Page 12 of Crown of Ash

"Recognize it?"

Andre looked at it for two seconds before his face changed. Not surprise exactly. Something colder than surprise, something darker. "That's the Rouge property." Andre stopped. His brow tightened as a year clicked into place he clearly hadn't expected to need again. "Condemned in twenty-nineteen. I ran surveillance on that lot for four months before the city tore it down out from under the case."

"So did I."

Andre's jaw worked once. He didn't say anything else about it. He didn't have to.

Marcus laid the second page down beside the first. A wire transfer summary, account numbers redacted down to the last four digits, routed through three shells before it landed. "Cayman entity. Surfaces every eighteen months, moves, resurfaces somewhere else. I've been tracking the pattern since the year after the Rouge lot."

Andre's hand came up off the desk and didn't quite touch the page, hovering an inch above the number in the corner. "Four-four-one-one," he said, more to himself than to Marcus. "I've had that account flagged in three different systems and it's never once tripped a wire large enough to force a judge's hand."

"Because it's built not to."

"I know why and we both know who. I've known for two years." Andre's voice had gone quiet in a way that had nothing to do with volume.

Marcus watched him for a second, then reached for the third page. His hand stopped an inch short of it, fingers open, and hung there. Some old instinct was telling him that whatever came in the next five minutes was going to cost more than the last five had. He knew the feeling the way he knew the smell of his own office, the dry heat off the radiator, the coffee going cold in Andre's mug, the dust on the file boxes stacked by the door.

He set the page down anyway. The weight of it on the blotter made a small sound.

Andre read it. His hand stayed where it was, hovering above the desk, and went rigid, knuckles pale against his dark cuff. He read it a second time before he moved again, turning it over as if there might be something on the back that changed things. There wasn't.

Neither of them said the name out loud. They didn't need to.

The radiator ticked. Outside, snow had started falling past the window in slow gray flakes, and the light over the river had gone flat, no shadows left anywhere to tell the hour by. A barge moved downstream without sound.

"Six years," Marcus said, finally, and it came out rougher than he meant it to, scraping like a match on wet sandpaper. "We've been running the same case for six years and never once crossed paths on purpose."

"We crossed paths plenty," Andre said. He picked up his pen and set it down again without using it. "We just never called it that."

Marcus didn't have an answer for that. He looked at his hands, at Andre's face, at the snow falling past the window. For the first time in longer than he could measure, he didn't have an answer for anything.

The silence went on a beat too long, and then another, until it stopped being silence and became the only honest thing either of them had said all afternoon.

Marcus looked down at the third page, at the name he wasn't going to be the one to say first. Six years of discipline dropped out from under him all at once: the legal pad burned before every hard decision, the number in his phone that had never once been allowed to mean anything more, the careful calculations of what he could afford to want and what he couldn't. He reached for the the systems the had built for himself… to keep himself, his heart, safe. It wasn't there. For the first time in six years, none of it was there.

He looked up. Andre was closer than he remembered him being, close enough that Marcus could feel exactly where the cold on his coat ended and the heat off his skin began. Neither of them said a word about how they'd gotten there.

"Marcus." Just his name. Andre's voice had gone rough in a way that had nothing to do with account numbers or a condemned lot on the Rouge. It wazs the agony that Marcus knew too well; want and need and the memory of how the other man tasted, how he looked on his knees and in passion.

Andre's hand found the front of his shirt. Marcus's hand found the back of Andre's neck. Neither of them decided to. There wasn't any distance left between them, and there wasn't any discipline left to hold either of them back when half a decade of imposed ecile came crashing down like ancient city walls. The singularity of them that had always burned hotter than a neutron star went nova in a clash of teeth and lips and tongues, breath ragged and hands grasping.

It wasn't gentle. Six years poured into it all at once: Andre's fist closing hard in his shirt, Marcus's mouth opening under his before either of them had agreed it should, teeth catching his bottom lip hard enough that it wasn't quite a bite and wasn't quite not one. Marcus made a sound he didn't recognize as his own and didn't care that he'd made it. He had Andre's jaw in his hand and Andre's mouth against his and too many days of longing and memory burning them both to the bone. All of his systems to manage this endless want and need came crashing to a hault because Andre was back in his arms, kissing him, tasting like sin and coffee and Marcus would have given almost everything he was to never leave the moment. To freeze time and undo the years of lonley hurt that the men they were could not have avoided.

Andre broke it first.

Hard, all at once, a flat hand against Marcus's chest, pushing, distance opening up between them. He was breathing like he'd run a marathon. So was Marcus.

Andre wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, a motion that didn't look like it believed in itself. His jaw worked. Whatever he'd started to say, he didn't finish it.

Marcus didn't move. Didn't reach for him again. Some part of him, the same part that had let Andre walk out of his life because he couldn't reconsile the man he loved with the man he'd become because of Drakov, already knew better than to ask for a version of this Andre wasn't offering. Yet. This kiss gave him hope for the first time in too long… and for once, he didn't immediately quench it to stave off the maddness of what would happen if they didn't.

"I have to go," Andre said. He studied Marcus' face for a long moment, too much emotion raw on his handsome face, and Marcus didn't stop him when he turned to leave. He would never make Andre stay. Never had. Theirs had always been a dynamic of give and take in equity, of saving space for the big feelings and independence that made them both. They shoulnd't have worked, introverted and in need of time alone to think as they both did… but they had. Until Marcus had chosen to forsake a law that no longer protected what he loved. And Andre had the strength to hold on a little longer.

Marcus stood at the window a long time after the door had shut, watching snow come down into a river that didn't stop for any of it. He felt the weight of the system crumbling down around Andre, understood the soul crushing agony of finally accepting that the only way through… was the dark.

Chapter 10

Andre was three fingers into a whiskey twety-four hours later he didn't remember pouring when his phone buzzed on the counter, an unfamiliar number lighting up the screen.