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When Alex let himself into his room on the afternoon of the fifth Wednesday of term, the last thing he expected was to find Yassen Gregorovich sitting on his sofa.
Alex’s first instinct was to wonder if he was cracking up. Week Five at Cambridge University was notorious for being bad: just over halfway through the term where the last holidays seemed a lifetime away but the end of term was firmly out of sight; the point at which the ever-increasing amount of work was beginning to get suffocating. ‘Week Five Blues’ it was called. And Alex was having a particularly bad time, on account of the fact that he’d spent the third week of term in Somalia, missing two supervisions and a clutch of lectures he was now struggling to catch up on. Between that, a karate tournament (Alex was on the university team) and trying to cobble together some semblance of an ordinary student existence, he’d barely slept that week. It was a very real possibility the dead man on his couch was simply a hallucination.
“Hello, Alex,” said the hallucination. “Why don’t you come in and shut the door?”
It certainly sounded real enough. And there was something else. The room was pleasantly warm; the heating was on. Alex had switched it off that morning before he’d gone to his lectures. He’d opened the window too, which was now closed.
Figments of one’s imagination did not turn on heaters and close windows.
Alex’s first instinct was to turn and run. He was defenseless - unarmed and exhausted. The last time he had deliberately put himself in an enclosed space with Yassen Gregorovich - in a cabin on board a yacht - he had ended up nearly being gored to death by a bull. And he had been the one with a gun in his hand to start with. It would be easy to retreat to the front of college; tell the porters someone had broken in and leave them to handle it.
Except Alex had never been in the habit of letting someone else handle his problems. And he had seen Yassen in action. This was a world-class assassin. The porters wouldn’t stand a chance. Alex had never seen Yassen kill indiscriminately, but he certainly had no compunctions about getting rid of those who stood in his way, and the fact that he was sitting in Alex’s college room rather suggested he wanted to have a chat with Alex and was determined to get it.
Alex’s hesitation must have shown, however, because Yassen spoke again.
“If you run, this will not end well.”
A gun had appeared in Yassen’s hand seemingly out of nowhere. One minute his hands had been resting on his crossed thigh - the next the fingers of his right hand were curled around a pistol pointed at Alex. Alex didn’t doubt for a second Yassen’s ability to press the trigger before Alex could disappear out of the doorway.
Very determined to talk, apparently.
Alex stepped into the room and let the oak door swing heavily shut behind him.
“Good decision,” Yassen said. “Now why don’t you take a seat.”
It wasn’t phrased as a question because it wasn’t one. Alex ignored it and remained standing. He felt better on his feet - as though it gave him some semblance of control over what happened next - and despite the gun in Yassen’s hand he didn’t think Yassen was about to shoot him for not sitting down. If you run, this will not end well, Yassen had said. Buried underneath that threat was a more benign implication: if Alex was willing to listen to whatever Yassen was there for, things would remain civil.
Alex would have to hope so, anyway.
Silence had settled between them. Alex was trying to get his thoughts in order - a hundred questions seemed to be swirling around his head. His mouth had opened before his brain had managed to catch up.
“How did you get in?” he blurted out, and then could have kicked himself. There were a hundred ways Yassen could have broken into his room. The Porters’ Lodge at the front of College held two spare keys for every room in college; Yassen needed only to have charmed or simply distracted them. The cleaners had skeleton keys for every room on a staircase he could have stolen. If he had been feeling more inventive, the door had only a straightforward latch lock anyway - it had taken Alex himself all of three minutes to break into his own room the other night when he’d forgotten his key, and that had been whilst he’d been more inebriated than he cared to admit. There was also the possibility of breaking in via another room - one of the fellows had a study directly above Alex and he often left it unlocked. One could make short work of dropping down from the window to the room below, especially when Alex had left his window open.
Yassen raised his eyebrows in a way that suggested that he agreed that it had been a stupid question.
