Death's Ink Black Shadow (7 page)

He’d made one or two since with Nikolas—foolish declarations, name changes.

This was probably the dumbest thing he’d ever done.

He was stuck on a ferry on the North Sea on his own for no reason whatsoever. But more than this, Nikolas had achieved the very thing he’d wanted to—driving Ben away—and he hadn’t actually had to do anything. Nikolas was now back with Steven in London, and Ben was fucking miles away, heading in the wrong direction.

At least Steven now knew Nikolas was gay.

Ben smirked at the thought of the conversations Nikolas might now be enduring and wished he’d told Steven a little more about his father’s preferences in bed. Mentioned the cock word, perhaps. There was quite a lot he could have said. Nikolas had a lot of interesting predilections. In and out of bed, come to think of it.

It was a long night. He had to think about something.

When they docked in Esbjerg, Ben sat in the terminal waiting for a return berth. Who else was so lucky to have a two-day cruise on the North Sea?

He was tempted to call Nikolas and tell him he wasn’t staying for the week on Aeroe after all, that he was coming home, but couldn’t be bothered to be put through to voicemail again.

When he docked back at Harwich, exhaustion weighed him down.

The car was gone, of course.

He had to take the train.

Public transport was a pisser, and for a moment he allowed himself to appreciate a certain billionaire more than he had been doing for the past forty-eight hours.

Ben arrived back at the house by taxi late in the evening. There was no light on downstairs. He heard a noise from the bedroom and jogged up the stairs.

The light was on low.

But it was enough to see by.

Jackson Keane was sprawled naked on his belly on the bed.

He was cutting a line of coke onto the back of his hand.

The door to the shower opened.

Nikolas came out.

He was also naked.

§ § §

Ben had never used the expression heard a pin drop before, but now it played on a loop in his head,
heard a pin drop, heard a pin drop, heard a pin drop
because it was—so quiet you could have heard the tiny plink of metal hitting the old wood boards.

Jackson snorted the coke on his hand, which broke the absence of noise in the moment.

Ben stumbled out of the room. He tripped at the top of the stairs and had to grab the banister.

Nikolas followed him out, his eyes so dark and cold Ben wondered if he was actually the same man, his bizarre thought that Aleksey
had
died returning to him.

“I tried to tell you. You never listen to me, Benjamin.” Ben backed down the stairs. Nikolas tied the towel he’d been holding around his waist and followed him. “Do not just storm out. Listen to me. Ben, listen to me.”

Ben couldn’t hear anything over the rush in his ears. He assumed it was blood, but it sounded more like air—as if he was flying very fast, being sucked very hard down a tunnel. He felt Nikolas’s hand on his arm and was drawn into the kitchen and eased into a chair. Nikolas leant on the counter, his superb, long, lean body displayed in all its beauty.

Even now, even
now
Ben couldn’t see the corruption beneath the surface. But he knew it was there.

Nikolas’s gaze had not left him all this time. It was why Ben hadn’t just gone. He was pinned by the weight of the horror of seeing Nikolas look at him like that. “Go back to Devon. You have Babushka and Emilia. Bring Molly Rose to you as well. She is yours, and they won’t fight it for long. I will assist with that if you need me to. We can still be friends. If you want. I would like that. After a while though. Not now, perhaps. I understand that.”

Pin drop, pin drop. Get the fuck out of my head!
Ben’s mouth was too dry to speak. But his eyes were welling. How could he have moisture for one but not the other? He dashed his arm across his face as something nudged his leg. Radulf.

It was too much. “
Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck
!” He couldn’t breathe. He felt a hand on his neck, pushing his head down. Everything swam around him.

“Ben. Breathe.” Nikolas shook him a little, and Ben pulled away, shoving blindly at Nikolas and stumbling for the door.

A hand held him back. “You can’t leave like—”

Ben turned and punched Nikolas.

He’d never hit him before in unadulterated anger.

Never caught him so completely unawares.

Nikolas went down, skidding on the kitchen tiles.

He was bleeding. His nose had never fully recovered from being broken on Aeroe.

Ben didn’t care.

He didn’t.

At last. He was
free
of this man.

