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It happened the first time, if Shaw was completely honest, because Reese was a dick.
A dick who had saved her life and kept trying to help her, so maybe that was ungrateful. Shaw didn't give a fuck. When Reese showed up at the charity ball in another one of his five thousand dollar suits and blinked at her in the catering outfit and leaned in and said earnestly, "You know, Shaw, if you're having trouble making ends meet, Harold would—"
"When I want something from Harold, I'll ask him," she said through her teeth.
Reese was there saving one of the other waiters from some kind of squabble with a drug gang in his neighborhood, it turned out, which was just as well, since that didn't intersect with what she was there for, namely stealing a cellphone with some incriminating photos on it from one of the guests. She'd taken the job from some scumbag lawyer looking for evidence to get his client a bigger alimony check. It paid the bills and didn't ask questions and didn't want her to commit murder or crimes against national security; that was all she could ask right now.
She got the phone and ditched her outfit, and bumped into Reese again at the back door. He had the nerve to look at her with mild disappointment, and then to top it off the drug gang showed up, and she ended up getting shot at alongside him.
"Look, Shaw, I get it," Reese said, as they fired back. "You aren't interested in our help, and you don't care about the people we save. But—" he paused to take out three guys with three kneecap shots, stupidly showy, "—if you're going to do mercenary work, why wouldn't you do it for Harold?"
Unfortunately, that made too much sense. Harold clearly had money to burn, given one look at the suits Reese could afford on his payroll, and she wouldn't need to worry about being cheated or more literally stabbed in the back. Not to mention she didn't have to worry about them prying into her background, since they already knew it.
And, okay. It was a hell of a come-down from saving the country and killing terrorists to be collecting dirt for divorce lawyers. Saving the lives of random civilians was a stupid-ass mission, but it was still a step up from no mission, and there was at least more likelihood of a halfway decent fight—she'd started to get concerned about losing her edge. She threw herself into a tumbling roll to the set of planters and stood to take out the last of the thugs.
The only reason not to wasn't a good enough reason: she didn't want to give Reese the fucking satisfaction. Reese with his smug self-satisfied inner glow, prancing around pretending to be a hero and looking happier on his pointless slow-suicide mission than Shaw remembered being any day in her life.
But she wasn't going to cut off her nose to spite her face. So after she got home that night and looked at the cellphone with the rich asshole having his stupid fucking affair, she tossed it in the trash and called Harold's number off the card. "Yeah," she said. "Fine. Call me when you need an extra pair of hands, and if the offer is good enough, I'll think about it."
"As it happens, Ms. Shaw," Harold said, "we could use some assistance tomorrow. I'm afraid we've received two unconnected numbers in close succession, and pursuing them both at once would be—complicated."
"Fine," she said, and hung up, forgetting to ask about the money, dammit; but when she met Finch the next morning at the Bethesda Fountain, he handed her an envelope with ten thousand dollars in it, cash, before they even said a word.
"I hope that's adequate," he said. "I replenish John's funds automatically whenever one of his accounts drops below its threshold, but I thought you'd prefer a more straightforward exchange."
"You thought right," she said, tucking the envelope away: it was more than twice what she'd been paid for any job in the previous two months. "What's the job?"
He handed her a picture of a seventeen year old girl, coffee-colored skin and goth clothes, nine piercings with a sullen look. "Her name is Jesenda Wallis," he said. "I'm afraid we know very little about her situation. Her father doesn't seem to be in the picture at all; her mother is in prison serving a sentence for selling drugs. This is the address of her foster home."
"That's all you've got?" Shaw said, tucking it away.
"For the moment," Harold said. He held out a cell phone and a small box holding a Bluetooth earpiece even smaller than the one she'd gotten from the government. "Please keep in touch. And—" She raised an eyebrow; he hesitated, and then said, in his formal polite way, "Ms. Shaw, I trust that you'll understand that I would prefer my—operatives—avoid taking life except when necessary for your safety or that of innocents."
"I can hit a kneecap too," she said dryly.
He smiled at her. "Thank you." He inclined his body to her slightly and went, stiff and limping; looked like a shattered hip and some kind of neck injury. It would be trivially easy to take him out. She watched him go and shook her head slightly; she had no idea how he and Reese had hooked up together, or why he wasn't working through an army of cheap intermediaries, since he could obviously afford them.
