Page 77 of Natural-Born Cullers

From the crypto wallet addresses and who’s accessed the Red Room…. With this banker, here. Simon tapped the screen before finishing typing his message.I’ve caught two different users using the same wallet, one from London, another based in Yorkshire. The dates at which the currency was used to pay for streaming from this account were too close together to suggest it’s only one person using two different addresses despite what the VPN is trying to say otherwise. There’s definitely two people involved here with this one account.

Simon looked at Gray, then typed something else.Maybe our Blood Eagle. He’s either got permission to do it, or he’s playing it safe by ghosting another wallet. I should have names in a few hours.

That should give them Blood Eagle, then ultimately the Controller.

The bathroom door came open, and Martin came out, wiping his hands. Head down, he went to say something, but stopped when he looked up and saw Gray. A slight blush burned on his cheeks as Martin bit back a smile and came over.

Gray cocked a brow this time as a hand went on Gray’s abs, breaching personal space as Martin pinched a roast potato off Simon’s plate.

“Clean your shit up when you’re finished,” Martin said down to Simon. “Light’s too, and that means washing them up as well, unless you think that’s beneath you?”

Simon snorted a smile and shook his head as Martin winked at Gray. “Be a bastard to own the….” He glanced up and down Gray’s body. “Bastard.”

Gray buried his own smile, surprised out how content he was to allow Martin to keep being a… bastard with his touch on him, although he held Martin’s look as Martin shifted behind him, reaching for….

“My coat,” said Martin, a hand on Gray’s hip as he shaped Gray too close from behind. “Just getting my… coat.”

He was back to pushing boundaries, one Gray would never allow him to cross, so he pushed it anyway. Only this time, it came with a blush that didn’t entirely call out… mind games. Just what had been going through his mind the past two days? Gray hoped he was in there somewhere.

He couldn’t ever really transcribe him to be too sure, which summed up the summerhouse on the whole, how brick and mortar stood on the boundary, always pushing into Gray’s.

“Martin.”

Gray gave Simon a look as he nodded back to the bathroom, stopping Martin in his tracks as he went to leave. A soft alarm beeped through from over by the sink.

“Jack’s phone,” he added. “Again.”

Martin frowned back, then started patting himself down. “Fuck.” His look went back to the bathroom, and he went back in and picked the phone up from where it had fallen by the sink.

“Can’t you get him a bloody chain for this?” Martin slipped it in his pocket. “Or better still, take it off Jack permanently? There’s a landline for a reason.” He didn’t look happy. “And since when did Jack set up a bloody alarm? Does he think I’m fucking Cinderella who’ll turn back into the soft touch once it goes off?”

The alarm off Jack was new, and Gray snorted a smile, guessing Jack had set it so it would cry out if Martin dropped it… again. Considering Jack and Martin had never met, they still found ways to wind each other up, and it looked like the alarm was Jack’s subtle way of pulling Martin up. He was sick of Martin losing his phone. Simon or Light usually found it in the summerhouse, but Gray and Jan picked it up in the manor.

The summerhouse had finally settled into quiet, and as the hot spray from the shower slammed into his body, Simon tilted his head back and closed his eyes. Tiredness hit core deep, the heavy roast from earlier no doubt playing havoc with his sugar levels and not eating, that and the cuts on his knuckles still throbbed as water dripped from his fingertips to his feet.

Fail….

Simon snorted at the echo of Light’s disdain. Yeah, Light could damn well fight one-on-one. He’d kicked his ass a few days ago. But when it came to the cullers? To being one? They knew Simon smelled wrong, that he didn’t quite… fit in. Yeah, he could get the job done, that he was… odd with how he manipulated the internet to get it done bloody well, but he was no psychopath. Yet Light… Light had only been around him for the best part of the year, but in that year, Simon had been damn well good enough to stop him. You didn’t need the call of a psychopath to catch one.

Light conveniently forgot about that, and his arrogance could be the break point for Simon at the best of times.

But… psychopath. Lightwasone, a young and raw one who couldn’t feel his way through it.

Simon clenched his fists at his sides, then briefly dipped his head until he made his grip hurt. Shaking it off, he cut the shower and pushed open the glass doors. As water steamed off his body, he wrapped a towel around his waist, then ran a hand through his hair to get it away from his eyes. His watch blinked 10:00 p.m., and feeling the cold around him more and more from Light, for the first time in a long time, he missed the London nightlife. He was MI5, not fucking dead from the waist down, and he loved the darkness of the streets better than any office. He’d grown up using nightclubs as a playground for throwaway men. He didn’t care for names. Strange considering he’d been brought up around the best kind of lovers: his father and mother. Even now, they’d be in the kitchen, his dad loading the dishwasher, his mother drifting over and going in for a quiet cuddle. No words needed, just two parts to a circuit board fitting naturally together. That level of love was rare, and it kept him smiling around his parents over the years, it still did. But they didn’t know him either, so the smiles always came back his way, the tug in from his own dad with an arm around his neck.

“Here.”

Jolting slightly, he glanced back to the door as he eased his watch back onto the unit.

Light leaned close to the doorway, and Simon wanted to glance back at the shower and question just how long he’d been there, but the two steaming hot drinks he held told truths on how it hadn’t been that long. Hehadseen him naked before he wrapped a towel around his waist, though.

An offer of a mug came his way, and Simon frowned.

“Coffee.” Light held it out. “Flat white, two sugars, right?”

So he had been paying attention along the way. Simon took it off him as Light looked him up and down, a frown creeping in as he sipped at his own.

He’d still love to know which window Light viewed the world from, because he didn’t carry any level of heat with looking at a near-naked man. Gray had called it: I-dosing had pushed Light into a playing field where intellect was transcribed into colours as he’d tried to sort through his own confusion and understand just where his sexuality lay, a mix of demi- and sapiosexuality. The skin a man wore didn’t matter. Yet even without the I-dosing effect in his system, he still seemed to live and read someone to the same translation: coloured Braille, where it didn’t just require a fingertip-to-colour touch, but his whole body and mind in order to understand it. Only Light couldn’t get his body working in time with his head at the best of times, despite looking as though he held a private conversation with the colours to Simon’s mind that even he couldn’t hear.

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