Chapter Three

Two weeks later

Griffin

"Not a chance in hell," I said with as much steel in my voice as I could muster. "I can't believe you're even asking me." Cade's sigh was the same long-suffering one I remembered from when we were kids and I wouldn't give him something that belonged to me. Even then, he'd been used to getting his own way. Just in case I hadn't quite hammered the point home, I added more. "Send John. He'll bitch and moan about it, but you know he'll do it. He likes to pretend he's fierce and doesn't give a fuck, but the majority is nothing but bluster."

Cade got up and went over to his office window to stare out at the impressive view of the London skyline, tension etched in every line of his back. "I can't."

"Why?"

Cade turned back to face me, his expression grave. "Three reasons."

I crossed one leg over the other and sat back in my chair. "I'm all ears."

"Reason one… he's pissed at me."

"What's new? When is he not?" I might spend most of my time avoiding my work colleagues, but I knew enough about what was going on in the department to have an opinion on it.

Cade sighed. "Not like this. I'm talking really pissed." When I shrugged, he continued. "Reason two… his license to practice necromancy is currently suspended. I'm working to get it back, but it's going to take time."

My eyebrows rose. "Suspended! Why? What'd he do?" I sat forward, eager to hear all the juicy details.

Cade rubbed a hand over his brow, the action speaking of a great weariness. "He raised a graveyard full of the dead. It was for the right reason, but you know what the board can be like about unsolicited action. I've submitted a written report detailing how there was no other option, but it'll be the usual story. They'll spend weeks picking holes in it before they finally back down."

"Arseholes," I supplied at the mention of the necromancy council. I'd had more than a few run-ins with them over the years when they'd taken exception to the way I did things. They were very good at sitting behind their desks and making up long lists of rules and regulations without ever setting foot in the field. "You said three reasons. What's the last one?"

"He's currently out of the country. He's gone on holiday with his new boyfriend. Oh, and then there's the small matter of him possibly not even working here anymore. He kind of told me where I could stick my job. "

I smirked. "Bet you deserved it."

"I did." Cade circled back to take the seat opposite mine.

I gave another shrug. "Okay. Not John, then. Send Calisto. Sell it to him as a wonderful opportunity to broaden his horizons and make new contacts. He's gullible enough to buy it."

Cade treated me to the most scathing look he'd ever given me in all the decades of us being friends. "You think Calisto would survive a secondment to CID?"

I considered it for a few seconds. "It might toughen him up a bit."

Cade didn't even warrant that with a response. "It's you or it's nobody."

I rolled my neck from one side to the other, trying to rid myself of the tension that had crept into my shoulders. "Then I guess it's nobody."

Cade shook his head. "You know how it works between me and the boys in blue. I scratch their backs and they scratch mine. We have an agreement that's worked perfectly for years. You've even reaped the benefits of it a time or two. I don't want to put that in jeopardy by saying no to them." He turned pleading eyes my way. "Come on, Griffin. I don't ask much of you. I give you all the best shifts. I don't complain when you don't turn up to work. I listen to John bitch about you and don't say a word against you." His eyes narrowed. "I don't even complain when you turn up stinking of booze."

"Wow! Low blow," I said.

"But true," Cade countered.

"What do they even want with me? It's not exactly standard procedure for the police to call on the services of a necromancer. "

"DCS Baros wouldn't say. He wants a meeting with you. I presume he'll tell you what he has planned, then."

I hung my head while I tried to think. I was the master of wriggling out of things I didn't want to do, but I couldn't help but feel that in this situation, the net was closing in on me. I wasn't about to give up that easily, though. "You know why I'm so against it, don't you?"

"Of course I do." Cade let out a sigh. "How many police officers are there in London?"

I let out a snort. "What is this, Mastermind? If it is, I hardly think I'd choose London's Met as my specialist subject. I'd go for something far more interesting, like whiskeys of the world."

"Yeah, you'd be an expert at that."

I let the dig go. I was beginning to think Cade had been under a lot of pressure in the past few weeks, presumably linked to the John situation—which I'd known nothing about. Sure, I'd worked more, but that happened occasionally. And then it came to me, John's absence the perfect excuse. "You need me here. The department can't function with just one necromancer. Not unless you're planning to make Calisto work twenty-four hours a day."

