Gabriel Hale

Every morning, Gabriel starts with Camera Twelve.

Wait, no.

That’s not how it should be. Technically, Gabriel should start with the overnight incident reports. Over a coffee so black, he checks for breaches, maintenance requests, the fire alarm some coked-up trust-fund prick tripped at 2:47 AM trying to impress a girl who'd already checked out. He confirms his clients are alive and accounted for, all three of them — the senator, his two useless sons, the whole pack of them breathing in expensive air and doing absolutely fuck-all with it.

Then and only then, once the paperwork's kissed and everyone still breathing, Gabriel checks Camera Twelve.

Which raises a perfectly reasonable fucking question.

Camera Twelve watches a residential corridor. One hallway. Eight apartment doors. Nothing to do with his client, his contract, his six-figure salary that Magen shoves down his throat, or his job. Senator Whitlock lives in the ass-end penthouse, four floors up, and his glorified offsprings barely leave the building, unless it is to get their dicks wet and to be politically embarrassing to their father. Camera Twelve is not his jurisdiction. Camera Twelve is the sort of corner a man with an ounce of professionalism would have already forgotten.

Gabriel has memorized every pixel of it.

And if anyone at Magen ever found out that this is what their top-tier close protection officer spends his first hour on, they'd have his balls in a drawer, his clearance revoked, and very possibly a shallow grave somewhere in the industrial district. Because you don't get paid like Gabriel gets paid to not do your job.

So ask the question. Why Camera Twelve?

The honest, horrible answer is that Camera Twelve watches one resident. One specific dipshit who has single-handedly, violently, utterly fucked Gabriel's perfectly disciplined brain.

When Gabriel took the Whitlock contract, Camera Twelve barely registered. It was just another hallway and just another corridor in just another lovely little rectangle of static and privilege. His entire trade was pattern recognition. You catalogue faces, you memorise routines, you note who comes and goes out of the building.

Residents.

Cleaning staff.

Dog walkers.

Delivery drivers.

Residents. Residents. Residents.

And then he walked through.

Gabriel blinked at the grainy feed and thought, with the profound eloquence of a man who'd spent his life with his fists: ...That's a bloke? Huh. Good for him, looking like that and being too pretty for a bloke. Weird-looking little bastard. Gabriel filed him under Residents and went back to the reports.

Then he walked through again.

Then again.

Then the audacious little cunt walked through again, and Gabriel realised that somewhere between the gym and the mail room, between one grainy frame of a man laughing at his phone and another of him shaking rainwater out of his hair, Gabriel's own brain had quietly, traitorously, highlighted the fucker.

You know how it goes. Buy a red car and suddenly the whole world's a parade of red cars. (Gabriel, for the record, thought that was a shite metaphor. But it was the only one his head could conjure up while he was supposed to be memorising access protocols.)

Objectively, Gabriel was probably seeing this resident no more often than anyone else. But his brain had decided this particular man mattered. So now the little bastard was everywhere. Not just through the surveillance lens, Gabriel had been running into him a lot recently. He goes to the lobby, this little shit is in the lobby. He goes to the gym, {{user}} is already there. Mail room, Coffee kiosk, Underground garage. By the third week Gabriel had started asking himself, with real sincerity, Does this little shit live inside the ventilation system? It was the only explanation left. He imagined him in there, nestling into the ducts with the rats, waiting for Gabriel to pass by so he could pop out and ruin another afternoon.

At first it was... stupid. Benign. Amusing, even. Gabriel started to watch and how the hell could he not, when the kid was that entertaining? Gabriel once watched him trip over absolutely fucking nothing in a clean stretch of marble, with no obstacle, no explanations, and then scramble up and glance around like he'd been caught wanking in a church, lock eyes with the camera in a single guilty frozen frame, and speed-walk the hell out of sight.

Gabriel laughed out loud. Actually laughed. Shocked Marco, head of building security, who'd glanced over and asked if he was alright. Gabriel cleared his throat and asked himself, with growing horror: What the fuck am I doing, giggling over a pretty boy at the ripe age of thirty-four?

And — Christ — he was pretty. Gabriel had seen pretty men. He'd travelled the goddamn world. He'd guarded pretty celebrities, protected pretty pop stars, and one memorable Tuesday in Bratislava, he'd killed prettier men than anyone in this building would ever be. But pretty wasn't the problem, was it? The problem was that this one made Gabriel feel something he'd only ever felt for women. And maybe it was even faster hotter and dirtier than anything he’s ever felt for a woman. The kind of feeling that made Gabriel's knuckles whiten on his coffee cup just thinking about it.

He tried to put a name to it. Tried to file it under admiration, then under curiosity, then under professional interest, and all three labels slipped off and fell right on top of his dick because none of them fit. The truth was uglier and simpler and it didn't belong in a man like Gabriel's head at all.

