Page 26 of 72 Hours

IT FELT LIKE I LEFT the Team as much a stranger to Niall Sutherland as I’d been his companion. Damned odd, how things go. Close together like Siamese twins—then as distant as prince and pauper. But I was still mad and still hurting. And after the fight, I had a whole pile of bureaucratic shit to plough through as well.

The last thing I wanted was to face more shit from—or because of—him.

We both went through the disciplinary procedure; we were treated just the same. Partners in crime, you might have thought. But instead it acted as the final dissolution of our partnership. We never spoke to each other during the proceedings. We were never left alone together, saw nothing of each other at formal interviews except at a glaring distance. Outside of work, we were under the guard of a Department agent, but we each stayed in our own apartment, anyway. And so we never spoke again at all.

Even when I left the city.

Facing that disciplinary procedure had been one of the grimmest times of my life—dammit, my work was one of the few things in my life that I’d been truly proud of—because they made me feel like a troublesome school kid who’d disappointed his parents and put his friends in the direst danger. Took several days, too, to grind salt into that wound. Fuck ’em! I’d thought. Do I really need this? Of course, I never answered myself. Nor did I wonder if Niall had been subjected to the same trial. Nor care.

When the internal investigation was over, all I did was peel back to the apartment and pick up the minimum that I needed to exist. We’d been given several months’ suspension, and I decided to run for cover. It was what I’d done in the past, though not since I’d joined the Team. Sure, Niall had a key to my place, but I didn’t care about that. He was welcome to it. I had other places I could go, I always did. Places that no one else knew. Not even Niall.

It was my second Departmental investigation in six months, of course. Odds were looking bad for me all round. I expected the call from Judith at any time, firing me completely. I reckoned it was the best thing I could do, to make an escape while I still could.

It still took me a long, lonely hour to pluck up the courage to leave.

I stood there in my cold hallway for a long time, staring at a jacket Niall had left at my apartment weeks ago, hanging on the back of the front door. But I couldn’t feel anything else of him there; no ambience, no vibrations at all. Despite a smattering of his stuff in every one of my rooms, it was as if that final fight had erased the whole of our relationship. I was too tired and too dispirited to remember anything other than misery and anger between us. I spent the last half hour heaping as many of his belongings as I could find into a couple of bags, and I left them in the hallway for collection. Or not. To be honest, I didn’t care what he did with it all, or if he threw the equivalent of my belongings at his apartment right out of the window. Perhaps he was already planning to move on—had duplicated his toothbrush and flannel elsewhere, at some other guy’s place. Some kind of masochist I was.

There were several messages blinking on my phone, probably from the other guys. Whether they wanted to help or to scold, I didn’t care at that time. I decided that I’d contact them when I was good and ready—and at my choice.

So I escaped to my anonymous trailer—courtesy of an old family friend who’d passed on and left his semi-permanent claim on this site to another mutual friend I’d once known well. Who was now overseas. Not that anyone needed to know my convoluted social history, of course, except to explain why no one would directly connect the place with me—and why it was available for my use at such short notice. And I stayed there. Comforted only by my own self-pity and the false warmth of my arrogance. In hiding. Licking wounds. Grieving. Whatever. It fucking hurt, whatever it was.

Thinking back on the fight, I realised that it was destined to happen at some time or another. It’d been brewing since the attack on Niall, and maybe from a way before that. It was difficult to remember when we hadn’t been at each other’s throats. And whose fault had it all been?

I hated to admit it but I had to, deep in my dreams, late at night in my solitude. Whatever Niall might or might not have done, however much he’d betrayed me, or dismissed me, or hurt me—hey, despite all that, I’d royally fucked up.

And lost the whole damned lot. Everything ruined. Everything finished.

He never denied it, you know? Never told me to go to hell, that of course he hadn’t fucked Lam, I was talking out of my arse. He never said anything like that. But he could have done, couldn’t he? It’s what I would have said. So what was a guy to think?

Fuck it.

SOMETHING WAS CALLING my thoughts back to the present. Something insistent.

Niall’s fist on my jaw. Niall’s angry voice in my head.

Niall Sutherland in my bed. Curled against my body. The rhythm of his breathing in my head.

Niall’s dick inside me, his hands holding me to him, his hips rocking against me, his voice in my ear, urging me on.

Niall, on the steps of my trailer, muttering something under his breath, something that sounded angry yet awed. His hand on my shoulder, my hand covering his, and my head leaning slowly in towards him....

I felt sweat spring up on my forehead, and I wrenched myself away from him. He was startled, and his body swayed as he regained his step. He also pulled back. I thanked God my senses had returned quickly to the present time before he’d seen the look in my eyes, or guessed the thoughts in my head.

“Get back inside.” My anger was way too fierce for the situation, but I wasn’t going to be justifying that to him. “Get back!”

He paused in the doorway, his head tilted just slightly to the side, his eyes temporarily distracted from glaring at me. He looked flushed again. “There was a movement, Tanner. Behind the black trailer.”

“I know,” I said curtly. Junk’s trailer was a big beast of a thing with exotic graffiti scrawled across the sides and bars across the smoked windows. A huge thing that looked like it’d never travel even if he’d wanted it to; a home usually filled with various relatives of all ages, from babes in arms to impossibly grizzled old ladies, and all protected by Dylan. There were other dogs on the site, of course, but Dylan was the biggest and the meanest. Or looked it, to intruders who didn’t know how well Junk had trained him. Dylan—who seemed to have gone astray this morning.

I’d seen the shimmer of movement behind the trailer too. I’d also heard the faintest echo in the morning air of a human footstep.

“I know Junk. That’s his unit. Leave it to me, for God’s sake.” This time, I was thinking. This time, trust me to do it properly.

Niall moved back into the trailer, obviously still reluctant to be left out of the action scenes, and the door closed softly behind him. I recalled the metal that was warped at the bottom of the sill and the hinges that groaned in the wet weather—but Niall managed to close it both efficiently and softly.

Right. I sighed to myself.

I slowly turned back around, mentally shaking myself back to full attention. The impact of that stupid, stupid touch had been so vivid that I still felt the trail of memory like goose bumps on my goose bumps. But now he was out of sight, if not out of mind. Now I could concentrate on the matter in hand.