Chapter 12 Wesley
Wesley
The sunlight streaming through the curtains felt harsher than usual, stabbing across the hotel room in sharp lines. I’d slept through the night without trouble—something I hadn’t done in years. But when I’d reached across the sheets, expecting warmth, all I’d found was emptiness.
He’d left before I’d woken up yesterday, and for whatever reason, instead of going home, I’d stayed, spent the night.
His absence was everywhere. In the faint indentation of his head on the pillow. In the half-tangled sheets that still carried his scent. My chest tightened just looking at it. I wasn’t supposed to care. I wasn’t supposed to let someone like him under my skin.
And yet… I’d spent hours last night thinking about the look on his face as he slept.
It wasn’t peace, not exactly. More like exhaustion, as if he’d been running for too long and finally collapsed. Vulnerable in a way I doubted he ever allowed himself to be while awake.
I’d wanted to keep him here.
Instead, he’d slipped out like a ghost. No note. No explanation. No trace.
I slid out of bed and paced the length of the suite, rubbing the back of my neck.
I’d checked with the front desk the moment I woke up—no one matching his description had been seen leaving. That was yesterday. I should’ve let it go by now. I should’ve told myself he was just work, and that I needed to either bring him to my side and have him betray his keeper, or eliminate him.
But I couldn’t.
Because for the first time in a long damn while, I felt the need to take care of someone. Not “take care” of them in my normal way, but in a tender, affectionate way. And instead of using that newfound weakness against me, instead of trying to twist the knife, he’d… left.
Why?
Why leave if he wanted me dead? Why leave if he didn’t?
I sat heavily on the edge of the bed, elbows braced on my knees, staring at the floor. I could still vividly remember how it had felt to hold him—how tightly he’d clung to me in those fleeting moments when he forgot himself.
That wasn’t just lust. That was need.
And it scared the hell out of me, because if he could need me, I could need him.
And needing someone like Ro was a dangerous fucking game.
* * *
His building looked like any other with its chipped paint, crickety death-trap stairs, and flickering bulbs.
He answered on the fourth knock, face and hair damp like he’d just showered. He didn’t look overjoyed to see me at his door.
“You found me,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“You left the hotel without saying goodbye,” I said. “Wanted to check up on you.”
He gave a humorless laugh and crossed his arms. “Uh-huh. You shouldn’t be here, Wes.”
“Probably not, but here I am. Care to let me in?” I nodded to the space behind him.
Ro hesitated, then, his voice a hair softer, he said, “You really shouldn’t be here. If you found my address, I assume you also know whose apartment this is.”
I didn’t argue with him. Instead, I nudged past him and stepped inside. His apartment was small, with worn and mismatched furniture. Given Elias’s wealth, I found it odd that he’d housed his most prized possession in the projects—not to mention the lack of security.
Ro watched me closely as I took a look around. “What do you want, Wes?” He sounded tired, resigned. His usual fire had dimmed, and the sweet obedience I’d seen in bed was nowhere to be found.
“I’m here to propose a deal.”
He laughed coldly and shook his head. “I’m not fucking you again.”
My brows furrowed at that. “That’s not… Wait—you liked it though, right? Did I hurt you?”
He sighed, then walked past me to take a seat on the couch. It was only when he passed me that I noticed he had on an oversized t-shirt and nothing else. His shirt just barely covered his ass, leaving his long legs on full display.
“I didn’t hate it,” he muttered. “But it was a mistake.” Quieter, he said, “And you didn’t hurt me. It just can’t happen again…”
“I’m glad I didn’t hurt you.” I joined him on the couch, taking a seat on the opposite end from where he was. When our eyes met, I could briefly see a glimmer of vulnerability in his, although it disappeared just as fast. “I want us to work together.”
“I don’t think that’s a great idea, since, you know, I still have to kill you and all,” Ro retorted.
“Yes, because that’s something you’re definitely going to accomplish after your first three failures,” I answered, smirking at the annoyance on his face.
He looked away, pursing his lips. The silence grew around us.
The ceiling fan clicked slowly; the city hummed outside.
I cleared my throat, sending him a smile I hoped came off as sincere—because it was.
His shoulders loosened. “I can help you escape him,” I said softly.
He made a sound in the back of his throat; half-anger, half-laughter. “Like that could actually happen,” he muttered, his tone bitter and hopeless.
“Look. It won’t be easy,” I said. “I’m proposing that you basically become a double agent. It’ll be dangerous, and I know that, but Ro… don’t you want to be free of him? You can start a new life. You asked for my help, and I want to give it to you.”
He stared at me blankly. “And how do you propose we do that?”
“You would just need to feed me some information. Literally anything that could be used to bring him down. My plan is to anonymously tip off the cops once we’ve gathered more dirt.”
“I’d be arrested then, too.”
“Not if you aren’t in any of the info we send. My team can scrub your existence from it all.”
His expression cracked with something like a scowl. “How do you expect me to trust you and whoever is working for you?”
“Because I can’t let someone like Elias exist in the world and sleep at night,” I said, getting his attention. “Because he’s been hurting people, and because I’d like to put an end to that. And—maybe—because I don’t like the idea of you living how you are. I need… I need to help you.”
There it was. The simple, unadorned truth that had been growing in me recently. That fierce, protective need that I hadn’t felt so strongly since I learned that my nephews were being abused. The same feeling that had led me to start my whole operation in the first place.
He laughed then, sharp and disbelieving. “You think you can make me free, Wes? This isn’t a fairytale. This is just how my life is meant to go, I think.”
“Ronan—”
He cut me off sharply. “You don’t know Elias. You don’t know what he—what I have done. You want to help me because what, you’ll have a guilty conscience if you don’t?”