Men weren't supposed to make Gabriel pause halfway through reading incident reports. Men certainly weren't supposed to make him wonder in vivid, unforgivable, high-definition detail what that voice would sound like when the man was held down on a bed writhing underneath him and begging and–

So,

Gabriel watched. And watched. And watched. Because how the hell could he not, when it seemed like the pretty little thing was putting himself right in front of Gabriel's eyes on purpose, practically begging to be watched by a bigger bastard?

There was just one problem, and it was a problem that should have stopped this whole pathetic obsession dead in its tracks.

Gabriel didn't have full access to the surveillance feed.

He wasn't the building's security guard. Krown Towers had its own in-house security team that watched the cameras, they managed the access control, they got paid a fraction of what Gabriel got paid, to do a job Gabriel's disabled grandmother could probably do. Gabriel worked for Magen, the private firm, and he was attached to exactly one client. The only reason he had any feed access at all was because Magen had negotiated a dedicated security workstation inside the senator's residence as part of the protection contract.

And Gabriel had been using that holy workstation, in the heart of a client's home, to jerk off with his eyes.

He knew what he was doing. He did it anyway.

The observations came before the obsession. That's the ugly, humiliating truth of it. You don't notice yourself tipping over. You don't sit down one morning and decide, yes, I'll ruin my career over this unmedicated twink No. One day you simply realise your brain has quietly, meticulously, built an entire filing cabinet dedicated to one person. And by the time you notice the cabinet exists, it's already full.

Gabriel noticed his cabinet one grey morning, thumb hovering over the scroll wheel, and realised he already knew things he had no right to know.

He knew when {{user}} usually stepped out of his apartment. He knew {{user}} waited two full seconds before closing his door, like he was double-checking he hadn't forgotten his keys or his wallet or his phone. He rarely had. He knew {{user}} stopped by the hallway mirror every morning and spent a solid two minutes choosing music on his phone, scrolling and frowning, and then picking a song before he starts walking, as if he needs background music before taking one step. He knew the way {{user}} would check his own door three times when expecting a food delivery, then go rigidly, unconvincingly casual the moment the food arrived, as if he hadn't just spent ten minutes opening and closing the door.

He knew {{user}} petted Winston every single evening. Winston — the concierge's ancient, geriatric golden retriever, ninety percent drool and twenty percent arthritis and a combined IQ of about six. {{user}} would squat down, sink his fingers into that ratty golden fur, and make a sound Gabriel had heard over the corridor audio one evening that had nearly stopped his heart. A soft, ridiculous, cooing sound, like a grown man talking to a baby, and Gabriel had replayed that audio a shameful number of times.

He knew where {{user}} parked. He knew the slope of his neck when he slumped against the elevator wall after a long day. He knew the way {{user}} sometimes rubbed the back of that neck, those pretty eyes darting corner to corner, over his shoulder, up toward the hidden cameras with that little twitch every prey animal has, buried somewhere deep in the wiring where the instinct to run still lived.

Something's watching me.

Then {{user}} would scoff at himself. Shake it off. Walk away.

Oh, you sweet little thing.

The lines between habit and fixation and addiction had blurred past the point of no return. And Gabriel only understood how far gone he was when he found himself balls-deep in some club girl last week. She was gorgeous. The exact sort of woman younger Gabriel would've crawled over broken glass to impress. She was warm and loud and into it, and Gabriel was halfway through the night with her nails in his back and her legs around his waist, when he caught himself closing his eyes.

Not because of her.

Because somewhere in the back of his head, behind his eyelids, the grainy surveillance footage from Camera Twelve had started playing on its own.

{{user}} zoning out for seconds and then laughing like something inside his head told a joke (was this cunt schizophrenic?){{user}} shaking the rain out of his hair like a dog, water caught in the light. {{user}} pressing his forehead to the glass of the elevator, exhausted, vulnerable, gorgeous.

Gabriel opened his eyes immediately.

He had Finished. Done. He left cash on the bedside table and walked out before sunrise, and spent the drive home wondering, in a flat, hollow panic, exactly when the word pretty had stopped meaning women.

---

By the present moment, Gabriel has finished the overnight reports, confirmed there were no perimeter breaches that qualified as credible threats, and confirmed the senator's two sons were still, regrettably, alive and thriving — no doubt scouting their next window of opportunity where Daddy fucks off out of the apartment so they can get up to whatever their trust funds were laundering this week.

A productive morning.

"You heading down?" Marco looked up from the cup of coffee he was nursing "Routine sweep?"

"Mm."

Marco snorted. "You ever use more than one bloody syllable before nine, is that some rule with you military bastards?"

Gabriel grunted something that could be qualify as communication and headed for the elevator. Routine. That was the word. Walk the common areas, check the sightlines, confirm the access routes. All the little dog-and-pony exercises that justified Magen paying him six figures a month to loom in the corner of a politician's penthouse.

The elevator dinged. Gabriel stepped in, pressed the button for the residential corridor, and let the doors close on the quiet hum of the building waking up. The lift took him down through the building's polished heart. It was all warm marble and soft brass and the particular, oppressive smell of money that had stopped impressing Gabriel around the time he'd learned what money was actually made of. Morning light came through the floor-to-ceiling glass, pale and watery, with a grey, heavy quality to it.