But she had ten thousand dollars in her pocket that meant she didn't have to care, and a job to do. Jesenda turned out to be a decent kid working two jobs to save for college and turning down an asshole football player in her class who wanted to date her; he'd apparently decided that was sufficient grounds for buying some rohypnol and doping her at a party. Shaw enlightened him thoroughly while he was swinging from an ankle off one of the East River crossings, then dumped him in the back of a police car with the drugs in his pocket, having explained to him that he was going to confess and plead guilty unless he wanted to see her again very soon.
She'd already decided to make a point, so she didn't just call in; she went to where the tracker she'd slipped onto Finch's coat had landed, a giant mausoleum of a building that turned out to be a defunct library. There was only one door, not locked, but when she opened it cautiously she heard the dog whine upstairs. After a moment Finch's voice called, "We're up here, Ms. Shaw."
She climbed up. Reese idly waggled fingers at her in greeting, stretched long and comfortable in a deep armchair with a book, and Finch was working away at a setup that she could tell at a look Cole would have given his arm for: six monitors, three keyboards, and two standing racks of servers in the corner. It hadn't occurred to her that Finch was tech and not just management and money; he was starting to rack up a whole lot of weirdly discrete functions.
Finch was in shirtsleeves and vest and tie, and he had to turn the chair bodily to look at her. He gave her a small smile. "You didn't call. No difficulties, I hope?"
"No," she said, "and keep the training wheels off, next time, or don't bother calling me."
"Told you she'd guess," murmured Reese.
Finch gave him a mildly exasperated glance and said to her, "I hope you'll believe me when I say that wasn't the point. I have no doubts about your abilities, Ms. Shaw. Only your willingness to do the work. I couldn't risk offering you a case that we couldn't subsequently handle, if you decided it wasn't worth your effort."
"If I don't, I'll say no," Shaw said. "If I say yes, it'll get done. That clear enough for you?"
He didn't get huffy, which was a point in his favor; just nodded. "Perfectly," he said. "Thank you."
Reese gave her a tiny smile as she left, infinitely annoying: he so obviously meant it as welcome aboard, with a blatant subtext of congratulations, like she'd won a prize even being allowed to hang out on the fringes of his noble quest and be occasionally useful.
She swore under her breath on the next job when her target unexpectedly disappeared into a VIP-only party at the Metropolitan Opera and hit her earpiece reluctantly. "Yes, Ms. Shaw?" Finch's voice came, quick. "I see you're at the Opera: is Mr. Volkonsky attending the gala? I can arrange a ticket."
She felt a sharp pang; it was the kind of thing Cole would have said, would have done: knowing what she needed without being told. "Yeah, but I need a little more than that," she said. "I'm betting he's going to make the drop there. I need a size four dress, size six shoes, and—" she sighed, but there wasn't a way around it, "—an escort in a tux," she finished grimly, because the last thing she wanted was to have to hang on Reese's arm, especially because she didn't trust him for five seconds not to horn in.
She heard the clatter of keys. "Half an hour, room 732 at the Empire Hotel," Finch said.
"Thanks," she said, and cut the connection. She knocked on the door half an hour later and blinked: Finch answered it himself, in a tux minus the jacket, bowtie dangling, gesturing her inside. "I took the liberty of having a selection sent over," he said, waving at four garment bags hanging in the open closet, from Bergdorf Goodman, and a stack of shoeboxes. She picked the first of each and threw them on in the bathroom and came out; he was shrugging into the jacket.
At the gala entrance, he smiled at the hostess when asked for a ticket and said, "I'm afraid I wasn't planning to attend, but I thought there might be room. The name is Harold Crane; perhaps if you check with Ms. Albon—"
Two people out of the fundraising department magically appeared with a highly effusive welcome and the willingness to introduce Mr. Harold Crane to anyone he might possibly want to talk to, including Mr. Volkonsky. It was perfect: no one paid any attention or even said a word to Mr. Crane's decorative companion. "Excuse me," Shaw said, and lifted Volkonsky's phone as she slipped past him to go to the ladies' room.
She slipped it back as she returned to Harold's side five minutes later, satisfied, after finally getting into his text messages: Volkonsky was making the microchip exchange here, during the show. "I need to stick close to him," she murmured to Harold, leaning in; Harold gave her the quick patronizing smile of a man to his trophy girlfriend and patted her hand, then managed with a few words to the not-paid-enough Ms. Albon to get them a box seat next to Volkonsky's.
Shaw didn't pay a lot of attention to the opera, watching Volkonsky instead, but after Harold noticed her focus, he took out his own smartphone and did something complicated; he touched her arm and said softly, "I'll be alerted if he moves more than a foot."
