Chapter 13 Marble Run #2
“Wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be honest.”
Cal laughed despite himself. “Fair.”
The British Museum rose from the evening like a temple, its stone columns pale against a darkening sky.
We approached from the service entrance, Cal producing credentials that got us past the security guard with minimal friction.
Inside, the museum was a different place after hours — quieter, the shadows deeper and the echoing silence of the public galleries replaced by the muffled sounds of an event somewhere in the building.
“Stay close,” Cal murmured. “Service corridors ahead. We need the one that leads to the Greek galleries.”
We moved through passages marked Staff Only, Cal navigating the way through. The sounds of the event grew louder as we went — voices, laughter, the high ring of champagne glasses — and Cal stopped at a door and opened it carefully, a fraction at a time.
We emerged behind a display of pottery, hidden by its strategic placement. And there he was.
Harrow stood at the centre of the room holding court.
A distinguished man in an expensive suit, explaining something about Athenian democracy to a cluster of admirers who hung on every word.
Two bodyguards were positioned at angles that covered both entrances, scanning the room continuously, assessing threats and mapping exits.
Cal's hand touched my arm. A warning. Stay controlled.
“We need to get closer,” he whispered. “See who else is here. Document the connections.”
He started moving, using the display cases as cover, and I followed, matching his movements and keeping him in my peripheral vision while I watched the room.
Then one of the admirers dropped her champagne. It shattered across the marble floor with a sound like a gunshot and everyone turned toward it, including the bodyguards, including Harrow, whose eyes swept the room as he turned and landed directly on Cal.
Recognition flashed across Harrow's face, followed immediately by something considerably colder. He said something to the nearest bodyguard and pointed.
The bodyguards moved.
“Run,” Cal said.
We ran, back through the doorway and into the service corridors, Cal calling directions over his shoulder as we went.
Left, then right, then through a heavy door that opened into a loading area with a concrete floor, high ceilings, and metal shelving stacked against the walls. No other exits visible.
The bodyguards came through behind us. Three of them now.
Cal spun to face them, already reaching for something concealed at his side. A knife appeared in his hand, short and practical. “Back off.”
The lead bodyguard smiled with the ease of someone who'd done this before. “Mr Harrow would like a word. Come quietly or we make this messy.”
“I vote messy,” Cal said, and moved before anyone could respond.
I'd seen people fight before, had trained with professionals, but Cal moved as though gravity was a suggestion he was choosing not to follow.
He ran straight at the nearest bodyguard, vaulted over a crate at the last second, and used the man's outstretched arms as leverage to flip himself over and land behind him.
His knife was already moving before his feet touched the ground and the bodyguard went down clutching a bleeding hamstring.
The second rushed him. Cal dropped low, swept his legs, rolled as the man fell, and came up with a spinning kick that caught the third across the temple.
The man staggered and Cal flowed from the kick into a series of strikes that looked choreographed but were leaving people on the floor — using the environment like it was part of him, vaulting off crates, turning every obstacle into a weapon, moving like water finding its path through whatever blocked it.
It was brutal and beautiful and completely mesmerising, right up until two more bodyguards appeared at the far end of the loading area.
I engaged before they could flank him.
My approach was nothing like Cal's — no acrobatics, no flow, just raw power applied directly.
I grabbed the first man and slammed him into the shelving hard enough to dent the metal, and when he tried to recover I caught his jaw with my fist and followed with an elbow to his ribs.
Bones cracked under the impact and he went down.
The second was better trained. We traded blows properly, his jab to my ribs blocked and my counter to his head deflected.
He swept at my legs and I shifted my weight and stayed standing, drove my knee into his stomach as he came in close.
He grunted and staggered backward and I put him down with a strike to his temple before he could recover his footing.
Across the loading area, Cal was still moving, still flowing between two more bodyguards simultaneously, his knife flashing as he wove between them.
One tried to grab him and Cal used the momentum to spin, his elbow cracking into the man's nose with a wet sound, blood spraying as the bodyguard stumbled away.
The other came at Cal from behind and I opened my mouth to shout a warning, but Cal had already sensed it — dropped low, let the grab miss him by inches, and came up with a strike to the man's kidney that folded him around the impact.
“Dom!”
I turned. Another bodyguard was rushing me with a knife drawn, and I grabbed a metal shelf support, ripped it free, and used it to deflect the blade with a shower of sparks. I drove the support into his stomach, followed with a strike to his temple, and he dropped.
The loading area went quiet except for the sounds of men groaning on the floor and our own ragged breathing.
Cal stood in the middle of it, bent forward with his hands on his knees and his chest heaving, blood spattered across his shirt — not all of it his.
His knife was still in his hand, slick and dark.
“More coming,” he managed between breaths. “We need to move.”
I crossed to him, gripped his arm to steady him. “Can you run?”
“I just did backflips while stabbing people.” He straightened, wincing, and managed something that was almost a grin despite everything. “Come on.”
We found a fire exit at the back of the loading area and pushed through into the cold London night. The rain that had been threatening all evening finally started as we hit the street, cold drops that turned to a downpour within seconds, soaking through our clothes immediately.
“He knows you now,” I said as we moved. “Knows you're hunting him.”
“Good.” Cal's eyes were bright with something beyond the adrenaline. “Let him know. Let him feel what it's like to be hunted.”
“We need to get off the street before they expand the search.”
“Where?”
I looked at him properly in the glow of a streetlamp — blood on his shirt, old bruises alongside new ones, the particular kind of exhaustion that moved in once adrenaline faded and pain took its place.
“There's a park two streets over. Green space, trees, places to disappear.” I started walking and kept to the shadows. “And a chemist on the way. You need supplies.”