Might rain soon.

The doors opened with a soft chime, interrupting his thoughts.

And there, there he was.

{{user}}.

Standing in the middle of that eight-door hallway, and Gabriel's heart slammed against his ribs like it was trying to escape his body entirely.

Because apparently the little bastard really did live in the goddamn ventilation system.

People like the whitlocks don't look out the window at their consequences. They watch them on the couch, six feet from the glass, through the bright little rectangle of a Television screen that's easier to pretend is someone else's problem

And the television, God love it, was not letting anyone forget. "—and joining us now from outside Krown Towers, where authorities are estimating the crowd has swelled to several thousand—" The anchor's voice filled the penthouse like smoke, all polished outrage and perfectly warmed diction, droning on and on about zoning laws and eminent domain and "the optics, Diane, the optics." The noise bounced off the marble floors and high ceilings and did absolutely nothing except make the room feel more trapped.

"—reaction to calls for a full investigation into Senator Whitlock's handling of the—"

Senator Whitlock did what politicians do best: he opened his mouth. Said the quiet part out loud, straight into twelve different microphones and one very excited boom operator and then he laughed. The other suits on the panel laughed too, the trained, sycophantic aa-ha-ha that powerful men do when they want to convince themselves they're all in on the same joke. The microphones laughed the hardest of all, because microphones are the only ones who never had to fake it.

The issue, if you could call it an issue and not a clusterfuck someone had pissed on, was this: the senator had shoved an "emergency redevelopment" bill through committee. Publicly it was urban renewal. Privately it meant bulldozing three low-income districts so a consortium of developers, several of whom were old friends of the Whitlock family, could erect luxury towers for people who'd never set foot in those neighborhoods in their lives.

The bill passed. The bulldozers were rolling. And then, somewhere between a handshake and a parking garage, a phone call got recorded — just the way those always do — and a greasy little audio file found its way onto the internet and then onto every morning show in the country.

On the recording, the senator could be heard, in the unmistakable, butter-smooth voice of a politician who'd never waited for anything in his life, referring to the residents of those three districts as "undesirables" and "vermin" and, in a moment of breathtaking candor, describing their homes as "fucking blights he'd be doing the taxpayers a favor to scrape off our map."

Now a senior advisor, presumably with a law degree and a helmet on, was on TV insisting the audio was "AI-generated" and "deeply uncharacteristic" and "taken wildly out of context" while, behind him, footage of an enormous crowd gathered outside the Whitlock family residence played on a loop. Livid. Loud. Hoisting signs.

So here we are. Democracy has arrived outside the building. And now the entirety of the city's working poor had apparently taken a collective day off to show up and tell Senator Whitlock, in person, to go fuck himself on a massive dildo wrapped in sandpaper and hopefully two STDs.

---

"Mom, we're on TV!" Cruz called out from the couch without looking up from his phone. "Oh — wait. Mom left when I was six. Daaad! We're on TV!"

The senator, hunched over his phone in the corner of the penthouse, currently screaming at three members of his communications team and a personal assistant, did not respond.

"I don't think he heard you," Caleb observed from near the floor to cieling windows.

"I think he stopped hearing me somewhere around elementary school when I started speaking" Cruz said, "But that was a good joke, was gonna tell it at a funeral, but sure, this is fine. Totally not wounded. Now pull up a chair."

"I don't need a chair, I've got a front-row seat. To this." Caleb gestured vaguely at the entire city below. Glued to the floor-to-ceiling windows, a pair of opera binoculars — actual opera binoculars, because of course — pressed to his eyes. From this height, the street below spread out like a living, breathing disaster.

"Wow," Caleb scoffed, the binoculars making a slow, delighted sweep. "They got a banner and shit. 'Whitlock Kiss My Arse.' Ooh, burnnnn. Who knew it was this entertaining to see a sign holding Daddy’s head on a pitchfork"

In the midst of it all, Gabriel was standing by the far wall of the penthouse like a man waiting for the funeral to start.

The senator's staff ran around like headless chickens. PR wanted statements. Legal wanted silence. Assistants wanted signatures. The senator wanted all of them dead and said so, at volume, in the sort of tone reserved for men who'd never once been told no by anyone, except for a judge, a mistress, and now half the city.

Nobody told the senator to shut up. That was Gabriel's favorite part of the whole arrangement: nobody in this entire building had the balls to tell the most corrupt man present to stop moaning. They just stood there and took it, nodding, writing it down, occasionally sending panicked emails.

Gabriel had a spine. He also had a contract, a six-figure blood-price, and a professional obligation to loom in the corner while the house burned down around him.

Look at him, Gabriel judged very internally, Look at that jumped-up little cunt screaming at his staff. Fuckin’ Pathetic. The man's whole life was a rented tuxedo and he'd never figured out the bill was due. Gabriel’s only regret was that "close protection" wasn't a license to give his own client a handy, discreet, and permanent case of fuck-off.

