Chapter 15: Beneath the Sheets
The first thing Nino registered was warmth. A deep, liquid heat enveloping him, pulling him up from the thick layers of sleep. Then, the sensation clarified: smooth, practiced pressure. A coaxing, rhythmic suction. He groaned, a sound ripped from the marrow of his bones before his brain even engaged.
His eyes fluttered open to the dim, gold-washed room. The city’s dawn was a grimy halo around the blackout drapes. Caius was a shapeless mound under the silk duvet, the fabric rising and falling with his movements. Only the crown of his dark hair was visible above the covers, a shifting shadow against Nino’s hips.
“Christ,” Nino rasped, his voice gravel from sleep. He sank his hands into that hair, not guiding, just holding on. “Way to wake a man up.”
There was no answer, just a deliberate, slow swallow that made Nino’s thighs tense. Caius’s head lifted slightly, the duvet slipping to reveal his profile, his cheeks hollowed. He released Nino with a soft, wet sound, his tongue lapping at the glistening head in a torturously slow circle before taking him deep again. It was relentless, unsentimental efficiency. An act of focused reclamation.
Nino let his head fall back against the pillows, the tendons in his neck standing out. This wasn’t the scared omega from the restaurant, nor the surrendering lover from hours before. This was the other Caius. The one who operated on a logic of cause and brutal effect. Who was saying, without words, I am here. This is mine.
His climax built, a tight coil low in his gut. His fingers tightened. “Caius…”
Caius pulled off, his breath cool. He surfaced from under the duvet, his lips slick and parted, his eyes clear and unsettlingly direct in the low light. “Good morning,” he said, his voice calm. Then he swallowed him down to the root and Nino came with a choked shout, his vision whiting out at the edges.
For a long moment, the only sound was Nino’s ragged breathing. Caius lay his head on Nino’s thigh, a gesture that could have been tender if not for the assessing look in his eyes. He watched Nino come down, detached as a scientist observing a reaction.
Nino finally dragged a hand over his face. “You’re a menace before coffee.”
“I am efficient before coffee,” Caius corrected softly. He sat up, the duvet pooling around his waist. The morning light caught the faint scars mapping his torso—a pale topography of another life. “The mind is clearest upon waking. Uncluttered by the day’s trivial data.”
“And this was your idea of a system purge?” Nino asked, his breath still uneven.
“A grounding exercise.” Caius leaned over, picking up Nino’s watch from the nightstand. He tapped the crystal. “It’s 6:47 a.m. Sera will be here in twenty-three minutes with the overnight reports on Alden. We should be dressed.”
Nino caught his wrist before he could move. The skin was warm, the pulse steady. He searched Caius’s face. The ghost was front and center, cool and operational. “Hey. You back with me?”
Caius held his gaze. “I never left. I was just running a different subroutine.” A faint, almost imperceptible softening at the corner of his mouth. “The manual override was… effective. The system is now optimized for new objectives.”
He slipped from the bed, naked and unconcerned, moving to the ensuite bathroom. The shower kicked on a second later.
Nino stared at the ceiling. The smell of gun oil and sex hung in the air. He could still feel the phantom heat of Caius’s mouth.
A grounding exercise. He barked a short, rough laugh. Only his husband could give a world-class blowjob and frame it as a tactical diagnostic.
By the time he’d pulled on dark trousers and a tight black tee, the scent of espresso cut through the other smells. Caius was in the kitchen, already dressed in soft gray linen pants and a simple white shirt, sleeves rolled precisely to his elbows. He handed Nino a small cup without looking, his attention on a tablet propped next to the pour-over setup.
“Sera’s early,” Caius said. “She’s in the lobby. Agitated.”
“How do you know?”
“The security feed on the tablet. Her pacing pattern is 23% faster than her baseline.” He took a sip of his own coffee, black. “She’s holding a folio under her arm. Tightly.”
The elevator dinged a moment later. Sera strode in, her heels sharp against the floor. She did look agitated. Her usually impeccable bob was slightly frayed at one temple, and the shadows under her eyes were a shade darker than her light makeup could conceal.
“You two look disgustingly fresh,” she said by way of greeting, dropping the thick leather folio onto the kitchen island with a thump. “Meanwhile, I’ve been up since four tracing digital breadcrumbs that lead to a fucking bonfire.”
“Alden?” Nino asked, leaning against the counter.
“Alden,” Sera confirmed, flipping the folio open. “He didn’t sleep. His team spent the night running forensics on the ‘novelty’ drive you so generously left him with.”
Caius didn’t look up from his coffee. “And?”
“And they confirmed it does play ‘Happy Birthday’ in a tinny MIDI format. Which has made him, predictably, paranoid and furious. He’s concluded the entire restaurant encounter was a deliberate misdirection.” She pulled out a series of grainy photographs, sliding them across the marble. “But he’s smart. He stopped looking for what you wanted him to see, and started looking for what you didn’t.”
