Page 88 of Xerxes Ascendant
“You don’t have shit,” Kyle informed him chipperly, cutting off the threat. “Except a receding hairline, a poor taste in mayoral friends, and one last chance to run before you lose your life as well.”
“He doesn’t deserve it,” Akira growled in protest over his shoulder. “The fuckertouched you, Kyle, and has threatened you half a dozen more times just now. I plan on peeling the skin from his screaming, bloodied body.”
“Mylast chance?” sneered Theta.
“Yep,” Kyle agreed. He wriggled around on the strut, making it wobble –for stars’ sake, Kyle,swore Akira under his breath – and pointed at where two burly and recognisable figures were moving swiftly towards them along the ragged edge of Lower Xerxes. “You’re being watched, so no murder this morning, I think, not unless you’re okay with the Coterie learning what you did. Want to stay and meet our friends? They have tattoos with claw marks, so I’m guessing that means they like cats. Ooh, Master, should I get one too? Maybe I could ask Chaos to scratch me and then get it inked? Because I’m…”
Akira idly listened to his boyfriend’s chatter, resting his chin fondly on his shoulder and watching Theta pale at the sight of the pair of approaching Carrions.
With a final snarled curse, the ex-Master retreated back into the city and was soon consumed by its shadows.
Off to wreak more schemes of destruction, no doubt, but Akira would find him and put an end to him. Just…at a better time than when he was exhausted, poised over a deadly drop, and with Kyle too much at risk of being hurt in any crossfire.
“Miguel!”
The huge man Akira had last seen jumping off the roof of the Rise with the only parachute between the three of them stepped out from under a crumbling concrete roof a few metres away and into a strip of sunlight beginning to grace the city, holding up a hand to shield his eyes. Spotting them and muttering something to Derek at his side, the gang member grinned and hurried over to offer Kyle a hand.
His boyfriend took it without hesitation, because apparently he liked giving Akira regular heart palpitations.
But then Kyle was safe on Lower Xerxes, turning to help Akira off the strut in turn, and miraculously they were both standing unharmed and backhomeand no one was trying tokill the pair of them in that particular moment, and stars have mercy, could it be true?
Akira glanced around warily. Theta might be gone but he wasn’tgone, and the threat wreaked by the silver snake lingered with palpable, sinister menace. He eyed the guns resting at Miguel’s and Derek’s hips.
Unburdened by such thoughts, Kyle exhaled with a long, pained hiss, and began to stretch out his spine and shoulders. Akira knew exactly how he felt, for he shared the stiffness in each muscle, but his reputation was too dignified to start shaking out the ache in his hands like he wished to.
Only Kyle didn’t much care about Akira’s dignity.
Just his comfort, for the blonde was immediately at his side, taking his hands gently in his and folding and clenching his fingers for him with as much careful attention as if he was attending to a newborn. Akira gazed at him fondly and resisted his usual urge to make a sardonic comment.
“Your friend took off pretty sharpish,” Miguel commented, waving a hand in the direction Theta had fled. He barked out a short laugh. “For a moment, I thought he was going to push you off!”
“Imagine that,” Akira said dryly. It appeared his sarcasm had only been diverted, not eliminated, but had evidently been diluted enough that the derisive comment went unremarked.
“Speaking of taking off, Miguel,” Kyle said without looking up from where he was rotating out Akira’s wrists, tenderly rubbing his pulse points with his thumbs like he did after he used restraints on him in a scene. “Perhaps you don’t remember stranding us on the roof of Mackenroth’s tower?”
Akira tensed, prepared to defend his man from whatever aggression was about to erupt. But to his surprise, the accusation was met with only a bashful half-smile.
“I’m sorry, Kyle,” the hulking gang member said sheepishly. “Orders are orders.”
Then he brightened. “But you guys killed it! I was about to ask the boss if we could send one of the aircraft to retrieve you, but then we saw you climbing on over here like it was nothing-”
“Nothing,” Akira repeated dryly. “Sure.”
“And the wholecityis talking about what you did!”
Miguel shrugged when they both looked at him questioningly. “You know, kidnapping the mayor. We had eyes on you.”
That just pissed Akira off. The Carrion had the resources to monitor them, but not to fucking lendassistanceafter sending them into a trap?
But of course not. Because her low-level thugs might have been expendable to Sinead, but Kyle and Akira were even more so. Why put her own men at risk when she had the pair of them to distract Benedict Mackenroth so thoroughly?
“Come,” Miguel offered, beginning to walk away before he’d finished speaking and waving a broad hand at them without turning around with the arrogance of someone assuming he’d be obeyed. “But not too close, because you both fucking stink. I have something I think you’ll want to see.”
“No,” said Akira.
“Okay,” said Kyle.
So, naturally, they compromised…and Akira did as Kyle wanted. His boyfriend didn’t have to use that low, sexy demanding tone of his, or bat those pretty blue eyes at him, for Akira to be thoroughly and utterly at his side no matter what. He just…was.
