Devon seeking guidance, p.6
Devon Seeking Guidance, page 6
“I heard you denied my request,” James said abruptly, taking a swig from his glass. He didn’t sound particularly upset. The boy had been rejected so many times, it was merely conversational.
Devon flashed him a swift look, remembering the partnership application stuffed at the bottom of his bag. “Sorry about that,” he replied, taking a drink himself. “Points for persistence.”
James nodded absentmindedly, unaware of the thin strip of chocolate above his upper lip. “I’m going to keep filing them.”
His father held back a smile. “I’d expect nothing less.”
They continued to drink in companionable silence, passing the syrup back and forth to add more chocolate into the glass. It might have started out as a mindless habit, but the two had met in the kitchen under similar circumstances more times than either could count. It had become a kind of tenderness between them, one Devon would miss tremendously when the boy finally moved out.
“What’s wrong?” James asked loudly, shattering his trance. “You’re looking at me all weird.”
Devon was quick to change the subject. “So things seem to be going well with Emma,” he prompted casually.
It was his favorite part of their late-night meetings, the random conversations that might never have otherwise transpired. He’d showed his son the correct way to shave, after a glass of chocolate milk. He’d talked him down after his first mission, taught him how to drive.
“Yeah, they are.” James stared into the distance, swirling the contents of his glass before he flashed a sudden look at his father. “You like her, right?”
“Yeah, I like her a lot.” Devon took another sip, watching him curiously. “You guys shut down pretty quick about her mom coming to town. Is everything okay?”
The boy drew in a breath to answer, then let it out in a quiet sigh. “It’s fine, she’s just...she’s tricky.” He hesitated a split second, then forced himself to continue. “I don’t think she likes me very much.”
Devon’s eyes flashed up in astonishment. “That’s ridiculous,” he countered, trying to hide his anger. “She hasn’t even met you!”
James just shrugged, taking another sip of milk.
Those blue eyes were distant, almost puzzled. With the exception of his older sister, there wasn’t a person in the world the boy hadn’t been able to charm. Except his girlfriend’s mother.
“I’m sure it will be fine,” he said mildly. “And it was nice of you to offer to have her come for Christmas. I’m not sure if she’ll accept, but I’ll pass along the invitation just the same.”
Devon was seething, but the boy had clearly finished with the conversation. Instead of pressing the matter farther, he forced a smile and clinked their glasses together. “Cheers.”
They drained the rest of the chocolate, rinsing the glasses in the sink.
“Are you heading to bed?” James asked, stretching his arms to the ceiling. “I heard that punching bag for hours last night, you need to get some sleep.”
Devon nodded vaguely, still reeling from what he’d just heard. “Yeah, in just a bit.” He rummaged in a drawer and pulled out a lighter, taking the swimsuit from his pocket. “Hey listen...don’t worry about Emma’s mom. It takes longer for some people to come round than others. That has nothing to do with you.” He held the fabric gingerly over the tile, watching as it caught flame. “You should have seen Beth’s face the first time she saw your mother and I holding hands. You would have thought we were doing something impossibly strange.”
James stood there in silence, watching with a tilt of his head. “Wasn’t Beth, uh, brainwashed or didn’t have any idea of who Mom was at first?”
Devon shaking his head, dismissing the correction. “I’m not trying to embarrass you or put you on the spot,” he continued, adjusting his grip as the turquoise singed to black. “I’m just saying to give it a little time. You’re an awesome kid, Jamie. It’s impossible to spend any amount of time with you and not see that.”
A pile of ashes fell onto the tile. James pursed his lips with a thoughtful expression.
“...are you doing okay, Dad?”
Devon glanced up in surprise. “Yeah, why?”
The boy shook his head, reaching for a broom. “No reason.”
Chapter 5
Gabriel sat alone in his new office, watching a beautiful sunrise on his computer.
He’d risen that morning before the dawn, slipping out the door when the moon was still hanging low in the sky. Since then, he’d been effectively locked in a small room beneath the ground, a depressing parallel to the first eighteen years of his life. It had only taken a few minutes for him to get claustrophobic. It had only taken a few minutes longer to think of something else he’d rather be doing instead. But when he’d attempted to wander back outside, he’d been grabbed by the arm and steered right back to the office by a woman who was currently a secretary, and used to be a friend.
“We don’t have sunrises in the tunnels,” she’d informed him curtly. “But we do have Wi-Fi.”
He leaned onto his elbows with a morose expression, staring at the swaying palms. He could almost smell the hibiscus. He could almost taste—
The door flew off its hinges, clattering to the floor.
“Son of a—stupid door!!”
Gabriel froze upon impact, then lifted his eyes as the fox appeared in the frame. He was there one second, then gone the next—moving in that strange, disjointed way he did when his mind was distracted and he forgot to concentrate on pesky little details like his tatù.
“Morning,” the assassin said mildly.
If there was ever a posterchild for half-caff...
Devon lifted a distracted hand, kneeling to grab the twisted handle and heaving the door off the ground. Instead of battling with the hinges, he propped it against the wall with a look of disgust.
