Red gave him a smirk, voice deadpan. “Yes, Turing. I’ve cracked your cryptic code. You're a friend of Dorothy.” He took another hit from his pen. “Annie is one of us. She recently did a job for the Turks, too, a similar request. A bunch of seemingly random names with no ties to anything. She’s been working on finding their commonalities, but she somehow didn’t end up on the wrong side of some pissed off Ruskies. Tell her I sent you.”
Cas gave a nod, retrieved his thumb drive, and made his way back into the crowded club, once more wading into the crush of bodies, this time, heading toward the bathrooms at the back. Normally, he wouldn’t dare go near the shadowy hallway, but he wanted to leave out the back door, and that meant walking the gauntlet of anonymous hookups and hoping somebody didn’t mistake him for a participant.
The dimly lit hallway smelled of sweat, and sex, and poor life choices. Cas could only make out vague shapes and amorphous figures, leaving him feeling like he was walking the walls of some haunted house. Only, he was the ghost. They could see him, but he could only see them if they stood beneath the pool of the security light, like the man leaning in front of him.
Cas froze, wanting to run but unable to look away. He had a beautiful body, this man. Too beautiful for gross hookups in skeevy bars. The man’s shoulders pressed against the wall, his hips canted forward, accentuating the muscular arch of his back and jeans caught just below his ass, highlighting chiseled abs and a nest of pubic hair in need of a trim, though the man on his knees before him didn’t seem to mind at all.
Nausea sent his stomach sloshing as the man tipped his head toward the light. It wasn’t just any man. It was Jonah. Cas’s Jonah. Head tilted, lips parted, eyes closed. Cas would know that profile anywhere. A shock of adrenaline swept his body, punching the air from his lungs, until he was dizzy from it. Cas was grateful the music swallowed his gasp, but he couldn’t will himself to tear his eyes away from Jonah and the anonymous stranger sucking him off.
He backed away, feeling like his ribcage had collapsed, crushing his heart and constricting his sternum until he could only drag in short bursts of air. Before he could think to push past them and head toward the back door, Jonah’s head lolled in his direction, lids no longer closed but at half-mast. Cas could almost swear there was the slightest shock of recognition, but he didn’t wait to find out. He turned on his heel, skirting around the dance floor and out the front door, breaking into a jog.
Cas didn’t know if Jonah followed, but he took precautions just the same, going left when he would usually go right to head into the subway station, following main streets instead of alleyways. Once he hit Chinatown, he was pretty sure Jonah wasn’t behind him. He tried to convince himself it was a good thing, but now that his brain wasn’t occupied by thoughts of escape, all he could see was Jonah with some guy, some random stupid guy whose only crime was not being Cas. Never Cas.
The more he thought about it, the more he seethed, his blood boiling. Rage and anger were old friends, far more comforting than rejection and sadness, so he just stewed in them until his fingers were pruny. No, not mad. Furious. Furious at Jonah, furious at the universe, furious at himself for even fucking caring about who sucked Jonah’s dick in the first place.
Fuck Jonah. Fuck Jonah and that fucking guy on his knees in front of him like he had some claim. Where was Madi? Did he know about Jonah’s Wired fuck buddy? Madi had been awfully possessive of Jonah back in the day. Had that finally fizzled? Was Madi dead? Had they split up? Could you split up if you had never been a real thing? Did trained killers have boyfriends? Fuck if Cas knew. He hadn’t had a boyfriend since high school, since Jonah chased away his one and only attempt at normalcy. That was Jonah though, do as I say not as I do.
“I didn’t have any choice but to be a criminal, but not you, Caspian. I’m giving you opportunities. You’re better than that. You have to be better than that.”
No casual hookups. No fights. No murder. Just homework and college and boredom. Cas let out a growl, startling a young woman and her son, causing the woman to hurriedly cross the street, dragging her curious toddler behind her. Cas felt like he was sixteen again and trying not to listen as Madi and Jonah fucked on the rooftop couch.
