbing her boot, “I could get you in the penitentiary faster than-“

  She yanks her foot away with impressive speed- Lars just knows she’s been trained to fight, and not in the street-y, vicious survival way that Niklas has. “You hurt him. I don’t care. I’ll remember your face… okay?” she says, softly, stamping down her boot and looking on him like an errant, vicious stray. There’s a blush coming along her face- of all times to get embarrassed for almost kicking the shit out of a federal agent, now? “I-I-I’ll remember you if you bother him again.”

  Lars angrily tsks at the ground and mutters, “Whore,” as the dizziness takes over and the floor takes on too bright a shade of white.

  That’s where she finds him.

  Viola is gone when he opens his eyes, and what he sees in her place is much worse. Down on the ground, Lars swallows back exhaustion and nausea to the sight of a pair of black high heels, and invokes every godly bone in his body to pray just a little bit. For self-restraint, for the rage pricking right through his chest above the throbbing pain- most definitely not for Germaine Kartoffeln herself.

  Germaine needs no one to pray for her.

  Slowly, he rises, trying not to look at her. God damn everything if she’s actually amused to find him like this. “Evening,” he coughs out. “Don’t you have an empire to run, my Mafiosi Cleopatra?”

  She’s dressed nicely for a night like this, black dress, blazer, wavy hair well-styled and flowing over her shoulders. Lars would almost want her, if only the head on her shoulders wasn’t just about the most terrifying thing in this country. “Good evening, Agent Cromwell,” she says, pleasantly, but with just enough of a routine in her voice to let him know she means business. Though, now, theirs is over. “The squabbles of the city can wait. I’m here to pay my respects. May I ask you lead me to him?”

  He clears his throat, gestures to the staff meandering the halls and throwing looks their way. “Not visiting hours, sadly.”

  And Germaine smiles, sending a wave of hatred from his head down to the base of his spine. “After all we’ve done together, I’m doubt you’re tired enough to forget you’re a federal agent.”

  And he bites down an all his loathing and that something else she brings out in him and tries to put all that nicotine he’s pumped into his lungs to use. Calm down. Calm down. She’s a scary bitch, but she’s a pair of legs, tits and a cunt all the same, never mind her head. Calm the fuck down. “I certainly am not, but hey, thought your pretty face could get us through,” he says with as much bleary dignity as he can muster, and produces his badge. “Please. Go ahead.”

  She walks, tapping her way down that sterile hall in heels and letting him do the badge-flashing for her. She only stops once to ask which room their favorite blond resides in, and then she’s off- as if she has some innate sense of where everything is already in this hospital, or has been here before. He doesn’t want to know. He just plods after, clutching his chest.

  Niklas, it turns out, has been moved from the ICU to a regular room. He takes that as a good sign. In dark repose, he is serene, hair swept back and skin catching the blue shades of the night outside the window. There are no monitors set up, just an IV stand coiling round the bed and into his arm and a patch of gauze showing on his shoulder where he’s been shot.

  Germaine switches on the lights, blanketing the world in fluorescent whiteness that momentarily blinds him and send a whole other amount of irritation surging through him. Always needing to have things in the open, this one. He watches, barely containing himself, as she proceeds to the bedside and pulls up a chair, businesslike as always.

  She sits there for a moment, tucking her legs together beneath the chair in a prim fashion and peering upon Niklas’ face. Then, calmly, she says, “I suppose you could break the news just as well, couldn’t you? Play the good cop for once?” And it’s evident she’s not talking to the blond. There’s a pause, gravid with her presence. “You know, you made too many mistakes with him. Heavy hands. He’ll never trust you after all this. With what you’ve done to him, with the lies about being a…” she laughs, slightly, a derisive noise from her nose, “private investigator. Almost as bad as telling the truth.”

  He wants to say she’s wrong, wants to say anything, but words stumble in his mind and not a single clear one makes it to his mouth. Yeah. The trust thing is a bit of an obstacle. He almost regrets the night, but can’t find it in him to do so. The moment, the satisfaction, the drained away tension all sublimated into something else with Niklas- something he could almost understand for a flash of a moment before they were both back in action.

  Germaine turns, glancing over her shoulder at him. “I don’t know what it is about you, Agent. Some kind of complex? A need to mark and dominate everything you come across? Who can say? Maybe your brother could tell me more and put it down to a childhood trauma. You have to be better than everything, you have to own it. But I don’t think my barista appreciates it.”

  He doesn’t know what it is about what she’s just said. Maybe it’s the ‘mark and dominate’ line, like he’s a dog that pisses on property to claim it. Or the mention of his brother, which is just about good enough to send goosebumps across his flesh with how angry he’s getting. He’s so close to snapping on something when Germaine is around that if it isn’t for the copious buzzing of nicotine in his blood he thinks he might just faint.

  Or it’s the calling Niklas her ‘barista’. Not the keys to her kingdom, not even by his own name. Her barista.

