Page 35 of The Primary Pest (Iphicles Security #1)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Dmytro

Dmytro rested his eyes. He floated lazily now, free of his boots, free of the jeans that pulled him down, all the while waiting for something to happen. Though there were clouds on the horizon, the sea seemed calm and the water passed them by in swells, not chop.

He clung to Ajax. Sometimes only his hand. Sometimes Ajax wrapped him in his arms, like when he’d been unconscious, using the ring-shaped float to save his energy.

Cold water sapped his strength. The brilliant sun baked them both dry. The few bottles they found with trace amounts of water in them would not hold them. They were being brined, literally salted from the outside in.

“Did you ever go swimming in the ocean so long you got pruned?” Ajax’s thoughts must have run along the same lines. “My fingers look mummified.”

He lifted Ajax’s hand, and indeed, his fingers were wrinkled like raisins. “Someone will find us.”

“You don’t know that.” Ajax’s mood had begun to swing between optimism and defeat.

One minute he was sure he heard a plane fly overhead, and the next he said how grateful he was to have had the chance to say goodbye to his parents.

Dmytro kissed him often. In his heart, he pined for his girls, but he knew Liv would be there for them.

With Zhenya’s help, with insurance money and his pension, she would be able to give them the best of everything.

And she loved them. That was important. She wasn’t their mother or father, but she loved them as much as he and Yulia had, and that was enough.

She was always there for them, which was more than Dmytro had been.

Now his place was there with Ajax.

“What? What’s that look for?” Ajax swiveled like an otter, turning his back on swells that threatened to come over his head. Dmytro swam like a rock—as Ajax accused soon after he’d come to. “You’re getting a look on your face.”

Hard to shrug in the water. Hard to speak without slurring his words. His head hurt so badly. “Thinking about Sasha and Pen.”

“You think ghosts might be real?” Ajax asked morbidly. “Like, maybe we can hang around our families still, even after we’re gone?”

“I doubt it.” If ghosts were real, the men Dmytro had killed would have driven him out of his mind long ago. “I believe… this is all we get.”

“I’ll bet you regret taking this job. I’m so sorry, Dmytro. I—”

“I don’t.” Dmytro bicycled his feet as much as he needed to cup Ajax’s jaw one-handed and kiss his red, chapped lips. “I will regret not seeing my girls grow up.”

“But you wouldn’t be in this—”

“I wouldn’t change a thing.” He kissed Ajax’s nose tenderly, then his lips again, speaking between kisses. “Except I’d kill Peter. Throw Chet to the sharks.”

“Shh…” Ajax’s laughter warmed Dmytro’s cheek. “Don’t say the S-word.”

“I regret trusting them.” Dmytro let his smile grow against Ajax’s ear. It made him dizzy, talking this much, but Ajax needed it. “But I’d never change us, little mink. I thought my heart was buried with Yulia. I thought I’d live the rest of my life for Sasha and Pen’s sake.”

“But that’s—”

“I would have been satisfied with that. But now, how could I?” He shook his head. “We could make a life together, Ajax. You are the heart I believed was lost. I know my girls would love you. Liv would love you.”

Ajax shook his head. “I doubt that.”

“She’d welcome you if only because…” He dragged wet hair off his face. “She says I never smile anymore.”

“She’s right about that. When we first met, I thought you couldn’t smile.”

“I’ll plan to smile more.”

He felt something brush past his leg and didn’t mention it. If it didn’t touch Ajax, he certainly didn’t need to know.

Perhaps it was a school of little fish.

Time passed with only the sound of the wind and the rising and falling ocean swells between them. They were definitely too far out for seabirds.

“If you got back and could have anything in the world, change anything in your life,” Ajax asked, “what would you do?”

“Stay-at-home dad. Local soccer coach.” Dmytro smiled. “No. Kidding. I’d take a job training Iphicles men in hand-to-hand combat and weapons so I wouldn’t have to go out in the field anymore.”

“Why didn’t you do that before?” Ajax bumped his leg. He hoped it was Ajax, anyway. He caught Ajax’s feet between his and kept his legs as still as he could while still staying afloat.

“Conserve your energy, little mink.” Dmytro blinked away a splash of water. “When I’m in the field, the pay is astronomical. If I’m killed on the job, the insurance pays triple my income, plus they get my pension. They’ll never want for anything. That’s the trade-off.”

Ajax nodded. “I’m going to do something totally different from now on too.”

“Different than ‘whatever I want,’ do you mean?” Dmytro asked with a laugh.