“I'm fine.”
“You're bleeding.”
“It's not my blood.”
“Some of it is.” I nodded at his knuckles where the skin had split open again. “And you're moving like your ribs are worse than you're admitting.”
Cal opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Fine. But make it fast. I'd rather not stand around bleeding in public any longer than necessary.”
The chemist was one of those twenty-four-hour places built for tourists and emergencies, all fluorescent lighting and overpriced convenience.
A bored clerk behind the counter barely glanced up when we walked in.
I grabbed a basket and started moving through the aisles, collecting antiseptic, plasters, gauze, tape, and pain relievers while Cal followed, dripping rainwater on the linoleum floor.
“Planning to perform surgery?” he asked.
“Planning to make sure you don't get an infection.”
“They're just cuts.”
“Cuts from fighting in a museum loading area that probably hasn't been properly cleaned in decades.” I added antibacterial wipes to the basket. “You want to explain to a doctor how you got sepsis from Roman-era dust?”
“When you put it that way.” He reached past me and pulled a bottle of water from the cooler. “Get two of those. And something with sugar. My blood sugar's dropping.”
I added chocolate bars to the basket, paid cash, and we left before the clerk had finished looking at his phone.
The park was dark and rain-soaked and completely empty, our footsteps the only sound on the main path.
We cut through to a cluster of old trees near the back — thick trunks and sprawling branches that provided some cover from the downpour — and Cal sat down heavily on a bench tucked under the largest one, his breath catching as his ribs protested the movement.
He was shaking slightly now, the combination of cold and adrenaline crash and pain all arriving at once.
“Jacket off,” I said.
“Romantic.”
“You're soaked and injured. Jacket. Now.”
He shrugged out of it with movements that were too careful, too measured, and I saw the exact moment the fabric pulled against his damaged ribs by the way his breath stopped and started again.
The shirt underneath was plastered to his skin, blood and rainwater mixing into pale pink stains across the fabric.
“Shirt too,” I said.
“Christ, at least buy me dinner first.”
“Cal.”
“Fine. Bossy bastard.” He started on the buttons with stiff fingers, struggling with the small ones, and I pushed his hands aside and did it myself — faster, more efficient, trying not to notice how intimate this felt on a park bench in the rain.
The shirt came off and I folded it and set it aside and tried not to stare at bare skin covered in bruises layered on top of bruises.
Last week's were fading to yellow-green.
Tonight's were fresh purple-red, still darkening as I looked at them.
“It's not as bad as it looks,” he said.
“It looks like you were hit by a car.”
“Only metaphorically.” But he was watching my face and reading something there I hadn't intended to show.
I opened the antiseptic and poured some onto a square of gauze. “This'll sting.”
“I can handle— fuck!” He hissed as I pressed the gauze to his knuckles where the skin had split open. “A warning would've been nice.”
“I gave you one.”
“A better warning.”
“Don't be a baby.” But I gentled my touch, cleaning the wounds with more care than strictly necessary. His hands were a mess of split knuckles and scraped palms and defensive marks that told stories about fights I hadn't been there for.
“You're good at this,” Cal said quietly, watching me work.
“Adrian makes sure all his people know field medicine. You never know when you'll need it.”
“Is that why you're so calm? Patching people up in parks in the rain?”
“I'm not calm.” I moved to the cut on his temple and cleaned away dried blood with careful strokes, feeling him flinch under each pass of the gauze. “I'm furious. At Harrow, at his people, at you for going to that museum without proper backup.”
“We managed.”
“We got lucky. Next time we might not.” I pressed a plaster to the temple cut, my fingers brushing his hairline as I smoothed it down.
He went very still under my hands, his breathing evening out despite the pain he had to be feeling, neither of us moving even after I'd finished.
The rain drummed steadily through the branches above us. The city felt very far away.
“Ribs,” I said. “Let me check them.”
“They're fine.”
“Let me check anyway.”
Cal sighed but shifted to give me access. I pressed carefully along his ribcage, feeling for anything clearly wrong, and he sucked in a sharp breath when I reached the worst of it — left side, three ribs down, swollen but nothing that felt broken.
“Badly bruised.” I taped gauze over it, more for padding than anything else. “You need ice and rest and actual medical attention if it gets worse.”
“I'll add it to my list. Right after 'destroy corrupt prosecutor' and 'try not to die.'”
“I mean it, Cal.”
“So do I.” But his hand settled over mine where I was still holding the gauze against his ribs, his fingers resting there warm and deliberate. “Thank you. For this. For coming tonight. For giving a damn whether I live or die.”
“Someone has to.”
“Yeah, but it doesn't have to be you. You could've walked away. Let me keep doing this alone.” His thumb brushed across my knuckles, a single slow stroke. “But you didn't.”
I looked at him — rain-soaked and bruised and bleeding, shaking from cold and the aftermath of everything, and still the most alive person I'd ever been in a room with, refusing to quit even when quitting would be smarter.
“No,” I said quietly. “I didn't.”
We sat there while the rain drummed on the leaves overhead and the city went about its business somewhere in the distance, entirely indifferent to two men on a park bench with their hands laced together and no immediate reason to move.
His breathing steadied under my palm. His heartbeat was strong and steady despite everything.
Eventually I helped him back into his wet shirt and jacket, steadying him when the movement pulled at his ribs. He stood when I stood and followed when I led, trusting me to get us somewhere safe, and that trust felt like something I hadn't been given in a long time.
The rain had eased to a thin drizzle by the time we left the park. We walked through empty streets and kept to the shadows, two men who'd just survived something that had no business going as well as it had, still figuring out what exactly that meant for both of them.