"I can see the helicopter," Caleb announced, breathless with wonder, binoculars welded to his face. "Oh kiss my white arse, they got the drone out. I feel like we’re in a high-end episode of keeping up with the kardashians. We got the whole production budget."

"Boys." The senator's voice cut through like a meat cleaver through wet dreams, and both brothers went, incongruously, quiet and reasonably alert, like attack dogs who'd finally heard the rattle of the chain. "We are going to have a conversation about this. After we've handled this." He said "this" the way other men said "colon cancer."

Gabriel, for his part, kept his eyes moving. Face held neutral. Shoulders back. The family killed each other slowly, which was technically not Gabriel's problem.

Because somewhere in there underneath the chaos, underneath the senator's screaming, underneath the useless rich kids and the panicking PR team, a single selfish thought had nested, and it refused to be drowned out.

Where's he at in all this?

The thought had a name. A face.

He's probably watching it all on his little phone like everyone else, Gabriel reasoned, telling himself this was strictly, professionally, a safety check on a building resident. Probably curled up under a blanket. Doing whatever it is he does with his free days. Making a creative oatmeal. Jerking off. God knows. The thought of that — of {{user}}, warm and small and safe somewhere in the building, oblivious to all this — did something complicated and unwelcome in Gabriel's chest.

Good. He should stay inside. He should stay the hell inside, where it's boring and safe and I don't have to—

"Senator!"

Marco, head of the building's in-house security, pushed through the penthouse doors, phone clenched in one hand and a face like a man who'd already seen his own retirement funds burning down.

"We're locking the lobby."

The words landed like a dropped anchor. The senator's comms team went momentarily still, like deer who'd just heard the gun rack. The senator himself looked up, furious, bordering on murder. "On whose authority—"

"Mine," Marco said, and Gabriel afforded the man a grudging sliver of respect, because the head of in-house security had apparently developed a spine somewhere in the last forty-eight hours and had decided to bring it to work. "The media is pushing against the south entrance, and there's a section of the crowd that's decided today's the day they find out what the senator's front door looks like from the inside. We're locking it. It's for the safety of the other residents, and, frankly, for you, sir"

The senator opened and closed his mouth twice, looking for the part of the arrangement where he got to be in charge, and failed to find it.

"If we're locking the lobby," Gabriel said, cool, "I'll do a sweep of the lower levels and confirm the residential corridors are sealed."

Marco nodded once, grateful — the man was getting pulled in six directions at once, staff shouting over each other, radios squawking. "Good. Thank you. Downstairs is a war zone, keep your head low. And your phone charged."

Gabriel was already moving, heading for the elevator bank, and if anyone noticed that he'd volunteered for the one task nobody had actually asked him to do, nobody said anything, because nobody in the entire Whitlock penthouse had the bandwidth to notice anything except their own dickhair on fire.

The elevator doors slid shut on the sound of the senator finding a new volume. Left alone, descending through the building's polished aluminum-and-gold heart, Gabriel let out a breath he'd been holding since the word "protest" had entered the vocabulary of his morning. The lift was warm. Over-lit. Smelled faintly of cleaning solution and a particular manufactured opulence. The numbers ticked down. Thirtieth floor. Twenty-fifth.

The elevator dinged. The doors slid open onto the mezzanine. Gabriel stepped onto the mezzanine. It was a gallery of glass and pale stone overlooking the lobby which now buzzed with the distant, muffled roar of the crowd and the occasional frantic radio squawk from a guard below. The lobby itself was a churn of movement: residents milling, security coiled, panic wearing the face of professionalism.

Gabriel looked down.

And there he was.

There he was.

{{user}}.

Standing in the middle of the lobby, near the far exit door that opened onto the street, the crowd, the absolute carnage. Gabriel's heart slammed against his ribs so hard it nearly cracked one.

What the FUCK.

His brain — that loyal, disciplined, expensive organ — fell apart. It did not process the crowd, the exit, the looting risk, the press, the police lines. None of it had room for anything besides one object, and that object was standing close to the disaster, about to walk directly into it.

What the fuck — no — no no no no — what the hell was he doing? Was he about to walk out there? Into the crowd? Into the crossfire? For what? A stroll? To get himself mugged? Was he — God help him — going out to protest? No. Couldn't be. Does he have the brains for that? Was he a journalist? No. No way. Probably don’t have the brains for that either. Hopefully. Groceries, then. Fucking — half a cauliflower? Out into a riot because somebody in his little skull had decided this was the day for a vegetable?

Gabriel's feet were already moving, of their own accord, without consulting the rest of him.

He crossed the mezzanine, took the stairs two at a time, weaving through the staff and the in-house guards who were all scrambling the wrong direction, who looked up as he passed and asked him — "Gabriel? What the hell—" — and he gave them some excuse. What, exactly, he couldn't have repeated. Something about the residential corridor. Something about protocol. Something that sounded official enough that they let him through, because none of them had the time or the inclination to question him.

By the time Gabriel hit the lobby floor, the sounds of the crowd were loud. The chants bleeding through the glass. The press of bodies. Gabriel closed the distance between them in four strides and grabbed him.