  “Don’t think you give that much of a shit what your barista thinks, Germaine,” he says above the uproar of disjointed thoughts in his head, and walks to the window. The view outside is dull- a parking lot dotted by staff vehicles, and worse still, Germaine still sits pretty in the reflection on the glass. “This turned out just the way you wanted it, didn’t it?” he asks. “No messy court case now that she’s dead. A whole pile of evidence for jack shit.”

  “Not for nothing,” she refutes. “You acquit him of the fraud Svetlana so elegantly framed him up in. And, after his trust fund is processed, his debt. You break his chains.” An elegant pause holds between them. “Though I suppose now we are enemies in name, not associates.”

  Because he’s almost certain that after this she will go pick up the remnants, the scraps of Lana’s gang and integrate them into her own. Even he has to say it’s pretty impressive, the playing Niklas as Lana’s vulnerability, the use even of his father in a game that built with the years as Germaine had climbed, slowly crawling, emerging from the barrooms and street racing scenes to the leagues of the people with names in dossiers and histories of manipulation. Most of all, her easy collaboration with the FBI, fenced in by contracts made airtight of loopholes. Fuck knew how long this plan had been in the making, how long Germaine had been in the darkness, quietly plucking at the pieces of aged coincidence- at Alexei and DeLane and more and more evidence- and turning it to dismantle Svetlana Morris.

  “You have a fucked up way of bringing down your rivals,” he concedes, with difficulty.

  He barely sees her reflection smile. “It’s all business, Agent. And it’s been good business with you. I hope it’ll continue one opportune day.” He hears her rise, the soft clopping of her heels on the carpet as she gives Niklas one affectionate touch on the cheek before she turns to leave, pausing only at the door to ask, “Shall I turn the light out?”

  He turns around, lips pursed with tension that’s already draining away and edging back into that pit of fatigue. “If you would,” he says, stiffly, and watches with relief as the lights go off and she leaves him in the steady silence of the room.

  Alone with him.

  It’s difficult to say if what happens next occurs over several minutes o
r all at once. He’s too tired to know. He walks around the bed, discarding jacket and holster and badge as he goes into one ungainly bundle in his arms to dump on the bedside table, then drops into the chair.

  He digs under the sheets and finds Niklas somewhere beneath, brushes the man’s hospital gown and grins to himself a little bit, then grips the warmth in his hand as gently as he can, interlacing their fingers.

  And then he allows himself to lay his head on the bed, hands a tangle in Niklas’, savoring the skin, the touch he’s only known brushes and intense stints with. For once he has him for hours alone, for once there’s no war, no mental wrestling, no psychological minefield to canvass in the lands of this man- and though he’s savored every breath of it, gloried in the vicious fires, he now realizes he is too tired to spar well or worthily with Niklas. To reason with him.

  And when the fire has died and the battle’s over, Lars thanks a god he doesn’t quite believe in that the skin he presses to his lips is warm and steadily beating against his with a pulse. He never prayed for anyone before then, but in a way, he feels like he’s saving himself then and there- on the frays of somnolence and empty, recursive dreams, touching Niklas Baranov somewhere on both planes physical and surreal.

  No one knows what the sunrise will bring either of them, but he thinks, tonight, he might actually get some sleep.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  And you wake up in early hours with an IV in your arm and think you’ve become a self-fulfilling prophecy, an angry man provoked by an angry society pushed down into the fray. And now you wake up from wandering your dreams with blood in your hands and some kid’s tear-stained face echoing from your memories.

  The words come round and round in his head as he feels the warmth of Lars’ hands and can’t bring his arm to move away- not without some pain at his core, his shoulder, telling him best not. He wonders if he’ll ever have his left arm again. He hasn’t seen a nurse, doesn’t remember being here- the thrum of blood in his head tells him he’s on at least some kind of drug.

  He watches Lars. Lars, with his face buried in the sheets, half on the bed and half in the chair and sleeping like the dead, dark hair swept over his eyes and caught in his eyelashes. Through the tight fabric of Lars’ shirt, he can see the church and cross rise and fall with steady, deep torpid breaths. He can meditate, almost, on the motion of this poisonous man’s restful body.

  “Verdura,” he starts through a dry throat, raising his functional arm and shaking the man. Technically, he thinks, it’s wrong to call him by that name. That wasn’t the name on his badge. “Verdura, wake up.”

  The man groans and turns his face into his hand, nuzzling it and sending a wave of something a semitone lower than disgust through Niklas’ head. He clears his throat. “Agent. Whatever the hell you are. Wake up,” he says, clearer this time. “Cromwell. Verdura.”

  “Cromwell’s my mother’s surname,” Lars murmurs, voice a vibration into his fingers. He clenches his fingers around Niklas’, momentarily, then lets go, and turns his head, blearily opening his eyes and looking at him. “Morning, sunshine. How do you say that in Russian?” he smiles, winningly.

  “Poshel na khui,” he says, almost automatically. “Divorced child?”

  “Yes.” The agent snorts derisively and sits back, stretching. “And yeah, no, I doubt that’s it. You’re not the only Russki in this country, in case you forgot. Plenty, for example, drive cabs in New York city.”