“You’re dead,” Alex accused in an effort to regain some ground. He could hear the slightly petulant note in his tone, but he thought it was justified, in the circumstances. It had been over five years since he thought he’d seen the life ebb out of Yassen’s body on a plane in Heathrow.
And yet. Alex had been young then. Five years was a long time to get acquainted with death, and Alex had certainly used that time efficiently. It had never occurred to him before, but something hadn’t added up about it. Yassen had been dying, but he’d been lucid, talking in full sentences until the supposed end. That didn’t happen in real life.
Maybe Alex should have been surprised, but he didn’t feel much of anything, really, except a weary sense of inevitability. Alex himself had cheated death so many times; was it such a surprise that Yassen had done the same?
Yassen hadn’t said anything; perhaps he thought the evidence spoke for itself. Alex amended.
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
“And you’re supposed to be at university,” was Yassen’s response, “but here we are.”
“I am at university, if you hadn’t noticed,” Alex couldn’t help but point out.
“You may be now, ” said Yassen. “However, you were not two weeks ago, when you told your Director of Studies that you had a family emergency and were needed at home.”
His gaze levelled with Alex. He spoke with the sort of calm certainty that left no room for denial.
“Yeah,” said Alex, hedging his bets. “So what?”
Yassen’s smile was thin. “You have no family, as we both know.”
Well. That was slightly more brutal than Alex might have liked, even if it was the truth. He had Jack - but even she was back in Washington, looking after her parents. Thousands of miles away.
“It was an excuse I made up, because I wanted to get away.” No need to say exactly what he was getting away for.
“It was an excuse you made up so that you could go to Somalia on MI6’s behalf,” Yassen elaborated for him. Again, that tone of utter certainty, with something delicately laced behind it: some underlying threat of what might happen if Alex continued to be uncooperative.
There was a long pause. The gun in Yassen’s hand didn’t waver.
“How do you know about that?” Alex settled on at last.
Yassen eyebrows lifted again. “See if you can work it out.”
“Someone told you,” Alex guessed immediately, but he realised at once how unlikely that was. He had kept his cover, and the job had been clean - in and out. He had been disguised enough, he thought, that a mere description would not have given him away to Yassen. What, then? An image, perhaps? Not CCTV - Alex had disabled all that on arrival - but a photograph, possibly? That would have been Alex’s next guess, but then he saw the tug of Yassen’s lips, and knew it was something cleverer than that - and knew what it was, too.
“You were there,” Alex said.
Yassen’s mouth stretched into a lazy smile. The effect was disconcerting - at once at odds with what Alex knew him to be capable of, and yet somehow moulding his face from something cold to something altogether more human. “Very good,” he said. “Who was I?”
Of course he had been in disguise, else Alex would have recognised him at once. For a second Alex contemplated telling Yassen where to shove his tests and questions - Alex had enough of those in his supervisions, thanks - but having already refused Yassen once, Alex wasn’t sure how far he ought to test the man’s patience. Half-frustrated, he thought back to Mogadishu and the compound he’d been in. There hadn’t been a lot of people there - at least not a lot of people he had come into contact with, who might have seen him. There had been the target, the mastermind of the plans Alex was supposed to steal: Aden. His petite secretary - too petite for Yassen to have pulled off. The overbearing security detail, who had snarled at Alex throughout the lunch he’d had with Aden. And…
“The butler,” Alex said. “You served the food.” It was almost impossible to reconcile the slightly plump and grinning, too-enthusiastic server wearing a coat and tails with the slight, cool presence in front of him. And the butler appeared much older than the man on Alex’s sofa; it occurred to Alex that Yassen seemed somehow ageless; he looked barely different from the first time that they had met. His hair was still pale blonde; no grey hairs in sight. Perhaps if Alex got closer, there would be lines around Yassen’s eyes, but at this distance his skin was smooth. He could have been anywhere from his late twenties to his late thirties.