"I've pulled a few strings and requisitioned someone from Scotland. They'll be here tomorrow." Cade held his finger up in a warning. "And before you suggest it, no, they can't be seconded to CID instead of you. They don't know London and I don't know them. I'm not willing to stake the reputation of the PPB on someone I haven't even met yet." Cade pulled his phone out of his pocket and typed something in. "As of 2022, there were 33,984 police officers in London."

"Fascinating statistic," I drawled.

"You know what I'm getting at. "

Yeah, I knew. He was trying to point out that the likelihood of me bumping into a certain police officer I'd once been involved with and had thought I'd marry, was virtually zero. "That's the entire force. Not CID."

Cade dutifully typed something else into his phone. "5666 qualified detectives."

Silence wrapped around me, Cade biding his time. "I'll go to the meeting," I eventually said after too long of a stalemate. "But I'm not promising anything more than that."

"Fine," Cade said, sitting back in his seat. "Let's take it one step at a time. Call me after the meeting once you know what they want and we'll discuss it. At least if you go to the meeting, I can claim I've done my part. I'll have delivered a necromancer to their doorstep, and it won't be my fault if they didn't convince you to fall in with their plans."

Evening found me where it usually did these days, frequenting Purple Paradise. Despite being in the middle of serving someone, Flynn threw a flirtatious wink my way. We hadn't fucked on the night I'd taken him home with me. Instead, we'd talked until the early hours. Not about anything particularly earth shattering. Just books and films and restaurants, and about how long he'd worked here and what he did when he wasn't at work. Somewhere along the line, one of us—or maybe it was both—had decided we'd be better off as friends. And I was completely fine with that. I didn't need any more complications in my life than I already had .

He served me my usual, an opportunity to talk not arising until the crowds had thinned. Flynn leaned on the bar to scrutinize me, his study far more searching than I would have liked. "Okay. What's got you looking even more gloomy than usual?"

"You can tell?"

He grinned. "I can tell. You work a bar for long enough, you become an expert on people's moods. Helps you to know the best way to treat all the drunks. Some need kid gloves and treating like they're a naughty child. While others respond better to military commands."

I raised an eyebrow. "So… it's your bar work that gives you all the expertise, is it? Not the degree in psychology you're doing?"

Flynn's grin grew wider. "Bit of both, probably." A devilish light glinted in his eyes. "I handled you okay, didn't I?"

"Are you calling me a drunk?" My words might have been more convincing if I hadn't brought the tumbler to my lips a millisecond later and taken a long swallow.

"If the cap fits." Flynn leaned forward slightly. "Listen…" When I started lifting the tumbler again, he pulled it away from my lips and polished the rest off himself.

"Hey!"

"After my shift's over," he continued, my protest falling on deaf ears, "let's go to a club."

"A club?" There was no holding back my snort of laughter. "Can you see me at a club?"

Flynn's once-over was slow and considered. "Yeah, I can. Bet I can even get you on the dance floor if I try hard enough."

"I sincerely doubt that."

A group of slightly inebriated women arrived at the bar and Flynn moved off to serve them, tossing "challenge accepted" back over his shoulder, the wink that accompanied his words the second of the night.

I shook my head. Maybe it would be good to get out of my comfort zone. After all, it wasn't like I'd never been clubbing before. It had just been a while, my life narrowing to a dark tunnel where nothing existed except work and whiskey, and there had been rather more of the latter than the former. A lot more. I toyed with my empty glass. Normally, I would have asked for another, but maybe it was time to do something different. Time to live again. Perhaps this newfound friendship was exactly what I needed.

Flynn won his challenge, getting me on the dance floor in under an hour. I couldn't claim to be the world's best dancer, but then neither was he, and it didn't seem to bother him. What he lacked in technique, he more than made up for in sheer enthusiasm, plenty of men responding to his animal magnetism by dancing closer, keen to catch his eye. I would have forgiven him for straying, but he remained resolutely focused on me.

When I found myself crammed in a bathroom stall with him, with his lips against my neck, it seemed like the evening had reached its natural progression. "I thought we were friends," I managed as he dropped to his knees, his fingers busy with my zipper.

He craned his neck back, his eyes shiny and his lips glossy. Lips that would stretch around my cock if I didn't put a stop to this. The flesh was weak, though. So weak. And so fucking needy. Flynn laughed as he eased my stiff cock out of my jeans. "We are."

I leaned my head back against the wall, vaguely aware of the sounds outside the bathroom stall: talking; someone washing their hands; someone laughing; the click of the door as someone entered the stall next to us and locked it. "Won't this ruin it?"

