21. GHOST
21
GHOST
Blair woke up sometime in the night, or maybe the earliest hours of morning, to find the other side of the bed empty. He ran his hand over the sheets. They were cold. He sat up and looked around for a clock, disoriented for a moment by the perfectly whole blackness. He felt for his phone on the nightstand and tapped the screen. It was almost four in the morning.
“Wren?” he said, just in case Wren was somewhere in the room.
No response. Blair groped around on the floor until he found his pants (it was too damn cold in Wren’s apartment to walk around without either clothes or Wren on him). He used the flashlight on his phone to navigate to the bathroom, also empty, and then out into the hallway. It was no brighter there. He ran his hand along the cool wall and wondered how Wren stood waking up to such overwhelming darkness when he already had nightmares. He was starting to worry when he saw the light from Wren’s phone, a faint glow he could just barely make out over the back of the couch.
“You okay?” he asked, putting his own phone in his pocket.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
Blair sat next to him. It could have been the harsh light from whatever article he was reading on his phone, but it looked like there were dark circles under his eyes. “Bad dreams?”
“Yeah.”
Blair didn’t take Wren’s shortness personally. He sounded fucking exhausted. “I could try to help you study if you want to bring some books back to your room.”
Wren rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “I’m done with school. The ceremony is in a couple of days.”
“You shoulda told me,” he said, giving Wren a nudge to his side.
“I was planning on it.”
“When?”
“In a couple of days.”
Blair huffed a laugh and slid his arm around slender shoulders. “I promise, no Incindious stuff until after you’re officially done with your graduation. I’m sure having all this going on hasn’t made it easier for you.”
“Don’t care,” Wren mumbled, head lolling into the crook of Blair’s neck.
He smiled as Wren’s hair—at its longest when the styling products had worn off or been washed out for the day—tickled his chest. Wren was still wearing his necklace. He thought Wren would have taken it off before he went to sleep but whether it was there intentionally or he just forgot, Blair liked that it was still there. It hasn’t been that long since we first kissed here, he thought, even though it seemed like so much more time had passed. He stared at the wall of glass currently blacked out by panels of dense fabric that ran along a sturdy bar attached to the ceiling. He liked being able to look out and see the city, he didn’t think he could ever bring himself to block out a view like that but he guessed Wren just didn’t have the same passion for New York. It wasn’t his home, after all. Not that I think anywhere ever has been, from the way he talks about his father.
“If you want to come back to bed, I can wake you if it seems like you’re having a bad dream,” Blair offered. He glanced down when he didn’t get a response. Wren’s fingers had gone lax, his phone abandoned in his lap. “Wren?”
Well, good . He slid his arms under Wren as carefully as he could, not wanting to wake him back up. Wren’s phone sat in the dip of his body where he hung between Blair’s arms so that was one less thing he had to worry about carrying. Wren muttered incoherently as Blair carried him down the hallway, all half-formed words and shapeless sounds. He eased the door open with his shoulder and felt his way across the room until his knees hit the bed.
Wren didn’t stir as Blair laid him down. Blair’s leg on the other hand had plenty to say about having to support his weight as well as that of another grown man, but as he had done since he was first shot, he ignored it. He put Wren’s phone on the charger and rejoined him in bed. Blair didn’t even have the blankets over them yet when Wren turned into his chest and took his waist in a tight grip.
Blair closed his arm around Wren’s back. If he started to shake Blair would be able to feel it, and he would make sure that ghost of a man in his dreams couldn’t hurt him.
A persistent buzzing dragged Blair from sleep. He fumbled for his phone, one arm still around Wren, whose hair was spilled out across Blair’s chest, his necklace trapped between them. Blair traced the silver chain around Wren’s neck, forgetting all about the call until its buzzing caught his attention again. Blair was seriously tempted to ignore it until he saw Spencer’s name on the screen. He swiped it and brought it to his ear. “Hey, what’s up?”
“You need to come to the bar. We found something.”
“Oh shit, really? I’m on my way. Give me half an hour, I’m at Wren’s.”
Spencer hung up and Blair put his phone aside on the bed. It wasn’t like Spencer to end a conversation so abruptly, but if they’d found something they could use then Spencer was probably focused on making a plan.
“Sunshine, hey,” Blair said gently, tucking some hair behind Wren’s ear. “I gotta go.”
Wren made a malcontented sound but otherwise didn’t stir.
Blair laughed, running his knuckles along the side of Wren’s face. Even in the darkness cast over the room by Wren’s blackout curtains, Blair could see him in the dim grey light. He looked so soft when he was asleep. And so fucking beautiful. “Wren, baby, I’ve got to go.”
“Did you just call me baby?” Wren asked without opening his eyes, his voice scratchy from sleep.