“I was disappointed you didn’t recognise me,” Yassen said by way of acknowledgment. “But, then, I don’t suppose you expected to see me. I have to confess I was rather surprised to see you.” His mouth quirked again. “Though I’m not sure that the black hair dye suited you. Too dark.”
“The grey didn’t suit you either,” Alex retorted.
Yassen’s smile widened. It was a genuine smile, and the overall effect was startling. He was good-looking, Alex realised, in a way he hadn’t noticed when he had been fourteen. That seemed like a further twist of unfairness. Yassen had cheated death, sought Alex out - did he have to be handsome, on top of everything else?
“What were you doing there?” Alex asked. Something about Yassen’s presence was knocking him off balance, making him feel he was constantly on the back foot. He needed to regain some control of the conversation.
“I was hired to ensure that no one attempted to steal the plans for the nuclear facility being built.”
In other words, precisely what Alex had been sent there to do.
“Then why didn’t you try to stop me?”
Yassen considered. “You didn’t steal them,” he said at last. “Aden gave them to you.”
“But you knew - ”
Alex stopped. Weighed what Yassen had said. Aden had given him the plans - just handed them over, blindly trusting because Alex - or, rather, MI6 - had gone to a tremendous amount of effort to make Alex look as rich as Aden, and the rich always trusted one another. Yassen had known that Alex was a fake. But he couldn’t actually stop Alex taking away the plans without outing him as such. Which would have meant killing Alex, because Aden’s intolerance for traitors was well known.
Which meant that Yassen had decided not to.
Alex tried not to feel too galled by this. But it was difficult. He had been quietly pleased with how smoothly he’d managed the operation, and MI6 had been satisfied too; they’d even arranged a car to take him back to Cambridge after the debrief. Now Alex realised he should have been more careful. He hadn’t trusted the security detail, nor the secretary, who had been pleasant enough but quietly watchful throughout the lunch. But he’d overlooked the butler.
“That’s the fourth time I’ve saved your life,” Yassen observed. At some point, Alex noticed dazedly, the gun had disappeared again. “You’re starting to make a habit of it.”
Alex unstuck his mouth. “You’ve saved my life once,” he said. “All the other times you just - decided not to kill me.”
“Semantics,” Yassen returned. “In our business, it is the same thing.”
Alex disagreed. “Last time I saw you, you sent me off to Scorpia,” he said. “That ought to make us even.”
Something unreadable flickered over Yassen’s face. There was a pause.
“That was...a mistake,” he said at last.
Alex felt his eyebrows lift. He’d only ever thought about how such a conversation might play out once or twice - if he ever got the opportunity to ask Yassen, what the hell he thought he’d been doing, sending Alex to Scorpia, if not to get him killed - but Alex had always assumed it would end with Yassen telling him that it was his own fault for messing up a wonderful opportunity to become a world-class assassin, like him.
“So are you here to apologise?” Alex asked, a bit recklessly.
“Not apologise, no.”
Perhaps that had been a bit much to hope for. But Yassen seemed to have lost interest; he was looking around the room. His expression was vague, but Alex suspected at once that this was just another of Yassen’s masks: made to cover up how deadly he could be, how astutely he was thinking.
“It’s very tidy in here,” he said, catching Alex off guard.
It was very tidy. Unusually tidy, in fact. And there was a singular reason for that Alex was certainly not going to disclose to Yassen Gregorovich.
“A cleaner comes in every day,” he said.
Yassen hummed an acknowledgement. “Your fellow college mates do not keep their rooms so neat for the cleaner,” he said, in that manner of conveying absolute certainty again.
They do when they think they might get laid.
Alex opened his mouth - perhaps to say that he wasn’t like most of his college mates - but Yassen beat him to it.
“How was he, Alex?” he asked, his voice soft.
Alex stood stock still. He could feel the back of his neck heating up and hoped that his face wasn’t turning pink.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said stiffly.
“I think you do.” Yassen’s tone, by contrast, was smooth, but he was unsmiling now. “The Gruger boy.”