My jaw ticked, and I leveled him with my stare. “You’re right. I don’t know you. But I refuse to walk away from this without at least trying. I don’t give a fuck what you’ve done, because I’m pretty damn sure you never had a choice in the matter.”
He chewed his lip. I watched the muscle move there, small and human and beautiful, and it flared something under my ribs.
“How do I know you’re not using me?” he asked finally. “That you don’t have some angle where I’m just bait and you’ll hand me off to the next problem?”
“Because you make a better ally than bait,” I said. “And because it would be easier just to kill you than go through with all of this.”
He nearly snarled, the sound all teeth and raw edge. “That’s not comforting.”
“It’s simply the truth,” I corrected.
He rose from his spot on the couch and paced the tiny space, a flurry of thoughts flickering across his face—anger, calculation, fear. He stopped near the window and looked out at the street below as if distance could give him perspective.
“If I do this,” he said, turning back to face me, “you take me out of here. You get me to disappear. That’s a promise?”
“I’ll get you out,” I said. “You tell me what you can, when you can, and we’ll build a case together. You’ll never have to see him again.”
He swallowed, lowering his eyes. “You’re sure you want to risk your life for this?”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a few moments before letting out a shaky laugh that sounded like it scraped his throat raw. “Okay. Okay, I’ll do it. It’s fucking insane and probably going to blow up in my face, but sure, why not? He wants me to get close to you, I’ll get fucking close to you.”
I left him then, after ironing out a few more details and exchanging numbers.
On the drive back to the warehouse, the city felt different—less like a field of knives and more like a place where plans could be laid, where a network could be unraveled.
When I walked in, Ichabod looked up from his monitor and gave me the barest of nods. He didn’t need to ask. Just based on the look on my face, he got up to join me at my desk.
“We’re in business,” I said without preamble. “Ro agreed to it. We’ll get started immediately. I want you off any other assignments for the time being. Have Lena split your current work between the rest of the guys.”
He nodded, the corner of his mouth tipping up. “On it.”
“Good.”
“You’re really going to hand him over to the police?” Ichabod questioned, his eyes knowing. I’d briefed him on the plan earlier, before going to Ro’s place. He’d left it alone at the time, but he knew me too well after years of working with me.
“Probably not. I don’t want Ro to know that yet, though. I wasn’t sure if he’d agree to it if it ended in Elias’s death.”
Ichabod didn’t sit down. He never sat when he was worried—kept his hands busy, fingers tapping the edge of the desk like a metronome. He watched me with those earnest, too-wide eyes, the kind that had tracked a hundred bad actors and never yet been fooled by any of them.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked, soft but blunt.
“Because Ronan—because Andreas—he’s been with Elias for twenty years.
That’s not just time. That’s a lifetime of conditioning.
Stockholm happens slowly. It’s… complicated.
Sure, I guess you could keep the possibility of Elias’s death a secret, but it’d come out at some point. It’d have to.”
Complicated was the understatement of the decade. Ichabod folded those wrung-out fingers together and leaned in.
“He might not want Elias dead, Wes. So if you keep him in the dark, and that’s how it ends… I can’t see him being very… grateful? He very well might care about him.”
Images I’d seen replayed behind my eyes like a looping file: Ro asleep and exhausted in the hotel bed, his arm thrown over me in a way that made something in my chest hollow and hot at once; the bruise along his cheek that mapped Elias’s ownership; the picture of him as a happy, smiling child in the newspaper clipping about his family’s massacre.
All of it bled into something I hadn’t planned to feel: obligation, maybe, or something worse.
“Stockholm syndrome,” I said finally, tasting the phrase like metal. “It’s a possibility. A strong one.” My voice was flat, but my insides were anything but.
“If we push too fast,” Ichabod murmured, “if we yank him out before he’s ready to understand what leaving will mean—he could snap. He could choose Elias again because it’s familiar, and hate you for his death. He could turn on us. He could break.”
The word “break” landed heavier than Ichabod intended. I thought of other people I’d tried to help. Few stayed fixed. Trauma rearranged itself into survival strategies that no good plan could completely erase.
“He’s not a child,” Ich added. “Don’t conflate fear with childishness. He’s trained, skilled. He’ll be useful—if he’s willing. But he’s also been groomed to depend on his owner.”
I pictured Ro in that cheap apartment, pacing, chewing his lip, his arguments and barbs a defensive armor. I pictured the boy in the photo and tried to reconcile the two images—the smiling child and the weapon Elias had crafted. The math didn’t line up nicely.
“I know what he is,” I said. “I also know what Elias is. I don’t want that man to keep owning people.” My tone hardened on the last clause. “I’m not doing this because I feel noble. I’ll survive it even if Ro hates me afterward. I just… I need him to be free.”
Ichabod’s shoulders dropped a fraction, the tightness in his face easing. “So what’s the plan when—if—Ro finds out and starts resisting the idea of taking Elias down? We need contingencies. Safe places don’t work if the person wants to go back. We need to dismantle Elias’s influence.”
“I know. I’ll figure it out,” I grunted. “I want surveillance on Ro. We make sure nothing happens to him while we gather the pieces.”
Ichabod’s eyes were steady in reply. “I’ll set it up.”
As he walked back to the bank of screens, I sat for a long moment and let myself feel the odd dissonance: a man in his fifties planning a rescue because a younger man’s soft breathing in his bed had unraveled his routine. Dangerous, foolish, perhaps—maybe all of the above.
Still, I found I didn’t regret it. If anything, I regretted the world that had made Ro a weapon and then called it a life. I’d seen men like Elias before. I’d put them down. This one would be no different—except that now, for the first time in a long time, the stakes felt a little too high.