Entangled (Virtual Vice #2)

Chapter 1

Resetting Romance Options

The maintenance shaft smelled like recycled air and hot metal, and every time Levi exhaled, the sound of it came back at him off the walls.

He moved on his forearms, knees dragging against ridged flooring, shoulders brushing both sides of the shaft at once. The emergency strips bathed everything in amber. Thirty feet ahead, maybe, was the next junction, and behind him, close enough that Levi could hear every controlled breath…

Asher.

Always Asher.

He’d been behind Levi since they changed places at the last junction, after Asher nearly got his shoulders stuck in a section that was maybe two feet across, and remained close enough that his knee had caught Levi’s heel twice.

Both times, his fingers wrapped around Levi’s ankle before Levi could process the contact.

Not to help. It was like he was letting Levi know it was just him, still with him.

It was comforting in a way. A deeply fucked up way, but comforting nonetheless.

He kept moving and tried not to think about what he’d done in the pod bay.

Not the killing — he’d never stop flinching at the killing, but it had become expected somewhere around the sanitarium.

The part that sat wrong was quieter than that: Asher had looked at him afterward, five bodies on the polished floor, and the expression on his face wasn’t satisfied or angry.

It was helpful, like he’d held a door open.

Like he’d done something considerate and was waiting for Levi to notice.

And Levi had looked at the bodies and said let Jasper go and that was it. That was his whole response to the murder of five people.

Don’t think about what that makes you.

Something buzzed in his chest — low, not quite a sound, more like a vibration that had gotten lost on its way somewhere else.

He was about to chalk it up to two hours of crawling on his forearms when the creature behind them shrieked, and the sound warped through the shaft’s acoustics into something almost musical.

Levi’s forearms tightened and he pushed faster, and Asher’s hand found his ankle again — one brief, firm squeeze — and released.

I know. I’m moving.

The junction appeared: three shafts converging in a small hub, barely large enough to turn around in. Levi pulled himself into it, pressed his back against the curved wall, and breathed.

Left. Straight. Right.

He had no idea which one to choose. Two hours on this ship, and his mental map was a single corridor, the pod bay, and this shaft.

There’d been a schematic on the wall of the crew quarters he’d seen for maybe four seconds before the alarms started, and he remembered enough to know they were in the lower decks, somewhere near engineering, which told him nothing about where they should be going.

In the sanitarium, we at least had time to learn the building before it tried to kill us.

Asher pulled himself into the hub a second later. He filled most of the cramped space, and he shifted Levi to one side with a palm flat against his sternum, looking at the three options with the same expression he’d probably use to pick a restaurant.

“There.” He pointed right, already moving.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t.” He glanced back at Levi, and even in the amber light, there was something in his expression that wasn’t quite a smile; it was warmer than that, something that showed up sometimes when he looked at Levi and seemed to catch even Asher off guard. “Come on.”

Levi followed.

The right shaft sloped down and then opened without warning into a proper corridor.

The ventilation cover was already hanging open, and Levi hopped down onto a real floor, white LED strips overhead, brushed metal paneling, room to stand.

He braced his palms on his knees and let his spine remember what straight felt like.

Okay. Ceiling. Light. Air that doesn’t taste like my own lungs. I can work with this.

Asher dropped down behind him and sealed the panel before Levi finished his first full breath. Then he turned Levi around and did what he always did, and Levi made himself hold still for it.

Asher’s gaze moved over him and his fingers came up without preamble to brush the torn elbow of Levi’s jumpsuit, checking the scrape beneath. Then his hands moved to Levi’s collar, thumbing the edge of the fabric back just enough to look at the bite mark, making sure that was still there too.

“You’re favoring your left knee,” he said.

“It’s fine.”

“I didn’t ask.” His thumb stayed at Levi’s collar for a moment longer than necessary, and then he let go. Satisfied. Or satisfied enough…with Asher, it was hard to tell the difference.

The corridor stretched in both directions.

To the left, a sealed bulkhead with a status panel blinking amber.

To the right, an open passage, maybe sixty meters before it curved out of sight.