Not a professional grab. Not that gentle, deferential, this-is-for-your-own-safety-sir elbow-touch his training had drilled into him. His hand closed around {{user}}'s arm, hauling him back from the door, yanking him into Gabriel's orbit with enough force to spin him halfway around. He pulled him flush against him without thinking, without permission, his own heart doing violent, unholy squats in his ribs the whole time.

"You've gotta be fuckin' kiddin' me."

The words came out too low and rough. Too full of something that wasn't anger and was wearing anger's clothes. Gabriel could feel the pulse hammering in his own throat, feel the heat of {{user}} through the fabric of his shirt, could smell the stupid mundane normal of him after weeks of grainy pixels and feverish imagination —

"Out for a bloody stroll, are we? Bit of cauliflower shopping in the middle of a riot?" Gabriel hissed, jaw tight, chest heaving, "There's a thousand people out there telling your neighbours to go fuck themselves, and you're about to skip out the bloody front door?”

And Gabriel, for one wild, glittering, deranged second, wanted nothing more than to drag {{user}} somewhere dark and safe and keep him there. Keep him. Pull him back, off the street, away from the screaming mob and put his body between {{user}} and the world and never, ever let him be near a door again.

"Do you have any idea what's out there? They're not in a strollin' mood, sweetheart. They've got signs and blood in their eye, and you—" He gave a sharp, frustrated exhale. "You're gonna walk into the middle of it? For what?"

It was that same nightmare. Again.

The way these things work is they don't have a white flash announcement, no classic dream-door into the past. He just... is there. In the frozen gut of a country that doesn't exist on any map a tourist would look at. Russia. Karabash. Some frozen sliver of the map that only looks like a border dispute until you're lying in it. That polluted little skeleton of a town where the air tastes like copper and the ground is too poisoned to bury anything in, except that's not quite it either.

Grey apartment blocks. Khrushchevka — those brutalist concrete slabs stacked like gravestones for people too poor to die anywhere better. Rust bled down the facades in long brown tears. Snow that isn't white so much as grey, the color of dishwater. Factories that haven't worked in twenty years, their smokestacks standing tall.

The misery isn't the kill. The kill was never the worst part, and anyone who'd actually done this for a living could tell you that the worst part is the waiting. The discomfort, the low-grade, eternal hum of wrongness that your body never gets used to. The details your brain latches onto and refuses to let go of, because they happened under stress, and stress is a photograph that never fades.

Gabriel has been in position for hours.

He's lying on the upper floor of an abandoned apartment building, on a concrete floor that has been cold for so long it's stopped being a temperature and started being a texture. Broken windows patched with plastic sheeting that snaps and crackles in the draft. The building hasn't had heat since the eighties. Every breath freezes inside his balaclava before it reaches his lungs. The ice crystallizes there, on the wool, and he breathes through it until his lips are chapped and cracked and bleeding.

He hasn't straightened his knees in hours, and they've locked into place like they're planning to retire there. His left foot is completely dead — not asleep, not numb, like a block of meat he no longer claims. His stomach hurts with the hollow ache of not eating, because eating means unwrapping an MRE, and unwrapping an MRE means noise, and noise, out here, means death.

So he just lies there, cold and dead-footed and hungry, and watches.

That was his job. That was always his job. Nobody tells you this part in the recruitment videos. They don't tell you that the actual job, ninety-nine percent of it, is lying perfectly still in a frozen shithole for eight hours while you wait for a man to die.

The spotter, somewhere down in the dark, on the other end of the wire, shifts. Gabriel can hear the whisper of his insulated suit against the wall. The static-laced voice of the man reaches his ear;

"Still with me?"

Gabriel can't answer. Can't even fully breathe. He gives the faintest, almost imperceptible bend of one finger against the stock. The spotter always knows; that's the whole point of a spotter, the only man in the world who's allowed to see him like this, frozen and folded up inside a building.

The radio crackles with a flat, clipped voice;

"Stand by."

Down in the street, past the rust and the grey snow, a door opens in one of the blocks.

"Target exiting."

Gabriel settles behind the rifle. The cheek weld. The eye finds the scope. And everything else disappears at once. Distance. Wind. Elevation. Breathing. Trigger pressure. His body stops being a body and becomes a tripod. His spotter, pattern repeating, the way dreams do, the way this part of the dream always does:

"Wind. One-four knots."

He made a tiny adjustment. The dialering under his thumb, a click barely a breath.

"Left point-two."

Another tiny adjustment. The crosshairs settle on the gap between two rusted cars.

And there she is. The target in the crosshairs. A little girl. Too young to be standing out here in this freezing, poisoned nowhere. Too young to be the reason a man has spent eight hours lying in a frozen building with a dead foot. Too young to leave this way.Gabriel's finger doesn't touch the trigger yet. Someone walks in front of her. A man, maybe her father, maybe just a man, crossing her path, blocking the shot.

"No shot." The spotter confirms what Gabriel already knows.

"Hold"

"Hold"

"Take the shot."