  In spite of himself, he blushes. “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, I was sleeping,” the man says, voice thick with something that could be anything from what looks like his broken nose to a cold or just plain bleariness. “But now I think I’m looking at this hot blond in at twelve ‘o’ clock. Damn straight. Tell me where they make baristas like you.”

  “Don’t get cute with me, Agent,” he mutters, raising a hand to his face. No eyepatch, just the scars like memories in braille across the right side of his face. He sweeps his bangs back and inclines his head to look to the light. Of all autumn days to be beautiful, he thinks, as he spies the tops of trees on the cusp of turning bright red.

  He feels Lars’ hand on his own again, and turns sharply, trying to raise it and succeeding only in twitching it ineffectually. “Can you not?” he asks, not as harshly as he’d like.

  The man says nothing, leans into his hand and presses his lips to it. “I’m sorry,” he speaks, then lets go, laying both palms flat on the edge of the bed. “That’s what I’m here for. Other than seeing you safe and knowing you’ll wake up. I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  He shakes his head, feeling the moisture of Lars’ lips on his knuckles long after the man’s drawn away. “You said you wanted me on my knees, Agent. You got it.”

  Lars sighs and lowers his head, then chuckles slightly. “You know me, Niklas. It pisses me off, sometimes, that you can be spot-on about me. You even know we’re terrible for each other. You know me better than anybody, in a way. Because we’re so alike.”

  He gives this a decisive silence. He wants so badly so say they are nothing alike, but he knows that isn’t true.

  Only recently he’d asked Lars what he’d do if Svetlana was destroying his life, and the man had said, in so many words, I’d fucking shoot her. And now here he is, the memories of her expiring before his eyes and under his hands still brutally fresh and disoriented in his mind.

  “Well, I’m sorry I wanted you on your knees. If it means anything, it’s only because you are so goddamn impressive.” He laughs again, covering his mouth with his hand. It occurs to Niklas that this is much more difficult for Lars than he thinks- he doesn’t care. The man hunches over and supports himself with his elbows on his knees and stares at the ground with a furrowed brow and ]shut eyes. “You know, the way I grew up bent me all… fuckways out of shape,” he explains, softly. “Nikky, my dad… was always moving somewhere, as an agent, never really with us, not in Italy, not in England, definitely not when I came here. My mom… Yeah, she wasn’t really all there after her miscarriage of my little sister. And my brother…” his eye gives a distinctive twitch and for a second Niklas sees something complex and unveiled there: something close to hatred.

  The look fades away into something else, something more suited for delivery, though shaken- and Niklas is almost completely certain the man has never done this before or talked to anyone about his life. And even now he’s not sure if he’s telling the truth. “I’m fucked up in every way and I’ve never really felt it for anyone or anything, but shit, I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you. Or I just- I- I want you. So bad it makes me breathless. You make… you make sense to me, loving you does, but somehow you always surprise me just the same with just being the way you are. I realized this shit…” he looks distantly away, as if recalling. “I don’t know. That night at the club. Watching you scare DeLane,” he laughs. “Fuck, driving back and feeling electricity coming off of you. I liked you, but, fuck, then I liked you and it wasn’t just the cocaine talking- dammit, I knew you were kissing me to control me, I knew it every fucking time, and it still… I wanted to control you back, and this fucking mission made me high doing it. Pushing your buttons the right ways. Pushing you.”

  Niklas feels the bitter taste in his mouth as he watches the man’s form. He’s attractive, there’s no doubting that- there’s a primal energy in human skin there that anyone would be attracted to, like staring at the sun. And when he remembers him inside him, something squirming and needful pulses beneath his skin and in his throat.

  But he knows the overtone of disgust when he feels it, and he doesn’t forget pain so easily. “You and I both know that the way you grew up doesn’t justify anything, Agent,” he says. “You fucked me. I hope you liked it, because you tore me open and enjoyed it, and I am still injured. And now that Svetlana is gone, I want to mourn my father. If there isn’t any other reason why you’re here, then you can leave.”

  To his credit, Lars takes it with a stride, nodding and running a
hand through his tousled hair. “…If it means anything, it was part of the game,” he begins with barely a shake in his voice and composure. “You see… that bitch Germaine and I set it up the night before I met you, Nikky. I was always going to put you on your knees, always going to fuck with you and drive you away- drive you in her direction. Tag team you into hating Svetlana Morris with a passion out of hell, play the game to get an overwhelming amount of evidence to put her away with for good, you know? I just...” he laughs. “I just caught feelings along the way. I never expected you would... You did everything the way she wanted, you know, shit, but somehow just the way you did it. I don’t know, Nikky, I don’t. Fuck, I hate that woman.” Uncomfortably, he massages his hand through the back of his neck and hair.

  “Germaine?” The name comes easy, fluid, the tongue against the teeth and two consonants separated by the single meeting of the lips. The image crosses his mind: Germaine, in the bar the night before he met Lars, Vesper Martini in hand writing discreet keywords on the back of a receipt in her feminine hands. Peach lipstick smiles. Call me if you need anything. Remember your allies. “Is she behind the trust fund, too?”