Flynn grasped my cock at the base. "Don't tell me you've never had a friend with benefits before, Griffin?"

"Is that what we are?"

Flynn didn't answer. Probably on account of him having his mouth full. A bubble of drunken laughter escaped my lips as I considered whether Flynn's good upbringing had taught him not to speak with his mouth full. Right. Like his mother had taught him blow jobs 101. And then I gave myself up to the pleasure. I might have many faults, but turning down a free blow job wasn't one of them. If this was what Flynn wanted, the least I could do was lie—lean—back and think of England.

Afterwards, we returned to the dance floor for another hour of dancing, the activity making us sweat enough that by two in the morning, we were gulping down glasses of water at the bar rather than anything alcoholic.

"You've had a good time, right?" Flynn asked, the slight smirk on his face saying he already knew the answer, but wanted to hear me say it.

"I have," I agreed, not churlish enough to lie through my teeth. Given how good he was at reading people, he would have seen through it, anyway.

"Good." He smiled and then hooked a hand behind my neck to pull me forward. The kiss surprised me enough that I didn't immediately respond. In the bathroom he'd sucked my cock, and I'd given him a hand job because it would have been rude not to, but we hadn't kissed. I finally got with the program, Flynn tasting of sweat and youthful exuberance as we learned each other's mouths, the combination heady.

"Friends with benefits," he said as he pulled back.

When he laughed at my expression, I played it cool, gulping down another half a glass of water while I regained my composure. "I'll admit," I said, "that I'm beginning to appreciate some of those benefits."

He pressed a hand to my chest and leaned closer. "I bet you are. I bet you're thinking about what it would be like to fuck me."

I hadn't been, but now I was, my cock straining against my zipper. Would that happen tonight? Flynn had already turned to peruse the dance floor. Have you got any brothers and sisters?" he asked.

"What?"

He turned his head to snare me in his gaze. "You're a mystery man, Griffin. I'd like to know a bit more about you. I thought we could start with some background detail. Family seemed as good a place as any. So have you?" When I continued to stare at him, he repeated the question. "Brothers and sisters? It's not a state secret, surely?"

It was like being at the end of a dark tunnel. I could hear what Flynn was saying, but it was just noise. And the rest of the club had ceased to exist altogether. What was I even doing here when I would be thirty-seven in a few months' time? I was too old to be reliving my youth. What was next? Would I buy myself a red sports car and drive around London with my elbow hooked over the door, playing obnoxious music at a volume loud enough to burst eardrums ?

Deep down, I knew the club had nothing to do with any of these feelings, and they were linked to the word Flynn had just used. If ever there was a trigger word for me, it was that one. Sister. Such a simple word. Only two syllables. But bringing with it such a rush of complex feelings, it might as well have been one of those activation words you saw in films. The ones where brainwashed soldiers went from being perfectly normal people to embarking on a massacre of gigantic proportions.

"Griffin? Hey, Griffin? Are you okay? You've gone pale."

Hands pulled me toward him. To do what, I didn't know. Hug me? Shake me? Take me somewhere else in the club. Back to the bathroom stall, maybe. I struggled free, needing to put some distance between us.

"I have to go home." My voice didn't sound like it belonged to me, both hoarse and clipped at the same time.

"Yeah, sure… It's late. I get that." Flynn's expression didn't say he got it, though. His expression said he didn't know what the fuck was going on. He struggled to get his phone out of his pocket, the denim tight enough to make it difficult. "I'll call a cab."

"No…" I was already backing away. Nothing felt right anymore. The club was too hot. My clothes were too tight. My mouth was too dry. I needed out of here and I needed to be on my own. I needed whiskey. Lots of whiskey. Enough that I didn't have to think about that innocent question—do you have a sister? Because I'd had one once, but not anymore, and that was something that ate away at me every second of every day. "I need to walk."

Flynn came a step closer. "I'll walk with you."

"No!" The word came out as sharp as a whip crack. I took a deep breath and tried again. "Thank you, but… "

"Whatever I said, whatever I did… I'm sorry. I wish you'd tell me what it was and then I can make sure I don't do it again."

Shaking my head, I turned on my heel and strode away, pushing my way past anybody who didn't move out of the way fast enough. The night air was a refreshing balm as I finally stepped outside and took off down the street. I might have been going the right way to get home, or I might have been heading in a completely different direction. Only time would tell.