#extremely dubious

He needs to pull the trigger and finish the job - his client specifically wants them both out of the picture. If she goes, he goes. They’ll be together, they’re never apart, but I can’t have any witnesses who can be questioned after the bitch is dead. 

Too great a chance of retaliation by the family, and the client was sure the husband would be little more than a liability. Antoni doesn’t like liabilities, and he doesn’t leave witnesses.

Still… his instincts are screaming at him not to drop the husband, too. 

He hesitates, equivocates, waits far too long as the woman downs her drink and lays back, laughing softly, pulling her husband down on the chaise with her. Her dress, a flimsy, filmy thing she wore to the gala they have just returned from, drapes just so against the velvet fabric of the chaise. Her husband’s suit is perfectly tailored, and she undoes his jacket buttons with one hand while they kiss, her other hand behind his neck, tangled in his brown hair.

She murmurs something even the bugs don’t pick up, and laughs. The husband smiles back, and drops his head, kissing along the column of her neck, pale and draped in heavy jewels that contrast with how thin her dress is. She hums, tightens her fingers against his nape, arches her back to press against him.

He makes a sound, an exhale with just a touch of voice, and an alarm goes off inside Antoni’s head, one that stubbornly refuses to explain itself. 

Antoni can’t figure out what he’s missing here, crouched up at the railing of the stairs with his rifle still aimed, watching as she slides the jacket off her husband’s shoulders, nips playfully at his lips, his nose, his chin. 

“I love you,” She whispers against his lips, and even from here Antoni can see his responding shiver.

“I love you, too.” His voice is low and soft, barely audible. The hand at his neck pushes his head down towards her chest, her other making quick work now of the buttons on his crisp white shirt. She rolls her hips up against his, her hair a waterfall of shimmering dark brown, nearly black, curls and waves. She looks like a Renaissance painting.

They look like a portrait of two people madly in love.

“Do you want me?” She asks, in a tone that says she already knows the answer, head tilted to watch him, hand slipping into the open front of his shirt to run down his stomach. He exhales loud enough for the bugs to pick it up and translate the sound into Antoni’s earpiece.

“Of course.” The husband’s accent is faded, but there - English, fits with what Antoni saw in the description of the assignments, his research files. “Of course I do, Savvie.”

Finger still hovering millimeters from the trigger, Antoni thinks over his files again.

Savannah Marcoset, queenpin of a human trafficking empire.

Run by her father's family until her paternal uncle's sudden death by car accident six years ago, shortly after Savannah married her longtime partner. 

Savannah Marcoset, a violin prodigy that burned out young and faded away from the spotlight, reclusive until she took control of the family business, now a sparkling socialite. Married to one Jackson Marcoset, neé Gallagher, UK resident by birth. Unclear how they met or became romantically involved. Estranged from family. 

Something is wrong about this picture.

“Of course I want you,” The husband says, in a low voice that could very nearly have passed for desirous. “I always want you.”

Antoni knows, all at once, exactly what his intuition is trying to tell him.

Jax Marcoset is just like Chris, and he has been like Chris for a very long time.

Antoni makes the decision in an instant, following his instincts where they lead him. When Savannah Marcoset hikes up the skirt on her dress and pushes her husband’s head down between her legs, Antoni aims and fires in a single silenced shot.

Savvie’s body jerks as the bullet goes right between her eyes.

The husband looks up, staring blankly, then scrambles back in belated panic as he sees the single small hole in her forehead, empty glazed eyes. “S-Savvie? Savvie, what-... what’s-”

“Hands in the air,” Antoni calls out, pitching his voice low and authoritative, standing slowly and keeping his rifle aimed just in case he’s called this wrong, in case the husband will attack him or try to call for help. “Move away from the body, Jackson Marcoset, now.”

The husband pushes slowly to his feet, hands up, standing in his suit pants and unbuttoned shirt. Antoni can hear his heavy breathing through the earpiece, echoed faintly even across the room into his other ear. He turns, very slowly, to look up at Antoni-

And the soft, supple black leather collar buckled tightly around his neck is suddenly visible, no longer hidden by the high neck of his shirt, the bow tie he’d been wearing when they came home. 

I was right, Antoni thinks, a lick of violent triumph running up his spine. I was right, he’s like us, I was right.

He keeps the gun trained on Jax Marcoset, anyway, walking slowly towards him down the stairs, each foot placed carefully, one by one. Neither of them speaks, although Antoni catches Jax Marcoset looking over at the body of his late wife, hands fallen limp to the side now, skirt still hiked high up on her thighs. It’s indecent, really - Antoni tells himself to pull her dress back down before he leaves.

He tries to give the bodies a little dignity - after all, every death since the first one has been strictly business and nothing more.

He left so little of Mr. Davies.

He’s tried to improve on that, ever since.

