Chapter 37

Alexei did not offer a clinical, line-by-line breakdown of the mutilation, but the raw fracture in his voice communicated more than enough to map the horror for Yuri’s internal eye.

A heavy, dual sorrow settled into Yuri’s chest—a profound pity for the doomed Cherriot, and an equally biting grief for Alexei himself.

Unlike Yuri, whose youth had been thoroughly baptized in battlefield slaughter, Alexei had never grown accustomed to the absolute silence of a corpse; he had processed men broken into unrecognizable, bleeding configurations of flesh, but in those instances, the victims had still been clinging stubbornly to a spark of life.

The dead were fundamentally different.

A rigid, unyielding body, drained entirely of its vital essence, inflicts an existential desolation upon the observer that evades ordinary description. The cold, immutable knowledge that the singular soul once contained within that vessel can never radiate through the world again—that a human face once animated by an infinite palette of emotions has stiffened into a dull, blue mask, preserving only a single, frozen expression—was unspeakably terrible.

—“It was a straight execution, Yuri,” Alexei murmured, his voice dropping into a raspy whisper over the line.

Yuri listened in absolute silence, offering no empty platitudes. In their line of work, this quiet, shared endurance was the only legitimate form of sanctuary they could extend to one another; hollow phrases of comfort would have served no purpose but to insult the gravity of the dead.

—“But you know how I operate,” Alexei continued, clearing his throat against the static. “I moved the kid somewhere clean, a spot only I can locate. The moment an operational window opens, I’ll find a way to leak the coordinates to the local authorities. At the very least, his family won’t have to waste the remainder of their lives wandering the earth in search of a son who simply dissolved into thin air.”

“You handled it well,” Yuri stated, his calm, authoritative tone acting as an anchor. “We will finalize the extraction together the moment I return to the city. I have no intention of letting you carry that weight alone.”

As Yuri delivered the steady assurance, he could hear Alexei’s ragged breathing gradually begin to level out. Through the distance, Yuri could vividly visualize his oldest friend’s exact posture: his heavy brow furrowed into deep lines, a cigarette clenched aggressively between his teeth as he chewed the filter to pieces in a desperate bid for grounding.

—“All right,” Alexei finally conceded.

Yuri knew precisely how the transition looked—despite his deep displeasure and somatic distress, Alexei’s shoulders would relax, thoroughly relieved by the certainty that Yuri intended to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him in the aftermath. Granting the companion he had known across lifetimes the necessary space to steady his internal architecture, Yuri remained silent on the dark porch, waiting. Alexei had witnessed the absolute baseline of human depravity and had executed unforgivable acts in his own right, yet these specific tragedies still possessed the power to lacerate his spirit. He merely refused to display the wounds to the world, maintaining the soul of a fundamentally decent man who suffered and felt acute shame under the rigorous demands of his own conscience.

As Yuri waited for the final coordinates, a sudden flash of light illuminated the window of Cherriot’s bedroom, cutting sharply through the midnight gloom. Yuri’s eyes narrowed into a faint frown as a distinct silhouette materialized behind the heavy fabric of the curtains. He had been entirely certain that Cherriot was locked in a deep, restorative sleep born of absolute physical exhaustion. Why is he awake at this hour? Has the fever worsened, or did a nightmare wake him?

The potential distress of the man inside troubled him immediately, and Yuri determined it was time to sever the communication. Furthermore, he needed to decisively avoid the catastrophic scenario of Cherriot wandering outside into the dark courtyard in search of his bodyguard, only to accidentally intercept a conversation detailing the execution of his former lover. Yet, one lingering anomaly in Alexei’s intelligence report refused to align in Yuri’s mind.

“There is still one structural inconsistency in your account,” Yuri muttered, his voice dropping into a cautious register. “An execution seems entirely illogical if Samuel was truly the branch leader’s preferred lover. Did the executive order stem from the leader personally?”