Placards on the walls read C-DECK - MAINTENANCE in stenciled military lettering.

A fire extinguisher sat in a wall-mounted bracket, and beside it, a laminated evacuation map behind scratched plexiglass, too far away to read from here.

The creature’s sounds faded. Levi still had the weapon at his hip, no map he could carry, no objectives, and no idea what the scenario wanted from them.

Play the game the way it wants to be played.

“We need information,” he said, and started toward the evacuation map.

“Levi.” Asher’s voice was behind him, sounding less like an address and more like a warning.

He turned around. “We’ve been running since we woke up, and I don’t know anything. I don’t know our roles. I don’t know what those things are. I don’t know what this ship wants from us.”

“We know we’re alive,” Asher said.

“That’s a starting point, not a plan.”

Asher looked at him for a moment, and then he crossed the distance between them — unhurried, like the corridor was a room he owned — and Levi’s feet decided not to move.

He stopped close. Too close, which was the only distance Asher seemed to understand.

His fingers came up and tucked a piece of Levi’s hair back from his face, and Levi’s brain briefly went blank because the gesture didn’t go with the corridor or the jumpsuit or the five bodies two hours back.

“You think too much,” Asher murmured.

“One of us has to,” Levi breathed, trying to ignore the goosebumps forming on his skin.

The corners of Asher’s mouth turned up. His knuckles grazed Levi’s cheekbone on the way down, slowly, and the warmth stayed on his skin after his hand dropped. Levi shouldn’t have noticed.

Stop noticing things.

He couldn’t stop noticing things.

“We need information,” Levi said again, because he needed to be saying something. “We find out what this scenario wants, and we work it like we worked the sanitarium.”

“Together,” Asher said. Not quite in agreement. Just the only part he cared about.

“Together.”

Asher smiled and stepped back, gesturing down the corridor ahead. “Lead the way.”

They found the voices twenty minutes later.

Or the voices found them. Radio chatter, carrying cleanly through an intersecting corridor with unhurried footsteps, like the specific rhythm of people who knew what they were doing and where they were going.

“Thermal confirms two heat signatures in maintenance corridor C-7.”

“Copy, moving to intercept.”

“Kane is armed and extremely dangerous. Mercer may be under duress…”

Levi ducked into a recessed arch over a door and glanced back at Asher.

Asher’s hand was already on his weapon. He’d repositioned, his weight shifted, body angled between Levi and the direction the sound was coming from, in the half-second it took Levi to process the words.

“They have information,” Levi said quietly.

Asher’s eyes locked on him. “They think I’m dangerous.”

“You shot five people.”

“I shot five people who were in the way.” He said it the way someone would say I moved the chairs. “That’s different.”

“Asher.”

“We don’t need them,” Asher said as he stepped closer, and Levi’s shoulders hit the wall before he decided to step back. “We figured out the sanitarium.”

“We figured out the sanitarium after dying in it way too many times.” Levi’s hands pressed against the wall behind him.

Asher was getting that look again, the one that said he needed things to go his way, and Levi needed to find a way to make him not murder their first chance at understanding what the hell was happening.

“Five minutes. Let me find out what we’re working with. ”

Something moved through Asher’s expression too fast to name, there and then gone. “And if they take you away from me?”

“They won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know I’ll come back.” I always come back. Haven’t I? “Asher. Look at me.” He waited until Asher did. “I’m trying to get us both out. That’s what this is.”

Asher’s hand came up and closed over Levi’s throat, squeezing gently, too tight to be feeling for a pulse, but too light to cut off any blood flow.

He leaned down, locking eyes with him, until their lips brushed for a fraction of a second.

“The first thing I did when I woke up was find you. It wasn’t easy, Levi,” he whispered against his lips.

“Mercer! Kane!” A new voice called — closer, carrying the flat authority of someone used to giving orders in hallways exactly like this one. “Maintenance Chief Nguyen. We’re here to help.”

Asher’s eyes narrowed as Levi opened his mouth to respond, his fingers tightening.