“Are you going to be a problem?” He asks, keeping his voice level, his accent smoothing off his vowels, sharpening the consonants. He reaches the landing at the bottom of the grand staircase in the entryway, rifle aimed through a large open doorway into the sitting room where the chaise was, right at center mass. “If you are a problem, I will kill you. Do you understand?”

Jax Marcoset seems to struggle to speak, or operate on a delay. For a beat there is a weighty silence, and then he says, just barely audible, “I won’t… be a problem.”

Antoni can see scars that run down his stomach, like he was clawed until he bled, again and again, to make them. The collar, the way the husband isn’t looking back at his dead wife any longer, wholly focused on Antoni, shifting submissiveness trained by violence and fear immediately to the next threat, to appease, placate, and hopefully survive.

It’s all familiar, sickeningly so.

It’s the way Chris acted, when they met. Antoni’s assignment then had been to take out a household of drug runners. He’d found Chris in the alleyway bartering a place to sleep, trading his body because he had nothing else to offer them. Antoni had started firing just after hearing them agree to the trade, but only if Chris would take them all at once.

Once they were all dead, Chris - terrified and teary - had started trying to trade himself to Antoni just to keep from being slaughtered.

It’s all exactly the same, no matter the differences on the surface. 

“I cannot leave you here alive. Do you understand?” He expects fear, or begging. Some kind of plea. But all Jax Marcoset does is slowly nod, hands still held in the air, and stay right where he is. He doesn’t ask to be spared, or for one more goodbye to the dead woman six feet away. He doesn’t beg, or go to his knees, or do anything at all.

He looks exhausted, emptied of all feeling, incapable of bringing anything up but resigned certainty. “Yes, sir.”

Too far gone, maybe.

But Antoni has to try.

“You may lower your hands.”

Jax’s hands drop like weights, down to his sides, where his fingers curl into fists. Antoni knows, from his own experience, that if he were to tell Jax to show him his palms, he would be obeyed, and there would be a row of half-moon scars there.

Just like Antoni has.

He lowers the rifle, slowly, ready to aim and fire again if Jax moves, but he doesn’t. Just stares dully at Antoni, waiting for whatever happens next, utterly incapable of making a choice for himself. Antoni moves over to Savannah Marcoset’s body, pressing two fingers to where her pulse would be and finding none. Not that he expected her to survive a direct shot to the head, but you never know.

He pulls a wipe from one pocket and wipes what might have been left of his fingerprints from her neck, then turns.

Jax Marcoset hasn’t moved a single muscle except to turn his head to watch Antoni’s movements around the room. 

Antoni hums - job done, more or less, and no one needs to be the wiser that he’s left one of the targets alive - and turns to leave. He pauses, and gestures. “Come on, then,” He says, and Jax Marcoset falls in beside him, almost jerking into motion like a puppy trying to find someone new to hold his leash.

The night is dark and silent except for the crunching of Antoni’s shoes on gravel, and even that is barely a whisper of sound. Moonlight glints off the platinum wedding ring Jax Marcoset wears, off the matching lip ring and ear piercings. It briefly illuminates the buckle of the collar at the back of his neck, his eyes focused firmly on the ground in front of him, never looking up. 

Antoni’s car is hidden, of course, and it takes them some time to walk there in silence. He keeps expecting Jax to ask a question, or cry, or do anything. But all Jax does is remain perfectly quiet, pliant, and empty.

He slips off his shirt willingly enough when they reach the car, lips thinned a little, and looks maybe mildly, just barely, surprised when Antoni hands him his spare shirt to put on instead. Their hands brush and Antoni feels the telltale roughness and scarring he expected.

Through it all, his intuition whispers, he’s like Chris, and he needs help.

Once they’re in the car, driving down a small two-lane highway, cutting through the late-night darkness, Antoni says quietly, “You are coming home with me. I cannot have you questioned, or have you speak to police. You will stay with me for now.”

“Yes, sir,” Jax mumbles, looking down at his hands, folded in his lap. He hasn’t tried to remove his collar or his ring, and Antoni knows how hard taking off your collar the first time can be for someone like them, and he doesn’t ask.

Instead, he offers, “Would you like to choose a station on the radio?”

There’s a long silence, Antoni aware he is being studied, Jax Marcoset watching him with utmost care, deciding what he will do or say. What he wants, Antoni thinks. Appease, placate, survive. It’s all the same, in the end. Even though he noticed Jax has no barcode when he changed shirts. If Jax is a pet, he isn’t a legal one and likely never was.

Jax slowly moves his hand, hesitating before he touches the dial as though he thinks his fingers will be slapped away. He changes the station, scanning until he reaches 90.1 FM.

Classical music drifts from the speakers, and Jax pulls his hand back quickly, folding them back in his lap, and closes his eyes. 

“Will you miss her?” Antoni asks.