He clipped Radulf to his lead and took him, too.

Nikolas didn’t deserve their dog.

Nikolas didn’t deserve
anything
.

§ § §

He needed to get to Tim’s.

It was all he could think of to do.

But the car wasn’t in the garage. Neither was his bike.

Everything was too surreal to worry about these things, so he led Radulf back to the street and hailed a taxi.

Tim was in bed.

With Squeezy.

Ben was ridiculously pleased to see this and told them so for some time, until they could get him to calm down and tell them what had happened.

He stopped himself then. He’d never really told them anything about Nikolas. Their odd relationship was private. It always had been.

But then he told them.

Why shouldn’t he?

Nikolas didn’t deserve his loyalty.

He didn’t.

Tim looked sick. It had happened to him. He knew. Ben tried to tell him that this was nothing like John. This was…then he saw it, if he hadn’t seen it already. This was exactly like John. Nikolas had found someone else at last.

They
were over.

Ben doubled up and was sick over the kitchen floor.

He couldn’t breathe because he was vomiting and sobbing at the same time. Radulf began to whine in distress, and then Tim began to cry, and it was only Squeezy who was doing anything practical, but that simply consisted of swearing—but his curses were more use than the noises the other three were making. The profanity brought Ben back to himself and he tried to apologise, tried to clear up the mess, until Squeezy just grabbed him and hugged him.

No one slept that night. They allowed Ben to talk, to go over and over what had happened, what had led to it, what Nikolas had said or not said. It was all for nothing. Dawn arrived. He had a splitting headache, a sore throat, and was no further forward in trying to escape the nightmare he was in.

A couple of hours later, Squeezy left them. Tim said he was going to fetch some more milk, as three Englishmen in crisis can go through a lot of tea. They had fifteen mugs already on the table as no one could face washing up.

Ben realised he had to take Radulf out, that he ought to put some thought into where his bike was, or the car, how he was going to get home to Devon, and then he stopped thinking, for all he could see was a dark tunnel ahead of him. He’d seen one of those before and had done something…uncharacteristic.

The dark future of his life without Nikolas.

However, when he’d seen this solution before, he’d still loved Nikolas and had wanted to be with him. The scar on his wrist was visible evidence of his
commitment
.

Now…he didn’t love Nikolas. He
hated
him. But the tunnel was very seductive, nevertheless, its darkness beckoning him, because in the dark he wouldn’t suffer how much he hated Nikolas, how painful that realisation was, how raw it made him feel. The table was suddenly too hard to lean on, the skin on his arms too tender and bruised. The light in the room was too bright and his eyes ached. He shut them. That was better.

He felt a hand on his arm and snapped his eyes open.
Nikolas
!

It was Tim. He was watching Ben cautiously. “Go to bed for a bit, maybe?”

Ben nodded. He wouldn’t sleep, but he wanted to be out of the kitchen and away from everyone for a while.

He went to the guest room and lay down.

He was offered unconditional love when Radulf slowly heaved himself, uninvited, onto the bed next to him, his old, whiskery chin placed just so on Ben’s belly, his unseeing eyes raised knowingly to Ben’s face. Ben wondered if dogs didn’t need sight to see all that ever needed to be seen. Unconditional love was unfortunate, however, given as it was then, for it not only put into contrast the gaping hole now left in Ben’s life, it showed only too well what he had enjoyed for the last ten or so years. Despite all the roil and tumble of life with Nikolas Mikkelsen, Ben had always been sure of one thing: Nikolas wanted him more than anyone else.

He could make out the faint sounds of the traffic on the London street. Another day starting as it always did, the world continuing on its disinterested diurnal schedule.

Sometime later, he heard voices and assumed Squeezy had come back with the milk.

He suddenly felt the need for more tea and rose, going back into the kitchen, his faithful companion click clicking after him on the laminate floor.

Squeezy turned quickly to the sink when they appeared, banging things around. Ben slumped into his chair. He was done talking about—whatever that man was called. He’d forgotten even the bastard’s name and needed to start thinking about things that were important in his life.

“My bike was stolen.”

Squeezy whirled around. “What? When?”