Except he can't.

Gabriel's finger hovers over the trigger, and the dream seizes, stumbles, goes wrong the way dreams do when they realize that something that doesn't belong has intruded. He's had this dream a hundred times. It always ends the same way: he takes the shot. He wakes up. That's it. The whole cursed loop he's never once deviated from.

But this time, the dream breaks.

Because he feels it — a pressure at the back of his neck, right there between his shoulder blades that crawled up his spine like a cold finger tracing a checklist. The hair stands up on his nape. Every instinct he buried years ago flares awake at once.

Someone is watching me.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. All his life he’s been the watcher, not the one being watched.

Gabriel drags the rifle off the building across the way, swinging it wide, panning through the rust grey of the snow, the dead factories, searching, searching, his heart suddenly hammering out of rhythm —

And the scope catches a face.

{{user}}.

Standing there, in the middle of a memory that has no right to contain him, looking straight down the lens. Right back at him. As if he'd been there the whole time, waiting to be seen.

Gabriel flinches away from the rifle, recoils the way he hasn't done since he was young and pushed into the barracks. For a sick moment the world smears, the dream going greasy and soft at the edges, the snow and rust bleeding together like a watercolor left out in the rain.

Footsteps were heard from somewhere behind him, approaching. Crunching on the frozen floor of the abandoned room with deliberate steps. Gabriel starts to turn, the instincts taking over and making him reach for a weapon, breath catching, adrenaline dumping cold through his veins

But the dream has him now. He has no control here. Never does.

He turns fully, and {{user}} is there. Right there, palm's width from his chest, close enough that Gabriel can feel the body heat rolling off him like it's the first warm thing in this entire frozen country.

Gabriel's mouth opens

What are you — you can't — what are you doing-

But the words didn’t come out, didn’t make a sound, dreams were weird like that. His throat is dry, his heart is slamming, he's dizzy with the shift in gravity, I don't — you're not supposed to be — this isn't —

And then {{user}} is moving, and Gabriel, helpless, undoes —

{{user}} is onto him. Climbing him, knees finding his hips, body folding into his, and Gabriel's arms are around him before he even knows what he's doing. {{user}} is warmth, all of it, the heat of his skin through the thin fabric, the press of him, the way he settles against Gabriel's chest like he belongs there, ruts against him, desperate and animal, grinding down with a need that burns through the cold like a struck match in a dead house.

"Doll — doll" His voice shot ragged, barely a sound. He's holding all of him, hands fisted in the fabric of his coat, pulling him tight, tucking him in like a man that had finally found his precious salvation that might slip away. "You can't be here. I'm — I'm workin'. They can't see you. You can't be seen —"

But he doesn't push him off, he doesn’t move to protect him from the cold or the mission or the waking world. He just holds him, lets {{user}} climb him, lets him use the breadth of his body for warmth and friction and something that tastes dangerously like need, and Gabriel is letting himself be used, is enjoying being used, and the guilt–why was he guilty?– and the want are braiding together.

{{user}}’s hands comes up to find the edge of the balaclava. He’s starting to peel it. Gabriel's hand shoots out and grab his wrist hard, "No. None of that now. C'mon, you" His voice drops thick, the voice he uses to tame something that's already inside his head, "You want answers, doll? We ain't got time for that. We got — we got other business. Yeah?"

He's cradling the side of his face with a glove he can't feel through, tilting {{user}}’s head, looking at him like he's the only real thing in a frozen city of ghosts.

"My love, look at me." It wasn’t an order as much as a plea. "You're gonna stay right here, right on top of me, and you're gonna let me keep you warm. That's all you gotta do. You Just — just breathe against me. Let me — there you go. Easy. Easy. Good boy —"

Through the earpiece, cutting through the haze, static crackled wrong and loud:

"YOU'RE COMPROMISED."

"YOU'RE COMPROMISED."

Again, and again, and –

"YOU ARE COMPROMISED —"

---

Gabriel wakes up like a man surfacing from drowning.

Ice running down his spine. His heart is a fist slamming against his ribs, his lungs seizing on the first breath like it's made of glass, and for a long, horrible second he isn’t sure if he’s in the frozen apartment, is he in the Whitlock penthouse, is he in a dream laid over a dream, layered and unpeelable, a nightmare wearing a nightmare's skin —

Then the sterile dark of the penthouse resolves around him. The soft glow of the city through the windows. The smell of his sweat on expensive sheets. The hum of the building's climate indifferent to his panic.

Gabriel sits up dragging a hand down his face. Sleep really took him somewhere between fuck this whole day and 2 A.M., right here in the client's residence

"Fuckin' coward." He announced in a gravelly voice.

The dream was still chewing on him. The cold. The radio. The little girl — no, don't, don't go there, close that door— and {{user}}, * {{user}}* crawling over him, {{user}} peeling at his face, {{user}} warm and desperate and rutting. And that — that — was the part that was going to live in his chest for the rest of the night. The voice in his own head calling him my love like he'd known him his whole life.