It was beyond Alex to know how Yassen had found out. He wanted the ground to swallow him up. He certainly did not want to be here discussing it with Yassen, of all people.
“How was it?” Yassen asked again.
Awful, honestly. Gruger - the son of a multi-billionaire, used to having everything done for him - had, surprisingly, not expected Alex to do all the work. But he had expected Alex to take charge: had wanted Alex to play the role of dominant; to hurt him, even belittle and humiliate him. Alex cringed thinking about the things he’d said even now. He didn’t think he’d ever been more turned off in his life - although Gruger seemed to lap it up - and Alex had actually faked an orgasm just to end the whole ordeal.
“It was fine,” he said.
“Was it worth it?” Yassen pressed.
Worth it? Worth what? Alex hadn’t been given all that much choice in the matter. He’d come out of his seminar on Monday to find Crawley waiting for him, and over a walk across Jesus Green Alex had been told what MI6 needed. Information. And quickly: Gruger’s father was more or less holding the UK government to ransom. Gruger Senior was an untouchable bastard, but his son - a second year at St John’s College - could be relied upon to be loose-tongued once you got a few drinks in him. The only problem was the bodyguards, who accompanied Gruger everywhere and seemed to be employed as much to keep him in line as everyone else. The only time they left Gruger alone was when he had company. Intimate company, Crawley had told Alex with an entirely straight face.
It wasn’t like Alex was a stranger to sex. There was plenty of it on offer at Cambridge, and whilst Alex was always wary of leaving himself vulnerable, it was OK so long as he remained in control. Not to dominate - not what Gruger wanted - but Alex would never have allowed himself to be pinned underneath someone he’d just met in a bar, or in any situation where his hands weren’t free.
Still, it had been a bit of an unpleasant shock when he’d realised what Crawley was asking him to do. Oh, Crawley had buttered him up enough - Gruger was a nice looking lad; Alex was just his type; MI6 had done their research and there’d never been any complaints about Gruger acting inappropriately; Alex would be perfectly safe - but it was undeniable that they were venturing into uncharted territory.
At least it had worked, Alex thought bitterly: he’d been able to give Crawley what they’d wanted that morning.
He settled for an awkward sort of shrug. He didn’t know how Yassen knew, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
Yassen’s gaze was piercing. “Yes,” he said. “It’s an ugly business, our line of work, isn’t it?”
Alex regarded him warily, unsure whether Yassen was validating MI6’s demands or not.
“You can always say no,” Yassen said, answering the unspoken question.
His tone was gentler than Alex might have expected. It was difficult to know what his angle was. Alex felt suddenly very tired, his exhaustion catching up with him.
“Is that why you’re here?” he asked. “To tell me to leave MI6 again? I’m not a child anymore.”
Yassen surveyed him. “No,” he said. “You’re not, are you?” As always, there was something edging underneath his tone, just out of reach. Approval, perhaps? Unbidden, Alex felt the heat rise in the back of his neck again. It would be a lot easier to read Yassen, he decided, if the man actually had the decency to look his age and not be quite so good looking.
“Why are you here?” he repeated. “If it’s about Aden’s plans, I’ve already handed them over to MI6.”
For some reason, this seemed to amuse Yassen again. “I’m not here for the plans.”
“Then what?” said Alex impatiently. “I mean, it’s interesting to see you’re not dead and everything, but I have stuff to do.” Three essays and a seminar to prep for. Maybe a review of the security arrangements around his room.
“I see you’re as impatient as ever,” said Yassen. “Very well. I’m here to offer you friendship, Alex.”
Friendship. For a moment Alex nearly burst out laughing - from disbelief or hysteria, he wasn’t sure. There were a lot of things he had thought about Yassen Gregorovich over the years, but “friend” certainly wasn’t one of them.
“Yeah, right,” he settled on eventually. “Why would I want to be friends with you?”