The photos showed various angles of the restaurant’s service entrance, the valet bay, the alley. In one, Nino and Sera were blurred figures slipping through a door.
“He identified you, boss. And me. He’s pulling every thread on the Moretti family, going back three generations. This is no longer about a nervous omega with a drive. It’s a full-scale, quiet declaration of war.” She finally looked at Caius, her gaze sharp. “He’s also requested the closed-circuit footage from every camera within two blocks of the restaurant. High-resolution enhancement. He’s looking for you, Caius. Not the crying husband. The man who walked in and out.”
Caius set his cup down with a precise click. “The feed from our car?”
“Scrubbed. The valet bay camera had a coincidental malfunction. The alley camera was sprayed with an acidic substance from a passing… pigeon.” Sera’s mouth tightened. “But he has other resources. Facial recognition from the lobby, reflections in the windows of passing cars. It’s a matter of time before he pieces together a composite that doesn’t match the ‘confused omega’ profile.”
Nino felt a familiar, cold anger settle in his gut. “So we accelerate the timeline. We burn the libraries today.”
“About that,” Sera said, pulling another sheet from the folio. It was a list of names, addresses, and alphanumeric codes. “The ‘Gwydion’ and ‘Thorn’ files Caius fabricated… Alden is purging them. Or trying to. He’s sending teams to four locations—two data-havens downtown, a private server farm in Virginia, and a physical archive in a D.C. townhouse. He wants every trace of those project names wiped before anyone else can ‘stumble’ upon them.”
A slow, frigid smile spread across Caius’s face. It was the first genuine expression Nino had seen on him that morning, and it held no warmth at all. “Perfect.”
“Perfect?” Sera echoed. “He’s cleaning up the decoy. Our bait worked too well; he’s erasing it.”
“No,” Caius said, his voice low and smooth. “He’s moving assets. He’s pulling trusted personnel from their regular duties and tasking them with a sensitive, off-book sanitization operation. Their focus is on the decoy. Their backs are turned to the real target.” He tapped the list. “These teams, their communications, their routes… they are the nervous system we infected. And now,” he looked up, his eyes glacier-calm, “we make it convulse.”
Nino straightened, understanding dawning. “We hit them while they’re exposed.”
“We don’t just hit them,” Caius corrected. “We let them do the hard work of accessing their own secure facilities. And then we harvest them. Each team is a treasure trove of access codes, protocol bypasses, and black-site operational data. They are the keys, walking right into the locks.”
Sera stared at him, then let out a low whistle. “You sandbagged him. The drive was never the point. The panic was.”
“The panic is always the point,” Caius said, turning to look out the window at the waking city. “Director Alden is a bureaucrat. His instinct is to contain, to clean, to make messy problems disappear. We didn’t show him a problem he couldn’t clean. We showed him a spill, and now he’s mobilizing his entire covert janitorial staff. He’s bringing his darkness into the light for us.” He turned back, his expression serene. “We just need to be there to take pictures.”
Nino felt a surge of fierce, prideful heat. He looked at Sera. “Can we get crews to all four locations? Discrete, quiet?”
She was already typing on her phone, her fingers flying. “We have people who can be ghosts. But we’ll need coordination, real-time feeds. It’s a big board to play.”
“Then we play it.” Nino walked over to Caius, standing beside him at the window. He didn’t touch him. He just stood, shoulder-to-shoulder, looking out at the city they were about to plunder. “You set the trap with a whimper. How do we spring it with a bang?”
Caius was silent for a moment, his mind visibly whirring, sorting variables. “We don’t spring it. We help it along. A sanitization team encounters… unforeseen complications. A rival agency intercept. A systems crash that requires on-site tech support with less-than-loyal contractors.” He glanced at Nino. “You have people who can be thieves. I need people who can be chaos.”
Nino grinned. It was a predator’s smile. “Oh, cuore mio, I’ve got people who can be a goddamn Category Five.” He clapped a hand on Caius’s shoulder, feeling the solid muscle beneath the soft linen. “Give Sera the specifics. The when, the where, the how messy.”
Caius nodded, moving back to the island where Sera had already brought up schematics on her tablet. Their heads bent together, a Beta and an Omega plotting the evisceration of a government black ops director. Nino poured himself another espresso, watching them.
The sun was higher now, burning the gold out of the room, leaving everything clear and sharp-edged. The scent of gun oil was still there, but it was joined by the smell of strong coffee and imminent havoc.
He listened to the quiet, technical stream of Caius’s instructions—frequencies to jam, vehicular patterns to exploit, security systems whose backdoors he’d already mathematically deduced. It was a symphony of ruin.
Nino took a last bitter swallow from his cup. Today, they wouldn’t just burn libraries. They would steal the ashes and sell them to the highest bidder.
He smiled into the empty cup. It was, he decided, going to be a beautiful day.