Of course he woke up for that .
“I might have,” Blair grumbled.
Wren snorted against his chest. “Baby.”
“Shut up.”
“I like it.”
Blair’s heart stopped for a second. “Oh.”
“Go commit war crimes.” Wren yawned and moved from his chest, stretching out on the other side of the bed. “I’ll be here.”
Blair got up and got dressed before he lost the will to leave, a surprising struggle to have since usually when Felix or Spencer said jump, Blair asked how high. He looked at Wren, seemingly asleep again, the sheet pooled around his waist and the blanket long forgotten at the foot of the bed. “I’m headed out. I—”
Wren turned over to look at him when Blair cut himself off. He squinted, and for a terrifying moment Blair thought Wren had an inkling of what he’d been about to say and was scrutinizing him for evidence, before he remembered Wren just couldn’t see shit without his glasses. Blair cleared his throat and smiled. “See you later.”
I love you .
Blair flipped through his keys until he found the one that went to the bar. He had tried to push it open but it was locked. As he walked inside, hope stirred to life in his chest at the prospect of finally having something they could use.
He came to an abrupt stop. “Spencer?”
For the first time since the war had started, Spencer looked grave. He had kept his composure at every turn but when he opened the door he set his eyes on Blair with an intensity that raised the hair on his arms. “Get in here,” he said.
Clouds had gathered, leaving bland and tepid air behind that smelled like a storm, but Blair felt cold as he walked further into the bar. Why was that, he wondered, when this was like a second home? He forced a smile onto his face to walk past Spencer. If whatever was going on was enough to affect their unshakable strategist, he couldn’t bring himself to smile for real but he would be damned if he wasn’t going to bring his fighting spirit when they had something on Phantom. Maybe their second man was just tired from working on the heap of computer bits Felix had given him. That would make sense and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling of foreboding.
“Guess I’m early, huh?” he tried to joke.
Spencer locked the door. “I didn’t call anyone else.”
He looked around. He noticed Julian for the first time, his usually sunny presence condensed into something much smaller and quieter where he perched on a barstool. Felix sat in the middle of the couch, hands clasped loosely between his knees, eyes on the floor. The chill that had gripped Blair before turned into a cold sweat. He could feel it bead at the back of his neck and roll down his spine. Spencer went to stand next to Julian, and the center of the room suddenly seemed like a bad place to be.
He walked over to the couch. The only thing that separated him from Felix was the table, and the lone black cord next to the ashtray that didn’t seem to be attached to anything.
“Boss?”
Felix dragged his eyes up from the ground and Blair’s breath hitched. His stare burned through Blair like thermite. There was no mere frustration there; he was livid. Felix snatched the cord off the table. “You know what this is?”
Blair eyed the round, quarter-sized piece at the end. “A mic,” he said thickly, his mouth dry when he tried to speak.
For a moment Felix just blazed into him with those furious eyes, and either Blair’s heart was pounding too loudly in his ears to hear anything else or even the city outside had fallen eerily silent. He was watching Felix so intently waiting for him to continue that he jumped at Spencer’s voice behind him.
“What I got off the hard drive Felix took out of the warehouse was a series of recordings. They date back to when the bar reopened. We searched the place, and I found that,” Spencer said, nodding to the wire.
Blair had forced his heavy limbs to turn and look at them, so he saw Julian shift before saying, almost guiltily, “It was ran along the inner lip of the bartop. I could barely get my fingers under there to pull it out. It was connected to a small transmitter that we can assume was sending the recordings to Isaac, and Spencer is going to try to run a trace to get Isaac’s location from it.”
“How did we miss an outsider being in here the night of the reopening?” He wracked his brain but the bar had been full of familiar faces, and the bar itself where the wire had been installed only held about eight people at a time.
Felix’s voice spun Blair’s head back toward him. “We didn’t.”
He could feel their eyes on him like he was supposed to understand. Felix still looked like he wanted to make him a pile of scorched bones, and when he looked back at the other two, they wore matching expressions of disappointment and was that pity? He looked back and forth to each side of the room waiting for something, anything to start making sense. Was he being accused of this? He was far from an outsider, he wore his colors as proudly as any member of Incindious, the only person who didn’t have colors at the reopening was—
“No,” he said. None of their faces changed. His fists clenched at his sides. “ No. ”
He remembered the distrusting eyes that turned toward the door when Wren came to the bar the night of the reopening. Toward the outsider, the only one that had been there that night, but no.
“You’re wrong,” he whispered, as loudly as he could when he felt like there was a hand wrapped around his throat, cutting off his oxygen.
“He showed up the same time we started fighting Phantom. Funny, ain’t it, how the closer you two got, the further ahead of us Phantom seemed to be?” Felix said.
