“The last time I saw him working a heavy bag,” Holmes said, still advancing, “he managed to trip over his own feet, get his shirt caught in the bag’s stand, and in the process, nearly hang himself.”

  “Of all the fuckery! That was bad luck! And you promised you weren’t going to tell anyone!”

  “This is who you’ve chosen for your defender.”

  “Right,” Paxton said, arms tightening around me. “Then maybe he’s my hostage.”

  The change in his tone was slight, but combined with the change in his body, it rang a warning bell in my head. I got more serious about breaking free, but Paxton pulled me back a step and lifted me until my toes were the only thing touching the floor. I’d seen him naked, knew he had muscle, but he was stronger than I’d expected, and my twisting and elbowing wasn’t doing anything to loosen his hold.

  “Go on then,” Paxton stage-whispered to me. “Beat me up and put on a good show for Hol, show him what his man can do.”

  Holmes stopped his advance. His face shuttered, and he folded his arms. “That’s enough, Paxton.”

  A smirk laced Paxton’s voice as he continued, “Or maybe we should flip the script, bruv. Make him jealous.” He kissed my cheek, and he smelled like sandalwood and that hint of tobacco, his stubble scraping my jaw. His voice was raspier when he added, “Look at him.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Holmes was glaring at us, that dead-ice look locking his face. Against all odds, it made me smile. I patted Paxton’s arm. “Let me down, big boy. It’s not fun for him.”

  “He’ll like it later, though,” Paxton said, but he released me, and my heels hit the floor. “Get his blood up, and he’ll be proper possessive when he gets you alone.”

  “You were in the process of leaving,” Holmes said. “Don’t let us stop you.”

  “He’s teasing you,” I said.

  “I know perfectly well what he’s doing. He never lets up; it’s unbearable.”

  That made Paxton laugh. He breezed past Holmes and opened the closet, and he laid out a washed pink oxford and navy chinos. “Are you going commando, luv?”

  “Get out!”

  Paxton threw a crooked smile and turned toward the door, but I grabbed his arm. “Nice try.” I pointed to the bed. “Sit.”

  “Worth a shot, innit? And he makes it so easy.” But he sat and spread his legs, and the joggers didn’t leave much to the imagination. He made a point of meeting my eyes as he adjusted himself. Then he winked. “Offers open. We could make him proper jealous.”

  I recalibrated. Apparently, a fuck boy with a dash of big brother was still, by and large, a fuck boy, and I wanted to know what that meant for the months they’d spent together. I tried to drag my focus back to more important things—at least, what other people would consider more important—and asked, “Want to tell us what’s going on?”

  He shook his head; the crooked smile was back. “Sorry, bruv. Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.”

  He shrugged.

  “Why did you need to talk to Lynnissa Baca?” Holmes asked.

  “Who?”

  He was so smooth he was like glass. If I hadn’t already known he was lying, I would have believed him.

  “Nice try,” I said again. “You texted her a week ago and said you needed to talk. About what?”

  “She a friend of yours? I haven’t been back to that school since I left, mate. Hand to God—ask Hol.”

  “This is serious,” Holmes said. “Lynnissa Baca was murdered after stealing something from Maggie. Someone killed her last night.”

  Paxton smoothed the bedding, shaking his head again. Then he muttered, “Shit.”

  “You didn’t know that? You’d better get ready for more questions; we won’t be the only ones who track that message back to you.”

  Paxton dry-washed his face.

  “You know something,” I said. “You texted her. You needed to talk to her. When we got here today, you were getting ready to run. What’s going on? Did you hire her to steal that stuff from Maggie?”

  “Sod off.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  “Are you taking the piss?” He dropped his hands and looked at Holmes. “Is he taking the piss?”

  “If you—”

  “I was in that tech boy’s bed last night,” Paxton said, still speaking to Holmes. “The little one who wears the jumpers. You want proof? He likes making videos.”

