“Please don’t do me any favors.”
The threat of having to listen to Liam talk about anything that struck his fancy was enough to make Oliver access the computer again and queue up a music station. Liam wasn’t familiar with the song that came on, but it had a nice beat, and he found himself tapping his fingers to it as he drove.
Driving north through crawling traffic was enough to make Liam want to bang his head against the steering wheel. The District Line had been shut down, to say nothing of Victoria Station, which was causing all sorts of mayhem. The Underground couldn’t run trains through quarantine zones, and the reroutes were sending people aboveground for other transport solutions.
It would be at least twenty-four hours before everyone was cleared because that’s how long it took Splice to kill. If anyone started to show signs of contamination during that timeframe, then the Met would extend the shutdown order to the Underground for another twenty-four hours to ensure proper cleanup. Clearing the Underground of any potential threats would take time, but it would be done, and everyone would whinge about how long it took.
“Do we know where Murphy escaped to?” Oliver finally asked, breaking the silence sometime after they’d left Waterloo Bridge behind them.
“CCTV showed them being evacuated by the telekinetic we’d encountered in the station. She lifted them out of range of security cameras. Probably to a nearby rooftop for further extraction,” Liam replied after he mulled over his answer.
“Did they fly out?”
“No. Running theory is they had a vehicle on standby.”
“Why didn’t you go after them?”
Liam grimaced, keeping his eyes on the road. “You’d gone dark on the comms. You were my priority after the crash.”
The metahumans the Reborn IRA had deployed had been difficult to fight against mostly because their powers canceled out Tariq’s as well as Glenn’s. Then the telekinetic had ripped a train car in half and tossed it at them as a distraction while the pair escaped. Honestly, they were lucky Victoria Station was still standing.
“Oh.” Oliver cleared his throat. “If they didn’t detonate a Splice bomb, then what was the point of the attack?”
“I don’t think they have control of the lab yet. Our analysts agree. Murphy is putting on a show for Bennett to tout the Reborn IRA’s tactics over whatever the Russians have to offer. Bennett might give them some Splice in the future to see what else they can do before he makes a decision on who gets the lab.”
“MI6 hasn’t seen a spike in chatter about when the buy might go down. “
“Neither has the UMG. Which means we just need to dig deeper.”
“Your dedication to your job is a bit surprising.”
Liam frowned, glancing at the side mirror before flicking the turn signal to switch lanes. “Why is that?”
“Never mind.”
“Oh no, by all means. I’d like to hear how you really feel about me.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Is this about the bet?”
In hindsight, Liam could have found a more polite way to broach the subject of the singular night that had driven them apart when they were younger. Sometimes, despite all his PR training, he was absolutely shit at it. The silence in the car was tense for several minutes. Oliver wouldn’t look at him, jaw clenched tight when Liam took his eyes off the road to glance at him.
“We aren’t talking about that,” Oliver said in a tight voice.
“Oliver—”
“No. I said this is not a conversation we are going to have.”
“Then when will we have it?”
“It doesn’t need to be had.”
“I think it does.”
“Just because you’re a prince doesn’t mean you always get your way.”
Liam bit back on the retort that popped into his head, knowing that it would make him sound exactly how Oliver seemed to see him—an arrogant little bastard. “We work together. We need to trust each other.”