It came out quite rudely, but he didn’t care. Yassen had killed his uncle, after all. He’d sent Alex off to Scorpia - was one reason Alex had two distinctive scars on his torso - the entry and exit wound of a bullet. And now he was sitting in Alex’s college room telling Alex he’d obviously been watching him and they ought to be friends? Frankly, he could piss off.
Yassen didn’t seem at all fazed by the rudeness; perhaps he’d even expected it. He shrugged off Alex’s question.
“I thought perhaps you might like someone to talk to occasionally.”
“I have lots of friends I talk to,” said Alex, bristling.
“Mmm.” Yassen hummed an acknowledgment. “Not friends you trust.”
Alex gritted his teeth, irked, again, by Yassen’s ability to pin down the point so effortlessly. Yes, Alex had a lot of friends. He’d even flatter himself that he was bordering on popular in college. But no one at Cambridge really knew him. And they never would, for obvious reasons.
It didn’t mean he wanted to be friends with Yassen Gregorovich.
“It’s an offer; nothing more than that,” Yassen said. “I will leave you my phone number. If you would like to talk, we can talk.” He shrugged, apparently carelessly - but nothing was ever careless with Yassen. “If you want something else, we can do that.”
“What sort of something else?” Alex asked blankly.
Yassen’s eyebrows drifted upwards again. He was obviously waiting for Alex to work it out. When he didn’t, Yassen said: “It’s up to you.”
It was much vaguer than what he’d been trying to say, Alex was sure, but he was still none the wiser.
Yassen watched him for a few seconds. Then, with almost effortless grace, he stood. He took a card out of his pocket that he put on the small coffee table in front of the sofa.
“I’d stay at university for the rest of term if I were you,” he said as he straightened up again. “Doesn’t Cambridge have a rule about the number of nights you’re obliged to be in residence in order to graduate?”
Yes. But no one ever paid attention to it.
“I don’t think that’s any of your concern,” Alex returned.
Yassen gave him a long look. “Companionship, Alex,” he said. “That’s all I’m here to offer.”
“I’m fine on my own.”
Yassen shrugged but he didn’t pick up the card from the coffee table. Instead, he walked to the door. Alex moved out of the way - enough to be out of arm’s reach; not enough to look like he was scared.
Yassen paused before he opened the door. Gazed at Alex, as though trying to commit his face to memory, or perhaps just wanting to scrutinise him. Up close, his eyes were a startling grey-blue. Alex tried to meet his gaze without letting on how disconcerting the intensity of it was.
“Don’t let MI6 bully you into things,” Yassen said eventually. “You are valuable enough that they would accept it if you told them no. And if you don’t say no, they will begin to think there are no limits. I don’t think you want that.”
Alex said nothing. Yassen nodded, as if that was what he had expected.
“It was good to see you,” he said, and let himself out.
Alex only realised the tension he’d been holding his shoulders when he exhaled, and nearly collapsed against the door that had just closed behind him. He felt lightheaded; dizzy with...well. He wasn’t exactly sure what.
The card Yassen had left was still on the table. Slowly, Alex pushed himself upright and went over and picked it up. There was a long number on it - it didn’t even look like a number - and then simply Y underneath it. The familiarity made Alex frown. Yassen had always behaved like he knew Alex - even though they couldn’t have spent more than a few hours in each other’s company in total. But, then, hadn’t Alex always felt like there was a connection between them - a history that pulled them together?
Was Alex really that sorry Yassen wasn’t dead?
No, he decided - although it would have been nice if Yassen could have avoided breaking into his room, all in all.
The question was what he did next.
MI6 might know Yassen was still alive. They might not. Either way, they would be exceptionally interested to know that Yassen had been here, in Trinity College, and they would probably offer extra surveillance and security if Alex wanted it - and maybe if he didn’t.
Alex stared down at the card.
Friendship, Alex. I thought perhaps you might like someone to talk to occasionally.
If you want something else, we can do that.
Alex pocketed the card.
Something to think about.