  “Pax,” Holmes said in a surprisingly soft voice, “what’s going on?”

  The hurt caved in Paxton’s face. “Yeah. All right. You want to know what’s going on? What’s going on is some serious shit, and you ought to leave. Get away from here. The same reason I’m running: because I’m a dead man if I don’t.”

  “Why did you send Baca that message?” I asked. “What did you need to talk to her about?”

  “You got something wrong with your fucking ears?”

  “Why did you send Baca that message? Why are you running? What’s going on—”

  He made a furious noise and started to stand, but I was faster, and I shoved him back onto the bed. He half-fell, the springs protesting under his weight, and he tensed. I could read it on his face: the internal debate, whether to attack and take his chances.

  “You’re not a punching bag,” I said, “and I tied my laces today. So don’t fucking try me.”

  The fight drained out of him, but he only shook his head.

  “What’s happening, Paxton?” Holmes asked. “You say run, but—”

  “I say run, but you don’t fucking listen, do you?” He sat up, elbows on knees. “And what the fuck is wrong with you? ‘I tied my laces.’ What the fuck kind of thing to say is that? Spoze I didn’t care about your fucking laces?”

  I decided to ignore that. Catching Paxton’s eye, I said, “You think you can run. That’s fine. But you know he won’t. And I think you care about him, even if you are just a fuckstick on two legs. Someone’s trying to frame him for this. Maybe they’re even trying to kill him. If you care about H, you need to tell us what you know.”

  “What I know,” Paxton said, an echo of a laugh trailing the word. “I don’t know shit, bruv. That’s the whole problem.”

  “The text to Baca.”

  “Fuck me.” He was silent, and in the distance, the hum of a vacuum filtered in from the next unit. “I met her at a Zodiac party. One of those team-building things. The tech boys play their video games and eat nachos, and the lot of them smell like unwashed socks.”

  “Why were you at a team-building exercise?”

  “I was keeping an eye on a bloke. I was interested.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He gave himself a tug through the joggers and cocked a smile at me.

  “You willingly chose to live with him?” I asked Holmes. “Again?”

  “It’s complicated,” Holmes said, and he blushed when Paxton laughed. “He has some redeeming qualities.”

  “Ok, you’re stalking your next hookup,” I said. “You go to this Zodiac event. And then what?”

  “I met Lynn. That’s what she went by, so you know. She stood out. Didn’t look like the rest of them. Didn’t act like the rest of them.”

  “How so?”

  “Confident. Assertive.” He shrugged. “I went home with her instead of the bloke.”

  “And?”

  “Do you know how it works with a girl? Same general idea, but—”

  “Paxton,” Holmes snapped.

  He smoothed the bedding again. The vacuum cleaner droned on the other side of the wall. When he spoke, he struggled with the first few words. “I have—had—a client. Someone interested in a few Zodiac assets. Proprietary stuff.”

  It took a moment before Holmes asked, voice charged with his shock, “You were stealing?”

  “Come on, luv. It’s a big company. It would’ve been fine.”

  “You were stealing from my father’s company? After everything he’s done for you?”

  Fury rippled under Paxton’s easygoing mask—there and then gone.

  “H,” I said quietly.

  “This is unbelievable,” Holmes said. “My father practically raised you—”

  “H,” I said more forcefully. When Holmes glanced at me, I shook my head. “Not right now.”

  After a moment, Holmes nodded, his mouth compressing into a line.

  “Go on,” I told Paxton.

  “The bloke, I thought he might be ready to flip. Why I went there in the first place, innit? Thought I could score with him, take it from there. But Lynn, Christ, she didn’t need any warming up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was mad, wasn’t she? Hated the Holmeses. Hated Maggie. Said Maggie had stolen her work. Kept talking about how she deserved compensation, that kind of thing. I don’t know the details, if that’s what you want to know. She worked with Maggie in the AI lab, and I got the feeling this was more of an excuse than anything. They had a whole history of arguments—she told me about them later, all the fights she had with Maggie. She kept saying she was going to quit. That’s who you want, you know. Someone who’s about to leave, someone with a chip on their shoulder. They’ll take something because they think its owed them, and they’ll sell it for cheap because they don’t know what to do with it once they have it.”