Come to think of it, Doc had been there that night, too, but Blair didn’t think it would help his situation to mention that. Not that he thought Doc betrayed them— neither of them did. Blair knew they didn’t. “Wren wouldn’t, he—”
“One of ours would never do this,” Spencer interjected.
Blair whirled toward him. “He is one of ours! He got the shit beat out of him for us!”
“You really don’t think somebody wouldn’t take a few bruises to keep their cover?” Felix asked, knuckles going white where he held the wire.
Blair slammed a fist down on the coffee table. “You’re wrong!”
“And you’re blind!” Felix roared, standing up so fast that the coffee table rocked onto two feet, sending the ashtray clattering to the hardwood and Blair staggering back. He grabbed a stack of paper off the couch and shoved it against Blair’s chest. “Read them.”
Blair looked down at the document on top of the stack. In the top left corner was a grainy picture that looked like a driver’s license photo. It was Wren, but it also wasn’t. His hair was too short, his jawline too sharp. Blair’s eyes drifted to the first line of text. Eli Vincent Masters. Wren was an only child, which left only one person who could bear such a striking resemblance to him. Anger shot through Blair, seeing the face of the man who had tormented Wren, so much that he almost forgot he was supposed to be reading this shit for some reason. He recognized the format as one of Spencer’s background checks. The name, place of birth, date of birth and… date of death. Almost four years ago.
Wren’s father is dead? Wren talked about him like he was still around.
That wouldn’t warrant Felix’s insistence for him to read these, though, so he kept going. There was a list of warrants that had been out for Eli’s arrest before he died. Embezzlement, grand theft auto, larceny and more, but most notably of all, thirty-six counts of first degree murder.
“Holy shit,” Blair whispered. “What… how the fuck did he ever get out of LA? How was he not in prison?”
Felix scoffed disdainfully. “Being a world class assassin gives you friends in high places. Who the fuck knows.”
Blair wanted to argue the point, but he’d already started to read the next page, and there were heaps of reports to confirm what Felix was telling him. Police reports, the accounts they uncovered with payments that matched to the time of the previously unsolved murders, even information about the city’s mafia that had long since been looking for a way to take Eli down.
My father was paranoid. He always said they would come for us.
Wren’s words echoed in his head, intertwining with the building headache threatening to split his skull open. Blair looked up from the papers. “But this is Eli, not Wren.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Kennedy, he was raised by a goddamn assassin!”
“Wren’s not his father!” Blair snapped, balling the papers in his fist.
Spencer’s calm voice cut between them. “So you knew? He told you?”
“No, but—”
“If he was keeping a secret like this, he wouldn’t bat an eye at using you to get to us. Nobody inherits a legacy like Eli Masters’ and doesn’t end up a criminal,” Spencer said.
“Blair, we know you care about him. I’m sorry,” Julian said.
A piercing sting formed behind Blair’s eyes. “I don’t believe you.”
Felix circled the table to stand in front of him. “You don’t have to.” He shoved the wire at Blair’s chest. “You’re one of us, Blair. You’re part of this family. Hate me for it or not, I’m gonna protect us even if it means you give up your pretty little boyfriend. So, here’s your options.”
“Boss,” Blair said, knowing from the hard set of Felix's jaw that this was going bad, quick, and he had to do something. Wren wouldn’t have betrayed them. He wouldn’t have lied to Blair all his time. Surely Wren had his reasons for not telling Blair about his father. Blair knew that, he just had to make them understand because they didn’t know Wren like he did.
Felix towered over him. “You break it off and tell him to stay the fuck out of my city—and don’t think for one second I won’t know if you try to keep talking to him, or—”
Blair’s hands had gone cold and too numb to grasp the cord Felix had been shoving at him so it hit the ground between them when Felix let go to reach under his coat. He snapped the MAC-10 together in a flash and Blair’s heart clattered against his ribs as metal touched his temple.
Felix brushed Blair’s hair off his forehead with the muzzle. “I’ll take care of him myself.”
Wren wouldn’t betray me, Blair thought desperately, but all he could see was the same gun pressed against Wren’s head, with Felix’s finger on the trigger instead of resting harmlessly to the side as it was now.
Blair distantly recognized what he had to do, but he’d forgotten what his nights were like before spending so many of them at Wren’s apartment, what his arms felt like without Wren in them. How was he supposed to go back to that?
“You got it?” Felix asked, bringing the muzzle under his chin to tilt his head up.
The gun no longer felt cold. The room no longer felt warm. It seemed to be someone else using Blair’s voice to say, “Understood, Boss.” Everything was numb.
“You have until tomorrow,” Felix said.