Chapter 4
REMINGTON
We spent the next day doing nothing, and doing it well.
Television in a language neither of us spoke. Room service under silver domes, ordered without looking at prices because neither of us had ever looked at prices.
She ate cross-legged on the bed in one of my shirts, stealing bacon off my plate with her fingers, and I let her because there was something uncomplicated about her company that I didn't want to ruin by being the version of myself that ruins things.
We showered. Fucked. Watched something Italian with subtitles she read aloud in a terrible accent that made me laugh despite myself.
Ordered more food. Fucked again—slower, her on top with her hands flat on my chest and her eyes closed and her head tipped back—and I watched her and thought about nothing.
By the standards I'd set for days like this, it was good. Low stakes. High thread count. A woman who didn't need me to be anything other than warm and willing.
But by the time she started packing—pulling clothes from the floor with the efficient carelessness of someone who lived out of suitcases—I was ready. The other version of myself pressing against the inside of my skin, patient but awake, watching the clock the way a dog watches a door.
She kissed me at the door. Tasted like mango.
"See you next time?"
"Next time."
The door clicked shut. The suite went quiet, and the quiet had teeth.
I stood at the window for thirty seconds. Marina lights bending across the water like spilled paint. Then I moved.
Cold shower. Two minutes. Dark jeans, black linen shirt untucked, a jacket that looked expensive and was. Best to look like I was heading out. Best to look like what they expected Remington Graves to look like at midnight.
I pulled the pen from my toiletry bag. Matte black.
Heavy. The kind a man like me would carry because it cost four hundred dollars and wrote like a promise.
I clicked it twice. The nib retracted and the blade deployed—four inches of reinforced steel, thin as a letter opener, hard enough to punch through bone.
I'd machined it myself in a workshop in Virginia Beach on a Saturday when the rest of the team was watching football.
Click. Retracted. Into the jacket pocket, where it sat against my thigh with the patience of something that knew it would be needed.
I knew exactly where I was going.
The cab dropped me in Deira just after midnight.
Different Dubai. The glass towers glowed in the distance like a pitch deck, but the streets here had a different grammar.
Older. Denser. Neon in Arabic and Hindi and Tagalog.
Shisha smoke and frying oil and the energy of a place that ran on cash and didn't ask questions about it.
Shopfronts open under fluorescent light, selling phone cases and perfume knockoffs at hours when decent people slept.
Men in doorways with the unhurried posture of people who'd made peace with standing a long time ago.
I walked like I belonged. Hands in pockets. Jaw loose. The gait of a man three drinks into a night with nowhere to be.
First bar. Small. Dim. Cricket on the television that nobody followed.
I ordered a local beer and sat near the window where I could see the street both ways without turning my head.
Drank slowly. Listened. Two men arguing in Urdu.
A woman laughing into a phone. The bartender wiping the same glass he'd been wiping for years.
Nothing.
Left cash. Walked.
Second bar. Louder. Music from a speaker that had seen better decades, the bass blown out enough to feel like a headache with a beat. I sat with my back to the wall because instinct isn't a suggestion.
Halfway through the glass, I caught it.
Dark eyes through the window. A face that held a beat too long before sliding past. Not a stare—that would've been amateur. A fraction past casual. The kind of delay that was invisible to civilians and neon-bright to anyone trained to read the weight of human attention.
I finished the beer without rushing. Smiled at the bartender on the way out.
Third bar. I almost didn't go in. But confirmation required patience, and patience was the difference between the men who came home and the ones whose names ended up on walls.
I sat. Ordered. Watched. He was there. Different position, same weight on his heels, same careful blankness trying too hard to be invisible.
Got you.
Halfway into the drink, I stood. Abrupt—chair scraping, the sudden movement of a man who'd made a decision or needed the toilet or both. Money on the bar. Out the door with the loose energy of someone running on booze and impulse.
I walked slowly. Let my feet find an uneven rhythm, a half-stagger that sold the story. Even laughed—short, private, a drunk man entertaining himself.
Behind me, the shadow shifted.
I didn't look. Didn't need to. I could feel him the way you feel pressure drop before a storm—displacement, weight, the old mammalian awareness of being tracked by something that means to close the distance. Thirty yards. Twenty. Matching my pace. Stopping when I stopped.
Good. Not great. Disciplined enough to hold distance but not enough to vary his rhythm. Whoever sent him had invested in training. Not enough training.
Two more blocks. I stopped. Squinted down a side street—narrow, dim, the kind of gap that existed between buildings because nobody had bothered to fill it. Made the face. A man whose bladder had outpaced his judgement.
I turned in.
Halfway down. Dumpster on my right. Locked door on my left. The far end opening onto another road I'd already mapped. No cameras. No foot traffic. Light from the main road reached ten feet in and gave up.
I faced the wall. Left hand against the stone—cool, slightly damp, the grit of it grounding against my palm. Posture slack. A man pissing in an alley because the bars in Deira didn't have facilities worth using.
My right hand was in my jacket pocket. Fingers around the pen. Thumb on the click.
The air in the side street changed. No longer observation. Approach. Space that had been empty stopped being empty. Acoustics tightening. A body moving through it with intent.
Footsteps. Measured. No longer bothering with pretence.
He came in shoulders-first, weight forward, one hand inside his jacket in a way that meant only one thing.