She still didn't think the opera was much of a good time, but that was okay; she watched Harold instead. He seemed happy as a clam, listening enthusiastically, except for the moments when he reached up and touched his earpiece and had a quick, almost subvocalized conversation, a cupped hand shielding his mouth. He did it fairly often. She edged closer to eavesdrop and realized after a while that he wasn't just talking to Reese: he had Carter and Fusco on separate lines, too, and a while after that she slowly started to realize—
"Are they on separate jobs?" she said.
"Well," he said, a bit deprecatingly, "I don't know that we can call Mr. Fusco's present assignment a case, exactly; but he and Detective Carter are working independently of one another and Mr. Reese, yes." He hesitated and then said abruptly, "It's often the case, you know, that work—expands to fill the available capacity." He smiled at her, wry, but that wasn't the point.
"You're running four jobs," she said flatly. "And watching—whatever the hell this is."
"La Bohème," Finch said. "I assure you it's not excessively taxing. It's rather like playing simultaneous games of blindfold chess. I used to do that for fun in college." He gave her a smile like he'd said nothing particularly out of the ordinary, and turned his attention back to the stage.
He didn't make sense; he hadn't made sense from the beginning. Not like Reese. Reese was someone she knew: not a brother, but the fucking annoying third cousin who always showed up for Thanksgiving. She'd known other operatives like him: too talented to be passed up, too soft to survive black ops for long, because they might talk a good game but it hurt them to kill people. Most of those men had eaten one of their own bullets if they hadn't gotten themselves killed on the job.
Harold had fished Reese out of the pit and given him a job he could do, and Reese was clearly his for life because of that. What didn't make sense was the other side: why the hell was Harold here?
Cole had been the best handler she'd ever worked with, miles above the others. The one time he'd had to run two ops at once, another handler down in Prague and two major cases exploding too fast for either one to wait, afterwards he'd made her buy him a bottle of Scotch and he'd killed most of it on his own. "I thought I was going to lose it the whole time," he'd said. "Just—trying to keep the whole picture in my head, for both ops at the same time, knowing both of you were on the line—it was fucking nuts, Sam. Don't let me do that again."
"Sure," Sam had said. "I'll shoot you somewhere non-vital, sideline you for a couple of weeks."
"You're a true friend." He'd saluted her with the glass, wobbly, just before he'd slid under the table.
Cole had been brilliant. Whatever Harold was, he was something beyond brilliant, freakish. She'd already started to pick up on that, but this put it in black and white. What the fuck was he doing? If he liked power, he should have been in a back room somewhere with several bodyguards; if he liked money and the good life, he should have been Harold Crane, here for real. If he was a patriot he should have been in charge of something very secret in the Pentagon. Instead he was running a two-man crusade to, as far as she could tell, commit random acts of kindness.
Something had moved him, hurt him, and maybe that had been enough, but she didn't buy it. People reverted to type if they weren't held down by something.
He stiffened in his seat and turned his body towards her, one hand sliding into his pocket; before he even spoke she glanced to the side and saw Volkonsky slipping out through the curtains at the back of his box. "Meet me downstairs by the main entrance in fifteen," she told Harold, and went.
She met him there fourteen minutes later and handed him the stolen microchip in its sealed case. "He and the buyer are duct-taped in a janitor's closet," she said. "The police are on their way."
"Splendid," Harold said, holding up her coat for her to slide into. "I imagine this should put a stop to the attacks on Ms. Liotta."
He offered her an arm as they went outside; he touched his earpiece as they started to cross the huge plaza, the fountains lit up and cascading white. "Is everything under control?"
She could faintly hear Reese saying, "All set here. And I'm pretty sure Anderson won't be pushing around any more tenants, either. How did our new operative do without the training wheels?"
She only with difficulty restrained herself from leaning over and telling Reese just where the fuck to shove his our. Harold only said, "Everything went smoothly. Detective Carter's subject is in for the night; I've told her to go home and get some rest. I'll see you at the library."
He tapped the earpiece again, hanging up. They'd reached the curb. He turned to her. "Can I see you to a cab, Ms. Shaw?"
Abruptly she looked at him, considering. "No," she said, "but you could see me back to that hotel room, if you've got it for the night."
"Certainly," he said, automatically. It was pretty entertaining to see the point hit him about halfway across the street, and the way he darted highly doubtful looks at her the rest of the way there, until they got to the door and she turned and slid two fingers under the bowtie and tugged him in.