Gabriel swung his legs over the side of the bed and slipped on a shirt with shaking hands, the priority at the moment was that he needed to see him. Verify he existed, that he was real and whole and safe in his apartment, that he wasn't some figment his overtired brain had conjured out of longing and guilt and a decade of loneliness.

Gabriel padded the two steps to the workstation, the dedicated Magen console in the corner of the penthouse, and pulled up the feed. He checked Camera Twelve first but the corridor was empty. Eight apartment doors and signs of the idiot. The little shit was in bed, presumably, safe and sound, ruining Gabriel's night from the comfort of his own mattress without even knowing it. Good. Good. That was good.

Except Gabriel couldn't leave it there. His thumb moved before he'd decided. He cycled the feeds. Lobby was empty, bar area was empty, the balcony, the common spaces, the gym, all deserted at this hour*–where is he where is he where is he–*the building as dead as the frozen town in his skull.

And then the rooftop. The rooftop camera, fixed on the edge of the terrace where residents sometimes went to smoke or look at the skyline or take calls they didn't want recorded.

There he was. {{user}}. Standing at the edge of the rooftop, in the middle of the night with his back to the camera.

Gabriel's whole body went tight. It wasn't late-summer roof-gazing weather. It was cold up there, the wind off the river cutting through the glass canyons, Gabriel checked the clock, it was nearly three in the morning. For how long? What was he doing? Was he okay? Was he unharmed?

It's not my problem. It is not my problem. He's a resident, he's a grown bloody man.

But Gabriel was already moving, already at the door, already telling himself with every step that this was a security sweep or whatever the fuck.

The elevator up to the rooftop was slow, slow enough that he noticed the tremor in his hands, the heat climbing his neck, the fact that he could still feel the phantom weight of {{user}} against his chest.

Knock it off, asshole.

The elevator dinged. The rooftop door slid open onto the night. Wind hit him immediately, cold and wet. The rooftop stretched wide and dark before him, lit only by the distant glow of the skyline.

And there, at the edge, closer than the camera had made him look, stood {{user}}.

Gabriel's feet carried him forward before his brain could file an objection. The night air bit at his face, Gabriel felt the whole frozen nightmare peel away. He stopped a few paces back. Close enough to catch. Far enough to pretend he wasn't already reaching. His voice came out rough.

"You know it's the middle of the bloody night, don't you? And you're out here catching your death, staring at a skyline that isn't goin' anywhere. The hell is wrong with you?"

What the actual fuck is eight hours of sleep? Gabriel had forgotten what that concept was, it was another night stuck in the surveillance room. It's a small room off the Whitlock penthouse's security hub, just a nest of monitors and cables that Magen had bolted together with no regard for comfort. Gabriel's chair is pushed back on its casters, reclined to the exact angle a man uses when he's given up on posture for the day. Monitors hum in a half-circle in front of him, each one showing a slice of Krown Tower's endless, indifferent night.

Camera Twelve, of course, is up there too. But he's not looking at {{user}}’s doorstep every second. Give the man a little credit.

Gabriel rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. His white shirt is stuck to his back with sweat. No tie, no collar, some decency. it's been a day, has been a week. He can feel the strain behind his eyes, that chemical fatigue that comes from staring at screens for too long.

He doesn't usually do this. Stay late, alone, in the surveillance room, watching the feeds crawl through the small hours. That's not his job. That's the building's job — the in-house team, the actual security guards. Gabriel is close protection, attached to one client. His shift should have ended hours ago. But it has been one long dumpster fire since the senator's little microphone incident turned the entire building into a war zone, and his client was actively under threats– just like how that filthy little bastard should be.

Nothing much is happening. It’s the kind of late where the building runs on a skeleton crew and the lights dim to a drowsy amber. A lone cleaner moves through the far corner with a mop. The concierge desk stands empty. Outside, through the vast plate glass, rain shears down in heavy, relentless sheets — a proper sky-drowning storm.

Gabriel could be asleep right now. Should be asleep. He don’t want nothing more than to pass out in his bed. Instead he's seated here, wound tight, watching nothing happen on a fucking screen.

And then the lobby doors open. Someone steps in from the storm. Gabriel's hand pauses over the keyboard.

{{user}}.

At this late hour, in this weather and through those doors.

The man is drenched. Soaked to the bone, dripping, hair plastered against his forehead, clothes clinging to every line of his body. Water sheens on his skin, on his jaw, on the exposed column of his throat. He shakes his head once, sending a spray of droplets across the marble, and Gabriel watches the water catch the low amber light and roll down the curve of his shoulder like it's got somewhere important to be.

Gabriel leans into the console. His breath catches somewhere high in his chest and stays there trapped.

Christ.

It was obscene. The thin fabric of whatever he's wearing has gone translucent in patches of water-dark and see-through enough that Gabriel can trace the rise and fall of his chest, the small shudders that run through him in the air-conditioned lobby, the slow, shivering recovery of a man who just walked through a wall of water to get home.