Ten feet. Eight. Six.
I turned.
Left foot to right. Body pivoting off the wall in a single rotation, right hand clear of the pocket, click done, blade out—four inches of steel catching a sliver of light before I drove it upward through the soft tissue below his ribs.
He inhaled. Sharp. Wet. The sound a body makes when something enters it that doesn't belong.
I held him close. Left hand on his shoulder, steadying him the way you'd steady a friend who'd stumbled. Right hand guiding the blade upward, threading between ribs with the precision of someone who'd studied anatomy for exactly this reason.
The tip found the pericardium. The thin sac around the heart. I held it there—a millimetre from the thing keeping him alive—and looked at his face.
Dark eyes. Wide. Could've been Middle Eastern. Could've been Latino. Nobody I'd ever seen, which meant hired, which meant someone else was paying, which meant this wasn't personal to him.
It was personal to someone.
"Drop the weapon." The voice I used in rooms where volume was a liability.
Metal on stone.
His eyes told me what I needed. He wasn't going to talk. Not courage—something bigger. Whoever sent him scared him worse than the blade in his chest. That told me more than words would have.
One thing left.
I stopped tickling.
The blade slid in. Through the sac, into the ventricle. His eyes blew wide and I held them—steady, present, without looking away. Not an apology. An acknowledgement that this was happening. That I was the one doing it. That he deserved to be seen while it did.
His weight sank into me. Breathing shortened to hitches that slowed, and slowed, and stopped. Nothing left but the heat of him against my chest and the silence of a Deira side street at one in the morning.
I lowered him to the ground. Crouched. Wiped the blade—two strokes—clicked the pen closed, pocketed it.
Stood.
What a mess.
Compact pistol on the ground beside him. Well-maintained. Professional kit. Professional surveillance.
Amateur ending.
Then someone clapped.
Slow. Three times. From the mouth of the side street, the sound ricocheting off both walls.
The pen was in my hand before the echo died. My eyes dropped to the gun—two steps—
"Well done."
A figure. Hands out, palms forward. The universal gesture of I'm not here to kill you, which in my experience was reliable about sixty percent of the time.
"I was hoping you'd handle him before I had to step in." The voice was easy. Loose. Familiar in a way that didn't fit, because the last time I'd heard it—
"Did you wash your hands after you pissed?" the voice asked.
My mind stopped.
Rebooted.
Stopped.
The voice. The rhythm. The joke—stupid, precisely calibrated, the kind only someone who knew me before the uniform and every mask I'd ever constructed would think to make—
He stepped forward. Light from the main road found his face, and the years collapsed like a building with its supports cut.
Kane Black.
Kane fucking Black from St. Paul's. From the nine of us who walked out of that place with our bones intact and our heads only mostly so. Bound by something too big and too ugly to call friendship.
"Why don't you come shake my hand and find out," I said.
He crossed the distance and we didn't shake hands.
We hugged. Hard. The kind that compressed your ribs and reminded you that your body existed in the world.
That it could be held. That you hadn't become the ghost you sometimes suspected you were.
His arms around my shoulders. Mine around his back.
Something in my chest cracked. Not broke—cracked, the way ice cracks when the season finally turns and what's underneath isn't empty.
It's moving.
The nine. Brothers beyond blood. The boys who survived that fucking school.
We let go. Kane looked at the body.
"We should probably go."
We walked. Out of the side street, onto the wider road. Two men with the easy stride of old friends on a night out. So far from the truth it almost circled back to funny.
Two blocks. Then Kane talked.
"The guy you put down. It's the past. Come back around."
"St. Paul's?"
He nodded. Grim. The nod of a man who'd been carrying something longer than tonight.
"Isn't it always?" he said.
Yes. Everything circled that drain. No matter how many names you stacked on top of the boy you'd been.
No matter how many oceans you put between yourself and those hallways and the things that happened inside them.
A time that should've been the best years of our lives.
Football and track and girls at the school dance.
The ordinary machinery of being young—the kind that made other people nostalgic and made me want to put my fist through a wall.
We'd been fighting for our lives. And somehow, together, we'd gotten out. I'd spent every year since trying to become someone for whom getting out was enough.
Now it was back. The school that should've stayed buried.
I was clenching my fists. Didn't notice until Kane glanced down at my hands.
"There's a place," he said. "In Paris."
"What's there?"
"Safe ground. Resources. People who know what we know." A pause. "It's where we fight back. Against St. Paul's and their new friends."
I wanted names. The full picture in a format I could process. But Kane's face said the answers existed and weren't coming on a backstreet in Deira in the early hours of the morning.
"There's an email in your inbox," he said. "Address in Paris. Go there. Ring the bell. When someone answers, say: I request Sanctuary."
I looked at him.
Laughed.
"You're serious."
No smile.
"I'd offer you a ride, but I figure the playboy of St. Paul's prefers his own transport." A flicker of the old grin—from before, from the version of Kane I'd known when we were both too young and too scared and too stubborn to quit. "Take your time. Not too much. Three days. I'll see you there."
He squeezed my shoulder. The weight held more than the gesture should've been able to carry. But it did. That was how it worked between us. Between all nine.
Then he walked into the dark and was gone.
I stood on the pavement. Deira humming around me. Neon and bass and frying oil and a city that never fully slept.
What the fuck is going on in Paris?