Ben started, then frowned deeply. “What happened—?” His eyes widened, and he shot to his feet. Squeezy had a black eye and his lip was split. “You went to see him?”

Squeezy could hardy claim he’d been mugged by the milkman.

Ben opened his mouth. Once more, infuriatingly, nothing came out. His thoughts were too much of a jumble. “What did he say?” It seemed a very simple thing to ask about such a momentous event.

Squeezy twitched his nose. “I didn’t go there to talk to him.”

Ben nodded, pleased. “You hit him?”

Squeezy rubbed his jaw. “He’s a big fucker, but yeah, I got a few in.”

“Is he—?” What was he going to ask? Is he okay? “Was he on his own?”

Squeezy shrugged. “I didn’t check the bed, Ben.”

Ben frowned. Something seemed off about this reply for some reason. Since when did Squeezy ever use anyone’s real name? He was about to frame another question when Tim offered, “We’ll drive you to Devon. You need to get home. Give yourself some perspective.”

Ben turned to him. “
Perspective
?”

Tim winced, apparently at something he could see in Ben’s expression. Ben closed his eyes. It wasn’t Tim’s fault.

It was no one’s fault but Nikolas’s.

CHAPTER NINE

Things were so awful when Ben got home he couldn’t cope with it all. For the last year or so, he and Nikolas had both made more effort to show the shared nature of their lives in their living spaces.

There were one or two pictures of Nikolas now, more of Ben, but some of them together, taken by their friends, which Ben had put up. They looked so unbelievably good together that it was hard to believe they were not models, actors, playing the roles of men deeply in love but trying not to show it.

Perhaps they were—just working to a script by an unseen hand.

Ben refused to think about it.

He found a plate of sandwiches pushed in front of him and discovered they’d been back over an hour. He hadn’t moved from the kitchen table in that whole time, the minutes just passing him by. He winced at the food, felt nauseous and shoved the plate away. Squeezy sat down alongside him and slid it back. “If you get sick it’ll only please the fucker. Eat and stay healthy and say
fuck you
to him by doing that.”

Ben stared at him. Squeezy held his gaze. Ben could see no sense in that at all.

Then he did.

He conjured Nikolas, and all there was left to give him was blood and pain.

Such oblations were not offered by the weak.

He considered the sandwiches and began to eat.

Squeezy nodded and muttered, “Yeah, exactly.”

Squeezy thought like him.

They were birthed and bred from the same mother and father. The same home.

Ben ate all the sandwiches and thought about revenge, and the food tasted the better for it.

Something of a calm settled on them all then. Even Radulf, reunited with his little scrap of blanket and his familiar basket by the range, stopped the low whine he’d kept up since…the incident.

Ben felt guilty. He suspected Nikolas sliding and bleeding across the kitchen tiles had been more the cause of the dog’s distress than the complexity of human emotion that had preceded it. For some reason, Radulf adored Nikolas. Ben couldn’t think why. He hated him.

A great deal more tea had been drunk by the time Ben came around to this conclusion, and the detritus lay about on the table: mugs, spoons, spilt sugar, squeezed-out bags. It was ugly. It ruined the perfection of his perfect house, his perfect kitchen. His perfect life. And then he saw a pair of Nikolas’s reading glasses on the counter next to a folded newspaper with the crossword half done. It was like a death. Ben mourned as if someone had died.
Something
had. He was
bereft
.

He began to cry again and was so embarrassed that he stood abruptly, knocking over the chair and going swiftly toward their—his—room at the back of the house.

It really didn’t help.

But then where was there to escape to when your whole life collapsed upon you?

§ § §

Sometime later, Tim came in and climbed onto the bed with Ben. They lay side by side.

“This isn’t very manly.”

Tim didn’t seem bothered. “Being manly’s never done shit for you, Ben. Try getting in touch with your feminine side for fucking once.”

“You’ve been hanging around Squeezy too long.”

“He hangs around me.”

Ben chuckled, and he hadn’t thought he’d be doing that for a while. “I should fuck you. I’ve always wanted to.”

“Almost did once.”

“Almost.” But he hadn’t because even then, even
then
he’d been in love with
the bastard
.