“Five minutes,” Levi whispered, grabbing Asher’s wrist. “I’ll come back.”

“No.” Asher pursed his lips, shaking his head. “Please, Levi. Stay here.”

Levi pulled Asher’s hand away from his throat. Asher let him — surprised enough by the redirect that his fingers opened without resistance — and Levi grabbed Asher’s face, pulling him down and kissing his forehead..

He felt a sharp inhale, and Asher went very still beneath it, like he was afraid to move and break whatever this was. “I am choosing you,” Levi said against his skin. “This is what it looks like when I do.”

He let go and stepped back into the corridor, turned, and walked.

His boots were steady on the metal floor and for the first time in longer than he could remember, he knew exactly what he was doing: walking toward the people who had answers, and then walking back. It was simple and clean as long as he didn’t look back at Asher.

“After everything.”

Levi kept walking.

“After everything we’ve…” Asher’s voice sounded wrong. Wrong in a way Levi had only ever heard once before, back in the barbershop in Riverbend, stripped down past the charm, past the control, to something that had no armor left on it. “You’re leaving me?”

God dammit, Asher…

“I’m not leaving,” Levi said over his shoulder without looking, trying to keep his voice steady as fear settled in his stomach like a chunk of ice. “I’ll be right back. Trust me.”

The security team came around the corner ahead of him. Three figures in tactical gear, rifles angled down, but ready, and helmets with tactical displays reflected in their visors. The lead figure had a name stenciled on her chest plate, NGUYEN, and she raised a gloved hand, palm out.

“Mercer. Step away from Kane. We’re here to help.”

Levi opened his mouth, but an impact hit him in the back, punching through him like a steel fist. His palms caught first. Then his knees, hard enough to feel the ridges in the metal grating.

The pain arrived a full second late, white and blinding, radiating from the center of his chest where something had gone clean through.

Oh. His face hit the cold metal floor. He did it.

He heard the security team shouting, and Nguyen’s voice shouted something about a formation. Then he heard something else — a different quality of sound: sharp and precise and utterly unhurried. It was the sound of someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

One.

Two.

Three.

He managed to roll onto his side, his vision already narrowing, but the corridor was still there, and Asher was still there, moving through the three-person team with the energy pistol raised and his face absolutely calm.

It was simple: four shots, four people, and he stepped over Nguyen’s body without looking down.

Levi didn’t have time to be horrified.

Asher knelt on the floor beside him, both palms pressed to Levi’s chest, warm and firm, and the pressure should have hurt — it did, distantly — but Levi couldn’t bring himself to care about that right now because Asher’s face…

He knew this face. He knew when it was cold, when it was calculating, and when it was pleased.

He’d seen it cracked open in the sanitarium, the desperate want underneath.

He had never seen it like this. Everything was gone at once — every layer, every mask — and what was left was grief.

Pure and uncomplicated, with no performance attached to it.

The tears were already there, tracking down his cheeks, like he wasn’t even aware of them.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and the words came out wrecked, barely recognizable as Asher’s voice.

His fingers pressed harder, uselessly, against a wound that wasn’t going to close.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t — I can’t—” He pressed his forehead down toward Levi’s, and Levi felt the warmth of it even as his vision narrowed further.

“We’ll try again. You’ll understand next time. ”

Next time. There’s always a next time. That’s the whole—

“I love you.”

The words landed like a second shot to his back, and Levi’s thoughts went quiet.

“I love you too much to let you leave.” Asher’s voice broke on the words as he pressed his lips to Levi’s forehead, the same way Levi had done to him, and held them there. “That’s why. That’s the only reason. Do you understand? That’s the only reason.”

The pain was getting distant, the edges of his vision going soft.

He actually loves me?

He shot me, and he loves me, and I don’t know what to do with either of those things.

Levi turned his head. Just barely.

Asher had the pistol at his own temple, his eyes closed.

Levi’s vision blurred, whether from dying or tears in his own eyes…he wanted to tell Asher to keep going. He blinked the tears away and saw Asher’s profile against the light of the corridor.

He loves me.

The darkness came like it always did.