The counter-intelligence Alexei delivered fractured Yuri’s assumptions entirely.

—“Samuel wasn’t his lover, Yuri.”

“Explain.”

—“The kid was an operative—he was explicitly hired,” Alexei revealed, the sound of papers rustling faintly in the background. “The operational timeline makes that much undeniable. Samuel miraculously began appearing within the branch leader’s inner circle at the exact historical juncture Goodnight claims the relationship initiated. Prior to that specific week, not a single subordinate or street-level soldier had ever seen the boss keep someone like Samuel within arm’s reach.”

“It defies logic,” Yuri countered, his tactical mind spinning. “I do not comprehend why a syndicate would systematically eliminate an asset they intentionally contracted for an operation.”

—“That is the next thread I intend to unravel.”

Through the glass, Yuri watched Cherriot’s silhouette shift erratically across the bedroom before vanishing entirely from the frame. A moment later, the amber illumination near the living room intensified, indicating that the man had emerged from his sanctuary and was navigating toward the kitchen. Gathering his complicated, fracturing thoughts, Yuri delivered a stern, protective ultimatum to his partner.

“Alyosha, listen to me carefully. If the investigation requires you to penetrate the upper tier of leadership, this situation has officially evolved beyond our operational capacity. Even if we possess the raw capability to navigate it, we are stepping directly back into the lethal terrain of our youth.”

Cherriot, who had innocently initiated the contract, naturally possessed no inkling of the broader conspiracy, but the wolves pursuing him were driven by motives infinitely filthier and more perilous than a simple domestic dispute. Discussing the mechanics of the hunt with Alexei in the dark of night made Yuri feel as though he were being violently dragged back into the bloody theater he had so meticulously escaped. But Alexei no longer belonged to that darkness, and Yuri was determined to sever his connection to it before the trap snapped shut.

“Think of Valeri and cease the reconnaissance immediately,” Yuri commanded, his voice hardening with absolute gravity. “The intelligence you have secured is more than enough to justify an extraction. Leave the remaining architecture to whatever high-tier security firm Cherriot commissions next. You are no longer an isolated ghost in the machine, Alexei.”

Alexei possessed a man who loved him more fiercely than life itself—a partner for whom he had tenaciously survived through years of systematic violence just to build a quiet, domestic sanctuary. Yuri refused to stand by and watch his brother walk directly back into the primordial swamp they had only just crawled out of.

—“And what about your own skin, Yuri?” Alexei countered, his tone turning fiercely defensive.

“What are you implying?”

—“If I drop the surveillance, are you going to drop the principal, break contract, and return to Vancouver tonight?” Alexei pressed, the accusation biting through the static. “You only accepted this miserable assignment to shield me from my debts. It isn’t as though you harbored some deep, altruistic desire to act as a bodyguard for a celebrity athlete.”

At that exact moment, the light within Yuri’s own designated quarters flickered to life. Yuri fell into an absolute, paralyzed silence as he watched Cherriot’s elongated shadow peek tentatively through the framework of the doorway, his posture visibly conveying a frantic, disoriented search for his protector. Gazing at that vulnerable outline against the warm light, an undeniable realization crystallized deep within Yuri’s psyche: abandoning the commission at this juncture was a moral and physical impossibility. He could not force his feet to leave this ground while leaving that fragile man entirely alone in the dark.

“Cherriot’s secondary security tier has not yet arrived on site,” Yuri said quietly.

—“Then I have no intention of suspending my operation either,” Alexei snapped back with unyielding finality. “If we are conducting a literal calculation of tactical jeopardy, you are the one embedded in the direct line of fire with the target, Yuri—not me. Therefore, I have zero intention of halting my intelligence gathering until your boots are back on the pavement in Vancouver.”

“Put your safety first, Alyosha.”

—“I will.”

Instead of becoming angry again at Yuri for bringing up Valeri, as he had the previous day, Alexei accepted it. After confirming that Cherriot’s silhouette was wandering near the living room, Yuri checked one last thing before going inside.