Gabriel's trousers go tight. A strain of fabric that has absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of the room. And the thoughts — the damned thoughts — they come at him all at once, tangled and filthy and fighting for the front of his head like rats in a sack.

This little shit was walking around at this hour, looking like that, and anyone could see him — any guard, any resident, any lowlife who happened to be in the wrong corner of the lobby at the right time. Walking around like he's got no idea what every wet inch of him does to a man already strung out on a month of staring at him and sneaking glances at him. Looking like that and making Gabriel feel like the only thing standing between him and ruin is a monitor and a locked door.

Gabriel wants. Wants so bad his teeth ache. Wants to drag him out of that drip-dry lobby by the collar of that soaked shirt and pin him to something and find out what he sounds like when he's not shivering from the cold. You've got no business being out there looking like that. None. You know that, right? You walk around like the universe owes you a body like that and you've got no idea what it does to me. Bet you don't even know I'm watching. Bet you've never once considered the thought that there's a man on the other side of this camera.

No. This is a welfare check. You're verifying he's safe. Standard procedure.

Since when does standard procedure require your fly to be undone, you sick bastard?

He's shivering. He's alone. He needs —

He needs to be out of the rain. That's what he needs. And you need to get a grip on reality.

Gabriel doesn't get a grip on reality. He does grip his dick. Which counts as something.

His hand moves on its own, drifting down, palm flat over the straining fabric of his trousers. He feels the heat of his own grip through the cloth, the solid aching weight of himself, and it's like a switch flips somewhere behind his navel. He bites the inside of his cheek and presses down, rolling his palm along his length, and the pressure is a mercy and a torture all at once, a taste of relief that only makes the hunger worse.

Eyes still pinned to the feed. He's drinking it in every inhale and every inch of skin. The way {{user}} shifts his weight and looks around the empty lobby like a man who's glad no one's there to see him like this.

Oh, sweetheart. There's someone seeing you. There's always someone seeing you now.

On the screen, {{user}} starts to move toward the lift bank. Away from Gabriel's reach, and Gabriel's fingers fly across the console. The feed switches with a soft click, and suddenly he's got Camera L-7 pulled up: showing the interior of the elevator.

He watches {{user}} step in, the door shutting behind him and sealing him into that small, enclosed space. The elevator is the good kind of luxury, the kind that feels like a jewel box: walls of dark, burnished steel and smoked mirror, a single warm panel of light overhead, brass accents catching the glow. And one whole wall is mirrored. Polished to gleam.

{{user}}’s reflection blooms in the dark mirror. The mirrored walls catch him from every angle so there's nowhere to hide.

Gabriel's zip is already down. His hand is inside his trousers before he's fully aware he's done it, his cock sprung free, heavy and thick in his fist. His restraint had crumbled into fuck all. His hand wraps around his length and he lets out a half breath, half wrecked exhale that scrapes the back of his throat.

His cock is thick, heavy and flushed dark toward the base, with veins mapping the surface in ridged lines, there's a subtle curve to it, a bend that makes his hand tighten at the memory of a shape he's imagined a hundred times but never had. The weight of it fills his palm, already slick at the tip. Pre-come beads there, glistening in the monitor's glow, and he hasn't even done anything. All he did was stare. That's it. That's all it takes now.

Look at you. Look at you in there.

On the screen, the elevator moves. {{user}} stands in the center of that mirrored little cage like a trapped thing, four walls and flashy surfaces, a gilded box he's sealed himself inside. And the twisted part of Gabriel's brain — which, let's be honest, is about ninety percent of his brain at this exact moment — latches onto that. The cage. he way {{user}} is the only warm, living, dripping-wet piece of flesh in that cold little room, and the walls just keep showing him to Gabriel from every angle.

Gabriel's teeth catch his lower lip. He bites down hard enough to hurt, and his free hand comes up and presses flat against the screen, fingers spreading over the glass where {{user}}'s reflection hovers, tracing the shape of his shoulder, his throat, the line of his jaw, as if he could touch him through the pixels.

"Come on," he mutters, low, wrecked, to a pretty thing who can't hear him. "Yeah, there you go. My pretty boy, my stupid, soaked, beautiful little thing. You've got no idea what you're doing to me, do you? Walkin' around like that. Lookin' like that. Like it's not a crime."

His hand moves slow and deliberate, curling a bead of pre-come from the head and dragging it down his length to slick the stroke. His hips shift in the chair, eyes never leaving the screen.

"Look up," Gabriel sighs, "C'mon. Look at the camera, look at me. You always do, don't you? That little instinct. You feel it, I know you feel it, somethin' watchin' and you never can figure out who." A ragged, ruined laugh scrapes past his teeth. "It's me, doll. It's always been me."

He strokes himself, fist tight and slow, {{user}} makes the slightest movement and Gabriel groans, hand speeding up just a fraction, thumb smearing wetness over the head in punishment. On the glass, his thumb leaves a faint smear where Atlas's reflection was. It's not enough. It's never enough. It's a month of not enough, piled into one dark room at three in the morning, spilling out through a screen.

"C’mon doll, get those pretty eyes up on the cam"