“When did these things get so flimsy?” he demanded. “Have they always been so flimsy?”
People don’t ALWAYS grab them with the strength of an Appalachian bear.
“Rough morning?” Gabriel guessed, watching as the guy threw his jacket at the coatrack with enough force to crack stone. “You know, they make pills for that sort of—”
“Emma’s mother doesn’t like James.” Devon spat out the word like poison and folded his arms, waiting for a reaction.
The assassin didn’t disappoint. He lifted slowly from his chair, staring without a hint of expression. “Shall we set fire to her house?”
Half-joking.
“I could easily be persuaded,” Devon growled, pacing around the desk to his chair. His jaw was clenched and his eyes were hard as flint. “What kind of a freaking lunatic doesn’t like Jamie? I might have a touch of fatherly bias, but the kid is unquestionably perfect.”
“He is perfect,” Gabriel agreed instantly. The two might disagree on everything in the world, but they’d found common ground in their kids. “Minus that nasty habit of walking through walls...”
Devon flashed a grimace, coming down from the adrenaline. “That’s only getting worse.”
The assassin nodded knowingly, then hovered the door back into position and fused the hinges with a twitch of his fingers. The fox was already busy unpacking his briefcase, and it was time for Gabriel to stake a claim as well. Paperclips stacked and contorted themselves into a crenulated boundary between them, while a mountain of paperwork covered the rest. He tried his stapler, but found it was broken. Suspicious, he swapped it out with Devon’s when the fox was looking the other way. He also took the opportunity to shove his friend’s things more deliberately to the other side of the impromptu partition. When Devon started to challenge it, he stretched out his arm to demonstrate the line between them—wielding the stapler and daring the fox to disagree.
Yeah, you better keep to your side.
“Did you see that stack of mission assignments...?” he asked, rummaging through the piles between them. There was a color-coding system, but it seemed to change day by day.
There was a loud smack as they dropped in front of him.
“Nice of you to take an interest, Alden,” Devon answered tersely before flashing a look at the assassin’s computer. “Were you just watching a video of a sunrise?”
Gabriel slammed the laptop shut. “Boundaries, Wardell.”
Truth be told, he’d shown up early that morning because he felt guilty for abandoning the fox to paperwork whilst he dealt with the new transfers. Of course, he’d come back a few minutes later to discover the fox had abandoned the bleachers. Only later, did he learn the reason why.
“I heard you fined Julian thirty thousand pounds for being a good guy,” he continued lightly, flicking a crumbled receipt over the paperclip-partition with a winning smile. “You have massively underestimated his wife, if you think that’s going to be all right.”
Devon shuddered in spite of himself, scanning through a field report. “Angel’s actually being super weird with me,” he murmured, scribbling some notes in the margin. “She got me a water.”
Gabriel glanced over sharply. “Did you drink it?”
“Accidentally,” the fox admitted. “Just a swallow.”
The assassin clicked his tongue disapprovingly, reaching over the partition to add some notes of his own. “Sometimes a swallow is all it takes...”
Devon rolled his eyes with a grin and the two settled into an easy rhythm—passing the files back and forth as those mountains dwindled to hills. They hadn’t been doing it long, but already, it felt nothing like that first day. Things that couldn’t be resolved peacefully had been settled with open violence. They were finding little compromises for the rest. The fox couldn’t handle the quiet, so a ten-hour loop of forest ambiance played softly in the background. The assassin hated the cold, so they’d turned up the heater full blast. It wasn’t long until they’d stripped down to socks and tee-shirts—raiding the upstairs vending machines, before tunneling back under the ground.
“Aren’t there supposed to be more of these?” Gabriel asked a few hours later. They’d just returned from lunch, and he was holding a sandwich in one hand and a mission assignment in the other. He scanned through it with a frown. “I thought we had someone going to Liberia this week.”
Devon glanced up swiftly before lowering his eyes. “Must have been postponed,” he answered vaguely. It was quite a few seconds, then he kicked back in his chair. “So you were once a part of a top-secret, highly-despicable shadow organization. What do you think this one wants?”
The assassin dropped the stack of folders, rubbing at his eyes.
It wasn’t the first time he’d asked himself the question. It had been running through his mind since it was revealed the people they were after had been shopping off a list.
Lists implied a plan. Plans implied an agenda.
“It could be all sorts of things,” he answered slowly, sifting them in his mind. “But they’re not your average mercenaries. They’re disgruntled knights, so that spells trouble.” He mulled it over another moment before glancing across the desk. “What do you think?”
Devon tilted his head thoughtfully, fiddling with a paperclip. “I think it says a lot that they didn’t enrich the uranium,” he said quietly. “I think it says a lot that they left it behind.”
At a passing glance, that might have seemed like a positive. When dealing with a criminal mastermind, it was good to know there were some basic lines drawn in the sand. But Gabriel had dealt with enough of those kinds of people to see past those initial layers to what was underneath.
“I think it says they’re desperate enough to be careless,” he replied. “The place was guarded by a single guy named Toby. There’s better security at Office Depot.” He let that settle a moment, then flashed another look across the desk. “Did you ever talk with Fodder?”