“Have they said anything about Cherriot’s location?”

—“Not yet. They lost him after you entered the highway, so it looks like they’ve only sent orders to branches throughout Canada. Fortunately, our client hasn’t carelessly shown his face the way he did at the hotel. There haven’t been any online sightings since then either.” Alexei lowered his voice. —“But be careful. I have a bad feeling.”

Alexei’s instincts were as precise as an animal’s. Yuri nodded. “Understood. I’m hanging up.”

—“I mean every word, Yuri. Watch your back.”

“You as well.”

—“I absolutely despise this layout,” Alexei muttered, his teeth clicking against his lighter. “But if I keep articulating the dread, I’ll jinx the entire extraction, so I’ll leave it there. No matter what occurs in the next twenty-four hours, do not allow your guard to drop for a single second.”

It felt profoundly surreal to receive such intense, repetitive cautions from Alexei—a man who traditionally cracked cynical jokes while standing knee-deep in the worst operational disasters imaginable. Yuri considered what vocabulary might suffice to completely reassure his friend, but in the end, the structural reality dictated that all he could offer was a sparse, verbal confirmation. Misfortune was not a variable one could invariably evade merely through the exercise of mechanical caution. With one final, lingering warning, the line went dead.

The moment Alexei’s voice dissolved from the receiver, Yuri found himself instantly buried in a thick, pitch-black void.

The immediate surroundings were chillingly quiet; in the absolute absence of municipal streetlamps, the wilderness expanding beyond the thin perimeter of the cottage was swallowed in total obscurity. It felt, with an unsettling familiarity, as though he had returned precisely to the grim architecture where his soul belonged. He had certainly maintained a rigorous standard of professional vigilance while guarding Cherriot, yet every discrete moment spent in the man’s eccentric presence had been so absurdly light and pleasant that Yuri had almost allowed his subconscious to believe he was resting on a genuine vacation.

When Cherriot was present in a room, sorrow simply lacked the structural space to settle into the corners. It was as though the man had been meticulously sculpted out of pure affection and light, possessing an innate, radiant capacity to make the people entering his orbit smile—even a hollowed-out weapon like Yuri. But now, with the grim phantom of Samuel’s murder heavy in his thoughts, Yuri was violently reminded of what the real world—the world to which he was irrevocably tethered—actually looked like.

He carried a devastating secret that would completely shatter Cherriot’s fragile emotional equilibrium if unleashed, yet Yuri analyzed his own internal state and realized he was not trembling with fear; he felt only a profound, heavy grief and a quiet regret. He had existed for too many decades in a theater where such brutal executions were commonplace. Once Cherriot inevitably departed his life and the contract concluded, only this sterile desolation would remain behind to keep him company.

Although the ticking clock dictated they still possessed a small horizon of time together, Yuri’s mind involuntarily leaped forward, imagining the exact moment Cherriot would vanish from his reality and the crushing, permanent solitude that would follow in his wake. A sudden, unendurable wave of despair rose from the depths of his stomach without warning, tightening around his throat. At the sheer thought of returning to those endlessly repeated, flavorless days of isolation, he felt a phantom sensation like stale sand pouring into his mouth, choking him. The grey, monotonous life he had once classified as perfectly adequate now appeared, after tasting the vibrant warmth of Cherriot’s presence, like a mold-ridden prison cell.

“Wolfie?”

The soft, hesitant cadence calling his operational moniker pulled Yuri violently from the terrifying psychic depression dragging him into the dark. He flinched, his shoulders tensing as he raised his head. Cherriot stood framed within the open doorway of the cottage, his eyes peering into the gloom toward him. A rich, soft orange light spilled from the interior, wrapping around his silhouette like a protective halo—small, yet intensely vivid as a solitary candle flame defying the vast expanse of the night. It captured Yuri’s gaze with total, hypnotic authority.