"Stop me if any of this isn't fun," she said, to his startled, uncertain face, and kissed him: deep and hard and serious. She felt good about it as soon as she'd started. It had been a long time, a long and bitter time; the adrenaline from that night's abbreviated fight was still simmering under her skin, mixed with lingering anger and a taste of regret in her mouth: why hadn't she ever done this with Cole, given him at least this much of what he'd wanted from her?
And Harold himself, with his hilarious courtesy and his weird brilliance and the puzzle of him; not to mention he was a fantastic kisser, once he got over the first speedbump, and she could tell his hands were going to be good; they were warm and strong on her bare arms. "Ms. Shaw," he said, panting a little, after they'd broken apart long enough for her to open the door and back inside.
"Call me Sam, Harold," she said, reaching around back to the clasp of the dress. "This isn't really a formal occasion."
"Yes, I do take your point," he said. He licked his lips. "Sam, I—this is, in fact, quite fun, but—"
"Relax, Harold," she said. "Neither of us is on deck for deathless romance. But that doesn't mean we can't have a good time."
She pulled the zipper down and let the dress puddle around her ankles. Harold drew a breath and said, wryly, "I find I'm quite unable to counter your arguments." And he stepped in close and kissed her.
He was very good with his hands, it turned out, and also with his tongue, and more importantly than that with patience: he licked and worked her for the better part of an hour, and at the fifty-minute mark an orgasm hit her, fast and hard and unexpected; she liked sex, but the orgasms she usually had to take care of herself. "Well, shit," she said aloud, as it shuddered through her, and she rolled him over onto his back and slid on abruptly, fast, to have his cock in her while she came; he groaned shocked, deep, and caught at her hips just a little too hard, which was perfect; the orgasm kept going, a sweet trembling shudder, and then it got even better, because Harold's earpiece buzzed.
"I—I have to—" Harold said, half-strangled, one hand hovering to answer.
"Go ahead," she said, and listened with delight as Reese said, "Harold? I'm back at the library—are you all right?"
"Y—yes," Harold said, panting, and stifled another groan as Sam strategically clenched down.
"Harold?" Reese said sharply, and Sam reached out and plucked the earpiece out of Harold's ear and held it up to her mouth.
"Harold's a little busy right now, John," she said. "He'll call you back later. In the morning later." She flipped the off switch and tossed it on the nightstand, and bent down to kiss Harold again.
The next morning, she strolled back into the library with Harold; Reese was already there, in a chair, frowning. He gave them both a flat, astonished look. Harold cleared his throat and went faintly pink in the cheeks, and said, "Good morning, Mr. Reese," pitched just a shade high, and then dashed for his computer for safety. Sam just smirked at Reese and ambled over to the desk and perched herself on the edge, near the monitors.
"So," she said blandly, "what's on our docket?" and smiled at Reese with bared teeth.
#
It kept happening because she liked Harold. It was nice to wake up with someone, warm and comfortable, and even nicer to have Harold lean over and kiss her and slide his broad hand down over her belly, teasing, and for her to rock against his fingers while he stroked and dipped them inside, coaxing her body along. She was getting used to actually coming during sex, a whole new world.
She still enjoyed that it pissed Reese off—although she did wonder what the fuck was his problem; apparently it wasn't okay with him that Harold had any secret agent friends but him? He should have thought about that before recruiting her—but it wasn't about him at all. It was just a small side bonus that now he wasn't being tolerantly smug in her direction anymore.
It annoyed her on Harold's behalf that Reese got cold and grim and tense, though she didn't spare it a lot of thought; but then one day she finished up a case early and came back to the library and found Harold alone, in shirtsleeves and vest, a smear of jelly donut at the corner of his mouth he'd missed. That ended up with her pinning him to the bookcases and working his belt open while Harold made half-hearted protesting noises. He groaned as she got a hand into his pants, and she jerked around, hearing footsteps coming, fast: Reese charged up the stairs and halted, staring at them.
Harold made a faint squawk of mortification and made an abortive move to hide, looking away, but Sam was looking at Reese's face. He flattened his expression out almost instantly, but it was too late, she'd already seen it. He didn't look annoyed, or angry, or even jealous; he looked like he wanted to die.
Sam made an abrupt excuse and got the hell out; she spent the rest of the day walking around the city telling herself, angrily, that she didn't give a fuck about John Reese, and it wasn't her problem. Except it didn't work like that. She did give a fuck about Harold; and though she still thought the mission was stupid it was the mission, she'd signed on the dotted line for that, too; and this was going to screw them both.
And dammit, annoying third cousins were still family.