Maybe it was being back home, the sensory experiences of his childhood coming at him from all sides. The smell of steamed dumplings and tobacco smoke mixing with gas fumes and the hum of window air conditioning units trying to keep the summer heat at bay. All around him, people spoke in rapid fire Mandarin and Cantonese, some waiting for food being served out of a walk-up window, others just casually chatting about the neighborhood.
Cas no longer recognized anybody. Some part of him was grateful for that. He hadn’t started out with any particular destination in mind—at least, that’s what he told himself— but his feet carried him home just the same. His old home. Jonah’s home.
To an outsider, it looked like an abandoned building, long forgotten, complete with a chain and padlock holding the two front doors closed. The windows on everything but the top floor were boarded up, and the paint peeled like sunburned skin on all sides. It was uninviting by design. Jonah’s design.
Cas bypassed those doors and headed to the real entrance, the one that involved taking the fire escape up the side of the building and unlocking another door. Cas pulled at the chain around his neck, staring for a long moment at the keys that dangled from it.
Cas didn’t know why he kept them. He was sure Jonah had changed the locks as soon as he realized Cas was gone. He’d probably been relieved to not have him always around anymore. But it didn’t stop Cas from trying the lock anyway. He slipped the key inside and turned it, the telltale click of the lock releasing, unlocking something in Cas, too. His heart beat double time as he entered, following the corridor to the last door on the left, using the second key to open Jonah’s front door. The hinges protested as the door swung open. Cas jumped as something fell against his leg before landing on his foot. His baseball bat.
He picked it up, swinging it from one hand to the other like it was nunchucks. There was something different about the apartment. It was void. Empty. The furniture was still there, but it lacked a soul. A heartbeat. It was just the corpse of their old life, left to rot. Jonah hadn’t even bothered to pack up Cas’s things or even his own, it seemed. He’d just walked away, left it all behind like it was nothing. Like Cas was nothing.
Cas let out a primal scream, swinging the bat, some of his fury easing as the television screen exploded, fracturing into a million pieces, the base wobbling like a prize fighter before it fell to the floor. The coffee table went next, pain arching through Cas’s arms as each swing reverberated through his muscles. He grinned like a fool even as shards of wood embedded in his skin.
Once he started, he couldn’t stop. He was a monster, a murderous lunatic hellbent on killing anything that ever meant something to him or Jonah. The bookcase they’d found at the consignment store, the french press Madi had gotten Jonah as some private joke between the two of them, the uglyChristmas Storylamp, anything he could reach, anything that gave a satisfying crunch to quell the helpless, lonely feeling eating at his soul.
By the time he finished, he could barely lift his arms. He was bleeding and panting and dripping with sweat. The apartment was in ruins, all but Jonah’s room above. Untouched. Something about that seemed fitting. Jonah had always been untouchable. The one thing Cas needed, always just out of reach.
Cas swiped at the wetness on his cheeks, not sure if it was blood or tears. Not even caring, really. He needed to get back to Briar’s and get some sleep. He had a date with a massage table tomorrow, and after this, he was going to need it.
8
Jonah
“You know why I’m here,” Jonah said as Red gave him an expectant look from the doorway of his office. Despite her claims that Red wasn’t around, Hannah, the club’s manager had finally buzzed Jonah in when he refused to go away.
“To wish me a happy birthday?”
“Is it your birth—” Jonah leveled a glare at Red and shoved past his big frame and into Red’s beloved hacker lair. “It’s not your fucking birthday.”
“It might be. You wouldn’t know.” Red chuckled from behind him and shut the door, sealing them into the chaotic den that had always made Jonah a little jumpy and Cas hyperactively excited. “Do you know a single person’s birthday?”
Jonah didn’t even know his own birthday for certain, though he suspected the one typed on his forged birth certificate was off by a few years. He wasn’t sure in which direction, though, and he’d never celebrated it, regardless.
But there was one birthday he never forgot.
Red swanned to his console, plopped into his chair with his back to Jonah, and made a few lazy keystrokes, as if he planned on ignoring Jonah until he went away. “You know better than to come in here asking me about…people.” He waved a hand through the air vaguely.