As Yuri stared, utterly entranced by the visual contrast, Cherriot stepped across the threshold and walked out onto the dark pavement. “What are you doing standing out here in the dark? Did something happen to the perimeter?”

Cherriot drew nearer with every word until he was standing directly within Yuri’s immediate personal space. The young man had hastily crushed down the canvas heels of his sneakers rather than donning them properly, and he wore nothing but a thin, oversized white T-shirt that draped loosely over a pair of navy lounge pants. The exact microsecond Yuri processed the visual details of his form, the suffocating darkness that had been tormenting his psyche seemed to instantly retreat into the tree line. When Cherriot finally halted directly before him, a sudden, powerful rush of sweet, kinetic pheromones flooded the air, snapping Yuri back into sharp reality.

He blinked, his pupils constricting. I cannot reveal the truth about Samuel. Not now. Even if Samuel had held a precious, irreplaceable position in Cherriot’s romantic history, utilizing the execution as a data point at this specific juncture was tactically forbidden. Forcing him to process such a devastating trauma while he was already being actively hunted by an organization of killers would only induce an acute, paralyzing anxiety.

“I was merely conducting a secondary sweep of the surrounding landscape,” Yuri lied smoothly, his voice a calm, protective shield. “Why are you awake at this hour?”

“Oh. Well…” Cherriot trailed off, his vocal cadence turning uncomfortably awkward. His beautifully curled gold lashes fluttered rapidly as his green eyes shifted erratically across the dark porch, evading direct contact. Then, lowering his voice into a quiet, sheepish murmur, he asked, “Do we happen to have any cold medicine packed in the tactical kit?”

“Cold medicine?”

Yuri’s brow furrowed deeply at the bizarre request. Observing the immediate shift in his bodyguard’s expression, Cherriot let out a low, embarrassed hum, his fingers rising to nervous touch his own face as he rubbed at his lower lip.

“The truth is…” Cherriot admitted, repeatedly pinching his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger—an completely unconscious, endearing habit that invariably surfaced whenever he felt profoundly sheepish. Yuri watched those naturally crimson lips grow intensely redder under the deliberate pressure of his fingers, then slowly, forcefully averted his gaze to the dark woods. For a dangerous fraction of a second, his eyes had strayed somewhere entirely inappropriate. “I felt a slight chill after we extracted ourselves from the lake, and I thought you’d instantly scold me for swimming for so many hours, so I just kept my mouth shut. But the fever… it keeps spiking. It’s getting worse.”

“I see.”

Yuri could not fathom why Cherriot had anticipated a harsh rebuke; he possessed absolutely no intention of lecturing a sick man. A sharp, protective concern regarding the vocabulary of the fever overrode his professional distance, and before his intellect could intervene to stop the motion, Yuri reached out.

He cautiously pressed the cool back of his bare hand directly against Cherriot’s forehead. The thermal bloom radiating from the skin felt almost boiling, the heat intense enough to startle his nerve endings. This was absolutely not the behavior of an ordinary seasonal cold.

“You have been harboring an inflammation of this severity since dinner?”

The moment Yuri’s skin made contact with his forehead, Cherriot flinched slightly, his body tensing in surprise. Then, almost immediately—as though his fevered system were intoxicatingly drawn to the soothing, icy texture of Yuri’s flesh—he began rubbing his forehead in light, pliant circles against the back of Yuri’s hand.

“Yeah,” Cherriot breathed.

The almost petulantly affectionate, animalistic gesture left Yuri temporarily speechless, his tongue freezing in his mouth. Not a single instructor in his military past had ever instructed him on how to tactically manage a grown man who behaved this adorably under pressure.

“Even if you harbored some irrational belief that I would reprimand you, communicating your physical symptoms sooner would have been inherently better for both of us,” Yuri murmured, his hand remaining steady despite the internal tremor. “Your temperature is dangerously elevated, Cherriot.”