"Harold," she said abruptly, that night in the hotel room—they both liked hotel rooms, anonymous and familiar and easy. She bet, sourly, that Reese had a place, an apartment where he put up pictures—maybe not pictures; pet guns probably, he might even name them—and picked out sheets and fussed around in the kitchen. She sighed.
"Yes?" Harold said, looking up from his laptop; he smiled at her, oddly sweet, and she sighed again. This was goddamn unfair.
"This is fucking Reese up," she said bluntly, and he blinked at her.
"What do you—" He stopped, straightening, and took his hands off the keyboard; he looked around himself, startled and helpless. "I didn't realize," he said after a moment, his voice strange. "But you're right; that would explain—ah. And," he cleared his throat, "I presume you're—that you—"
"I'm not the one he wants to fuck, Harold," she said. "I'm the one he wants to strangle with his bare hands."
Harold stared at her. "No, Sam, you must have misunderstood. John is—"
"John was perfectly happy being your platonic life partner on the road to Damascus," she said. "Until I showed up and it turned out there were parts of you he'd left on the table for me."
"But that's absurd," Harold said. "He can't possibly—" He paused, awkward, and then he said quietly, "Sam, I hope you won't be offended, but you see, John can't possibly imagine there's anything he would like of me that I wouldn't give him."
It made her chest ache. Cole would have said that for her, she knew. She wished again she'd been able to say it to him. That she'd been able to let Cole know—She swallowed. But oddly that made her feel better, too; she was going to miss this, a hell of a lot, but at least she could fix this for Harold, even if she hadn't been able to figure it out for Cole in time.
"Sure he can," she said. "But he should be here in five minutes now that you've spelled it out for him using small words."
"What?" Harold said.
She waved a hand at her ear. "I opened a line to his phone. I assume he's been lurking somewhere outside the hotel wallowing in misery."
Harold gawked at her, but she raised an eyebrow and dared him to be shocked about someone listening in to his conversations, and he looked embarrassed without even saying a word. "But," he said, "—but Sam, you—"
"Will be fine," she said, swinging her coat off the chair and pulling it on. She bent down to give Harold one last kiss, fast and sweet, and then she went to the door and opened it with Reese raising a hand to the knocker. He looked at her with his stupid chiseled face nakedly open, terrified and desperate, and that helped too, because thank God, no one had ever made her look that way and never would, and she couldn't help but feel sorry for the poor bastard.
"You're welcome," she told him, pointedly, but even then he just said, "Thank you," shakily grateful, like even the smugness had been driven out of him. She huffed an annoyed breath and jerked her thumb over her shoulder into the room. "Go," she said, and pulled the door shut behind her, hearing him say, "Harold—Harold—"
She kept the line open long enough to hear what sounded like Reese knocking over three different pieces of furniture while Harold kept trying to have an important relationship conversation, saying, "But why didn't you—ah, that's—John, are you really—oh," until John apparently proved that yes, he was really, and she felt okay hanging up and letting Reese take it on his own from there.
#
The next morning she went into the library, because she figured it was better to start as she meant to go on. Reese was lying on the couch on his side, back to his annoying glowingly happy self; he beamed at her and stretched luxuriously, arms over his head and hips shifting, before he rolled onto his stomach: not so much unselfconscious as openly advertising he'd been ridden hard and put away wet. It made him about ten times as attractive as his usual boring tall-dark-and-superhuman routine, she had to admit. Harold on the other hand went a little pink when he looked up, and anxious at the same time.
"Morning," she said, firmly casual. "Anything new come in?"
She didn't need Harold spilling any guilt on her: sure, she'd miss the regular orgasms, but the pay was still good, the work was decent, and she still liked her boss even if his boyfriend was a nuisance. Which Reese remained. He wasn't patting her on the head anymore, but now he was earnestly trying to find a way to make it up to her, for her massive noble sacrifice apparently.
Although to be fair, that was pretty funny, and the upside was that it made Reese more talkative with her about Harold, although he should have known better; but apparently he badly wanted to brag about his boyfriend, and he had a limited audience.
Reese hadn't completely lost all discretion; on anything to do with where the numbers came from or Finch's identity, he clammed so absolutely she wasn't even sure how much he himself knew. But he let a lot slip about himself: how Finch had found him, saved him. It was pretty clear that Finch had known ridiculous amounts of information about him; the kinds of data that he just flat-out shouldn't have been able to get on a covert operative.