“It’s not like that. People always think you can do whatever if you’ve got money. That money means freedom. It’s really kind of the opposite if you ask me.”

“How so?” Dmytro couldn’t wait to hear this.

“This is the perfect example, don’t you think? I doubt we’d be floating out here in the middle of nowhere if my dad worked at Taco Bell.”

“Guess not.” He held Ajax’s hand in his. Laced his fingers with Ajax’s longer, slender ones and noticed Ajax’s nails were turning blue.

“There’s the lack of anonymity, for one thing.” Was Ajax’s voice getting thready? “That goes straight away when your mom and dad send you to school in a town car with a bodyguard.”

“When did you ever seek anonymity?”

Ajax smiled and rearranged the papers on his face. The idea was ingenious, but they kept drying and blowing away, leaving salt crystals that looked like drying tears in their wake. Maybe those were drying tears.

“We’ll get out of this.” Dmytro offered vain hope and little else.

There was always a chance. He’d done everything humanly possible.

Ajax still wore his watch, although tampering with the case like he’d done had destroyed its water-resistance, the tracker inside was waterproof.

But Bartosz was the only one who’d known about the tracker.

Since he was at the bottom of the sea, it was likely they would end up there as well.

Best not to offer that bit of information.

Best not to get Ajax’s hopes up too high because nothing good could come from realizing that’s all they were. Just hopes.

“There’s always a small chance.”

“Who’re you trying to convince?” A smile flickered on Ajax’s lips, then died.

Dmytro wiped water out of his burning eyes. “What are you going to do differently when we get back? No more Ajax Freedom, I presume.”

“I’ve been thinking about that for a while. I called myself Ajax Freedom to prove my independence to Mom and Dad. I made a lot of money off social media. Now, I can do pretty much whatever I want with my own money. Why does my life seem so simple from here where I can’t do a damn thing about it?”

Dmytro pulled him in for a gentle kiss. He couldn’t help himself. He’d fallen so deeply, deeply in love with this man, and now he couldn’t bear the thought of losing him.

Ajax broke away first. “I’m going to be Ajax Fairchild again.

I’ll start some kind of story-hour podcast for kids, even if I can’t be the front man.

We’ll read books. Play music. Keep kids company whose families are forced to leave them home alone after school.

I’ve given it lots of thought since all this happened. ”

“Sounds like a good idea.”

“What if I can leverage some of the money I got being Ajax Freedom to persuade large corporations to create on-site day care centers?” Ajax drifted away, and Dmytro pulled him back.

“We could… lobby Congress. Create better tax breaks for corporations that promote job sharing. Off-site employment opportunities… so families can be with their kids? Use encrypted technology to create… safe shared spaces where whole families can check in with each other, even if they can’t afford smartphones… or—”

“You want the children of working parents to feel what?” Dmytro asked, desperately trying to keep Ajax with him.

“ Connected to their families… Stimulated, educated, loved… whether their working parents can be on hand to deliver that love in person or remotely.” Ajax sighed. “Hey. That sounds like a mission statement to me. Got a pen? Better help me remember all this. I don’t feel so good.”

Dmytro wanted to cry. “How would you do it?”

“Get Mom involved. She… can get anything done. I have the technical know-how… podcast and stream. Must be a ton of… like-minded people who would contribute content—” Ajax’s effort to keep talking had cost him.

“You have a beautiful soul, Ajax. Sometimes, I’m simply in awe of you.”

“Nobody has ever… said that before.” Ajax could no longer talk over the wind and water. Dmytro only heard him because he kept their cheeks pressed together.

The water tried its hardest to pull them apart.

“I would imagine you’ve never let anyone see you before.” Dmytro spoke against his ear.

“Maybe not.” Another wave picked them up and dropped them. Ajax caught his breath. “Is it getting choppier out here?”

“Could be.” Dmytro tried to see past the swell but couldn’t. That was a bad sign.

Ajax’s teeth chattered louder between bits of conversation.

Dmytro didn’t think about God often. Until his mother died, he’d been raised in the Ukrainian version of the Russian Orthodox Church. Somewhere, Orthodox clerics got to rule who had jurisdiction over each part of Eastern Europe, but as far as he was concerned, they could all go spit in the wind.

He’d hated every second he’d spent with priests—medieval actors in a two-thousand-year-old play—with their incense, robes, and bearded faces.

If there was a God, Anton would be alive and not Dmytro, the family cockroach, still breathing the air and fighting his way out of one disaster after another.

If there was a God, He and Dmytro had no use for each other.

Time passed more slowly still.