“I know, but…” Cherriot lifted his face slightly from the cool sanctuary of Yuri’s hand, the movement causing Yuri’s knuckles to slide smoothly down the elegant bridge of his nose. Before Yuri could retract the limb, Cherriot’s fingers shot forward, catching Yuri tightly by the wrist and guiding the hand flat against his cheek instead, nuzzling deeply into the palm. “Yuri, you’re so incredibly cool. It feels… it feels so good.”

Was it because they had sustained more than twelve hours without direct physical contact? The boundary-breaking behavior was blatantly selfish, yet Yuri analyzed his own internal chemistry and detected zero baseline anger. When he remained entirely motionless, silently permitting the indulgence, Cherriot’s movements gradually shifted into something distinctly more suggestive, the friction turning deliberate. Rubbing his flushed cheek against Yuri’s palm like an affectionate cat was apparently no longer sufficient to sate the craving.

Slowly, Cherriot’s hot lips brushed directly against the sensitive skin of Yuri’s palm.

Yuri’s fingers twitched violently at the sudden sensation of that wet, concentrated heat—a localized fire far more intense than the fever burning across Cherriot’s forehead—and the hand anchoring his wrist immediately tightened its compression. The raw, possessive grip, as though Cherriot were deliberately snaring his handler to prevent any possibility of physical escape, sent a profound, primal chill racing straight down the length of Yuri’s spine.

“You…”

He had suspected the underlying variance since the morning, but face-to-face with the somatic reality, the calculation was undeniable.

“You are entering rut.”

Cherriot’s unique pheromones had suddenly shed their polite, suppressed baseline, growing brazenly, suffocatingly dense in the midnight air. As a dominant Alpha himself, it was biologically impossible for Yuri to mistake the signature scent of another Alpha crossing the threshold into a reproductive rut. The more genetically blessed and physically powerful the Alpha, the more lethal and intoxicating his pheromonal output; the entire evolutionary purpose of the scent was to violently drive rival Alphas out of the designated territory while seamlessly enticing available Omegas into submission.

Cherriot’s golden scent was currently thick enough to make Yuri’s bare skin tingle with static electricity. Something had felt subtly askew since their arrival at the lake, but because Cherriot had been strictly adhering to a regimen of high-grade chemical suppressants, Yuri had not factored a full-scale rut into his threat assessment. Far more troubling than the biological anomaly itself was the terrifying truth that the cycle had already fully detonated, and Yuri had only now decoded the symptoms. The territorial markers in the air were blatantly obvious. How have I spent the entirety of the evening sitting inches away from him without recognizing the shift?

The answer crystallized with a lethal, terrifying clarity.

Because his pheromones didn’t repulse me.

Was it because Cherriot had a history of exclusively dating other Alphas, conditioning his output? Even though Yuri’s system was currently drinking in the explicit territorial markers of an apex Alpha in heat, he experienced absolutely no trace of standard physiological hostility or aggression.

Under any ordinary biological calculus, the scent of a rival Alpha entering rut should have been so violently unpleasant as to induce acute nausea and immediate territorial rage.

“Rut…?” Cherriot echoed the syllable, looking up at him through green eyes that were already half-glazed over with a thick, heavy lacquer of biological intoxication.

The exact microsecond Yuri witnessed those vivid emerald irises slipping faintly out of tactical focus, a distinct sensation of something illicit and profoundly forbidden grazed the back of his neck. It felt as though he had accidentally trespassed into an intensely private, sacred chamber. Forcing his muscles to obey, he deliberately turned his face away from the sight.

“What you’re feeling is rut fever. Once rut begins, it will keep burning through your body until it’s relieved. You really have never endured one without a partner.”

Cherriot’s focus flickered out and returned several times before his eyes finally settled into something close to normal. Breathing shallowly, he asked as though he truly had no idea, “It keeps going?”

“Yes.”

“I’m already in serious pain.”