Devon went perfectly still, then looked down at his papers. “I left him a message,” he said evasively.
Gabriel nodded slowly, eyes twinkling. “Very presidential.”
“Shut up.”
They worked a while longer, listening to the soothing whispers of an ancient forest, paired with the sounds of scuffing boots and muted impacts coming from above. It wasn’t until the sun began to lower in the western sky—somewhere unseen above them—that Gabriel set down his pen.
“When are we going to deal with Kraigan?” he asked without preamble, leaning back in his chair. “I almost blurted it out to Natasha last night.”
Devon was already nodding, shifting around so they were face to face. “We just need to rip off the Band-Aid and tell the rest of them,” he declared, making the decision right there on the spot, “apologize for not doing it sooner.”
Much sooner.
Gabriel shook his head, bracing against their inevitable reaction. “We were leaning on them so hard during the whole Bradwell fiasco,” he murmured. “I just couldn’t—”
“I know,” Devon interrupted softly, “me too. And that’s okay,” he added suddenly, like he was trying to convince himself. “This wasn’t some tricky mission—we were talking about a stolen vial of uranium. There are levels of priority to consider. They’ll forgive us...eventually.”
There was something strange in his voice, and Gabriel looked up with a question. The fox held out a single moment, then dropped his shoulders with a sigh.
“I lied to Rae this morning,” he confessed, looking utterly sick with himself. “She saw that blueprint on my phone and asked about it. I said the school was considering another field trip.”
Gabriel nodded once, then pulled out his own phone—humming absentmindedly, as his fingers flew over the screen.
It was quiet a few seconds before Devon asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m texting Rae.”
There was a burst of laughter, as the fox grabbed for the phone. “Come on!”
Gabriel slipped it into his pocket with a grin.
Over the course of the afternoon, the partition had gradually come down between them. It was either a mark of progress, or they’d simply knocked into it too many times. The papers had begun to blend together, and the remains of a hasty lunch lay between them. The assassin reached for a paper cup, rattling the ice, before taking a long sip.
“Why did you lie?” he asked quietly.
It wasn’t said with any judgement, merely an honest curiosity. Gabriel had spun so many tales, in so many countries, he could no longer keep track of them. But he never lied to Natasha, not unless it was absolutely imperative. From what he’d seen, Devon was the same way.
The fox shot him a quick glance, searching for the phone. “Is this being recorded?”
Gabriel held up both hands, innocent and empty.
“Like that would stop you—”
“I’m not recording, Dev. I’m just asking.”
The conversation stalled for a split second, hanging uncertainly between them, before something shifted and Devon bowed his head with an inaudible sigh.
“Rae has dealt with a lot of crap in her life,” he answered, keeping his eyes on the desk as he fiddled with his own drink. “A lot of things that should never...” He trailed off, lifting his gaze to the wall. “There’s a chance this one is my fault. There’s a chance I somehow triggered this whole thing by taking Kraigan out to lunch. If I hadn’t tried to mend things, then maybe—”
Gabriel held up a silencing hand, caught off guard by the quiet angst in his voice. It had never occurred to him that Devon might be taking this personally. And while he didn’t agree for an instant, he knew his friend well enough to know that assurances weren’t the answer. He wanted to fix things. He wanted to neutralize the problem, before it had a chance to fall upon his wife.
“So let’s go to the museum,” Gabriel said simply.
Devon glanced over in surprise. “What?”
“Let’s go to the museum and fix it.” The assassin pushed to his feet without another word—taking his coat off the rack and tossing the other over his shoulder.
Devon caught it with a blank expression, unable to process how abruptly things had changed. It wasn’t until Gabriel grabbed his wrist that he scrambled to his feet. “Wait—you mean, right now?”
IT WAS JUST AN HOUR before closing when Gabriel and Devon stepped through the doors at the British Museum, wedged between screaming children and rowdy tourists taking pictures of everything in sight. They flashed a pained smile at the ticket booth and presented their arms for wristbands, deliberately avoiding each other’s eyes as they filed sheepishly inside.
“This feels so weird,” the fox muttered, fidgeting with the band.
His eyes darted around the entryway, torn in a hundred different directions, assessing every juice-box-wielding toddler as a possible threat. Gabriel chuckled softly, raking back his hair.
“Come on,” he teased, “you’ve never done something like this?” They stepped aside to make room for a Japanese tour group. “Just think of it as government-sponsored recon.”
Devon flashed him a hard look. “You remember that it’s all government-sponsored recon, right? You remember that you technically work for the government, and there’s never a reason to do things another way?”
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
“Sure.” Gabriel flashed an easy smile, pulling him to the stairs.
There were maps and directions posted along every wall—plaques that told them helpful things like you are here, and this is probably where you’re going. But they never gave them more than a passing glance. Helpful as they might be, things like that didn’t offer the kind of information they were looking for. Services entrances and storage closets. The location of the employee break room.
They would make their own map. It was the reason they’d come.
“How did you know the guard change was every five hours?” Gabriel asked, breezing past a bust of Louis XIV that looked suspiciously like their Uber driver.