  Holmes’s expression tightened, and he opened his mouth, but when I made a gesture, he shut it again.

  “Luv, it was a tiny thing. It was nothing. I wouldn’t hurt you or your family.”

  “It was the AI lab,” Holmes said. “The single most important program in Zodiac. Don’t insult me, Paxton. And do not try to minimize this.”

  Paxton let out a breath and offered me a smile, one of those expressions like we were on the same side, and wasn’t Holmes being unreasonable, all that.

  I gave him nothing in return. “What happened with Baca?”

  “We hit it off,” he said. “Met up again for drinks. Met up a few times. I started laying out the pieces for her, and the more we talked around it, the more it seemed like she might be interested. She wasn’t just talking about quitting; she was sure Maggie was going to fire her. We hadn’t talked about it explicitly, but she kept saying she wanted a piece for herself, didn’t she deserve it, they’d stolen from her. Everything you want to hear.”

  “When did you decide to use the anniversary party as cover?” Holmes asked.

  Paxton held up empty hands. “We didn’t. She disappeared. Wouldn’t message me. Wouldn’t take my calls. Didn’t answer the door. I spotted her a few times, so I knew she was alive, but she didn’t want anything to do with me.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Someone got to her, didn’t they? That’s what it was. Had to be. Corporate security, maybe. If it was cold feet, she’d have told me. We were having fun; no reason to disappear unless someone told her to stay away from me.”

  “This asset you wanted her to steal,” Holmes said. “What was it?”

  “Got me, luv. An algorithm, I think. Something to do with the machine-learning side of AI. Couldn’t tell you what it was, though. Honest.”

  “How was it to be delivered?”

  “Huh?”

  But I understood Holmes’s question. “Was she supposed to retrieve a portable safe from Maggie’s office? Is that what your client wanted?”

  “A portable safe?”

  “Answer the question.”

  Paxton frowned, though, and he was looking at me too intently for my liking. “Would have been a flash drive, wouldn’t it? A bit of code, that’s all. Nobody said anything about a portable safe.”

  Holmes let out a breath and glanced at me. I shrugged.

  “What are you two on about?” Paxton asked.

  But it hit me again: his reaction when we told him. “You didn’t know Baca was dead.”

  “No,” he said. “I already told you that.”

  “So why were you running?”

  His hand stilled on the bedding. He made a face.

  “Paxton, why were you running?”

  For what felt like a long time, he held himself perfectly still. The vacuum cut off. The silence sounded like wind rushing in my ears.

  “Got home from the jumper boy’s place this morning,” he said, his voice stiff. “He was already here. In your room. Leaving that, I suppose.” He nodded at the oil-stained chukka, which Holmes had deposited near the closet. “He didn’t hear me; it’s the only reason I’m alive. I got out of here. I waited. When he left, I started grabbing everything I could. I’m sorry, Hol, I am. But I can’t help you. Nobody can. That’s why you need to run. Take him if you want—” He nodded at me. “—but run.”

  “Who did you see?” I asked. “Who was in here?”

  But Holmes’s face was pale, and the corner of his mouth trembled.

  “Blackfriar,” Paxton said with a weird, tight laugh. “Who else?”

  Chapter 13

  ’K Great Thanks Bye

  We let Paxton go because there was no point in keeping him. I locked the door behind him, and when I got back to Holmes’s room, he was holding the oil-stained chukka, turning it in his hands.

  “Later,” I said, taking it from him.

  He looked at me. His eyes were lusterless, the gray of scuffed concrete. He’d bitten his lip while I’d been out of the room. Once, I guessed. He’d only allowed himself to do it once. I thumbed away the blood, and he flinched at the touch.

  “Shower,” I said. “Clean clothes. Food.”

  “My father—”

  “Later.”

  I walked him to the bathroom, got the water running in the shower, and tugged on the overalls until he slapped my hand. He looked down, and he made an unhappy noise that was supposed to be a laugh. I used one finger under his chin to tilt his head up. We were the same height, and we were so close his breathing wove together with mine. I waited until he met my eyes. It was our thing, or it had been, and I wanted to know—what? I didn’t want to think about that too closely.

  “Not now,” he said softly. “Please not now.”

  I pretended to consider it. “Five minutes, bucko.”

  Then I went for the overalls again, and when he shoved me, I did a whole Three Stooges routine on my way out of the room.

  Holmes lived for this stuff, I’m telling you.

  I went to the kitchen next. A quick check of the cabinets and pantry and fridge made it look like no one lived there: paper plates, plastic forks, a roll of paper towels. The only thing that might pass for food in a court of law was the meal-replacement shakes lined up in perfect rows inside the fridge. It was easy to imagine Holmes living like this for months—absorbed in his work, forgetting to eat until Paxton wandered in from his latest hookup and forced him to drink a shake.

  Well, I thought, fuck that.

  My phone buzzed with a text from Rowe: Dude, where are you?

  And then another: Your dad is pissed.

  Back to the bathroom: the water was running, but it sounded like it was still coming out of the tub spout and not the shower head. I opened the door, already starting to speak, and froze.

  Holmes sat on the side of the tub, back to the door, feet under the running water. I had forgotten, over the intervening months, how pale he was: his body like a winter sky, darkened by the storm clouds of bruises rolling in. So many bruises. And scars, too—a crescent moon, a lightning bolt, a dark seam like a second horizon low on his back He was lines in so many places: hard, beautiful, rigid lines that marked the limits of that pale perfection. A universe of order and straight paths and unbent trajectories, like Holmes himself. But when he moved, bending to hold his hand under the water, to splash it against his legs, he was the arc of his biceps, the knob of shoulder and vertebrae, the elliptic of that jack-in-the-box ass.

  He started to turn, and I yanked the door shut.

  “Jack?”

  I counted to ten silently. I thumped my head against the jamb. I wondered if he’d be polite enough to help me drown myself after he finished his bath.

  “Is everything all right?” Holmes called.

  I opened the door an inch. “Yep. Great. Everything’s great.”

  The water splashed, the sound of it changing as it filled the tub.

  “Are you sure?”

  I laughed. A lot. Way too much. “Everything’s super.” And since I was sure I’d never in my life said super about anything, I rushed to add, “I’m running out to pick up some food, so I’m taking your keys, and I’m locking the door behind me.”

  “I’m not hungry—”

  “’k great thanks bye.”

  There have been a lot of embarrassing retreats in my life, but I think I had a new winner.

  It wasn’t far to Bruges—they had another location in Provo, plus food trucks, and Ariana had introduced me to them last year. I used the ride to listen to Nirvana turned all the way up. I figured if I popped my ear drums, I wouldn’t have to answer any future questions from Holmes about why I had turned into such a raving weirdo. I kept seeing the cruciform of spine and shoulders, the flex and torsion of muscle as he bent. When I got to Bruges, I had to sit in the truck for a few minutes to wait for a certain predicament to, uh, go down.

  By the time I got back to the condo, Holmes was dressed in a pair of turquoise trunks and the pink oxford Paxton had picked for him, trying to do the buttons. He wasn’t doing too bad a job of it, but his face showed his frustration, so I dropped the food on the table and helped him.

  When I’d done up the last button, I asked, “Ready?”

  “As I told you—”

  “Great.” I met his eyes.

  For a moment, he tried to squirrel away. Then his eyes came to mine. His mouth gentled at the corners, softened, bent.

  “Grade A dork. Still.”

  The steel flashed down. “You are insufferable.”

  “I know. Let’s eat.”

 

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