It was another piece of the puzzle she increasingly felt she had to solve: why was Research feeding Harold numbers on the side? Because that was definitely happening. Harold's numbers were small-time, but they were just as accurate, and she was starting to realize that she'd been wrong to dismiss them as unimportant.
It didn't take a rocket scientist to guess that someone buying twenty pounds of Semtex and some detonators on the black market was bad news; figuring out that some random asshole football player in the Bronx who'd picked up some roofies was going after one particular girl—she wasn't sure how anyone could do that.
And what Harold had said, about work expanding to fill the capacity available—that was clearly happening too. She'd counted the number of cases on Harold's board, she'd looked into the ones he and Reese had filed. The pace had gone up by half since she'd come on full-time. Harold had somehow told Research he could handle more now; and Research had handed him more. That meant that Research didn't just stumble over these things once in a while. Research had all these cases, and more sitting in the wings, just out of sight.
She wasn't Cole; she'd always understood that there were answers she wasn't allowed to get, because that was how projects got fucked, and this project was too important to take chances with. But that was why she did need to chase this puzzle down. She was absolutely certain Control didn't know about Harold; if they did, they would've politely but firmly escorted him into that back room in the Pentagon in five minutes, assuming some fucking moron like Wilson didn't put a knee-jerk kill order on him first.
So someone in Research was doing this under the table. Harold had a friend inside Research—possibly another freakish genius just like him; that sounded plausible—who was opening a back door for him. And she wasn't a fucking moron like Wilson, so she knew Harold wasn't a threat; but she wasn't at all sure about Harold's source. Harold's source had to be evading a dozen security protocols to get Harold this information, and they'd been doing it for years now. Who else were they feeding information to? It didn't make sense that Harold would be the one and only; he only ever got people in the tri-state area, and most of the time only in the five boroughs. Probably there was a whole network of geek geniuses throughout the metro areas of the country, having numbers and money funneled to them.
So this was something she did need to know, because she liked Harold a lot, and she liked being alive, but if some loose cannon inside Research was jeopardizing the whole project just to play guardian angel for random schmucks, then she was going to have to find a way to get Control that intel regardless of the cost.
She wasn't going to jump the gun; she did trust Harold more than not, and she was pretty sure he had reasonable priorities even if he included more on his list of things to care about than she did. She didn't think Harold would put his random numbers above the project as a whole, and she didn't think he'd be the kind of stupid that would miss it if his source was doing something that risked the project. But she was going to make sure.
So she squirrelled away all the intel she could get in the back of her head, and worked steady cases, and then she came into the library one morning to find Harold staring at a picture of a woman on the board, anxious, and Reese packing a suitcase full of padding and guns. She raised eyebrows. "Road trip?"
"A plane trip, I'm afraid," Harold said, turning around. "Our latest number is in Vancouver."
She stared at him. "Since when do we handle numbers in Canada? Or on the west coast, for that matter?"
Harold hesitated, then said abruptly, "What matters now is that the only reason we would receive this number is if the incident involving this woman is likely to produce a very serious loss of life. If you were available, Sam, we would be grateful for your assistance."
She spent the ride to the airport revising a whole lot of ideas. So Harold was the one and only. Getting numbers only in the New York City area—triage? The metro area had the population density and the transport choices to make it a great choice, if you only had one team. Why the hell would you only have one team?
Things got even more strange at the airport. She eyed Reese sidelong as he just hefted his suitcase of mass destruction straight out of the trunk and headed inside, but there were no problems: they were met by two unsmiling security suits, escorted through a side office and straight onto the tarmac: a private 767 was waiting for them, with IFT emblazoned on the tail.
Harold had a laptop open before they even took off; Reese immediately stretched out in the seat next to him and slept. That was a good idea, since there was no way of knowing when they'd have a chance to sleep out there, but she spent some time online herself, sitting on the opposite side of the plane.
IFT was a private company, so private even PrivCo's database had almost nothing on them: not much beyond the intel that it had been founded in 1983 by the late Nathan Ingram, which Google had already told her. But she still had the IRS back door Cole had set up for her when they'd worked their very first case, and there was estate tax data: on the death of his father, William Ingram had become the sole owner of a tax-shelter trust holding fifty shares of the company, valued at $75 billion dollars. That was insane, but in 2010 IFT had brought in over fifteen billion dollars of net income, and thirty seconds of googling told her that meant it should have been valued at twice that. So someone else owned half of IFT. Someone completely invisible.
She sat back, drumming her fingers on the tray table. A shot in the dark: she typed Harold Wren into the search along with Ingram and got nothing; literally nothing, not even irrelevant search results; when she tried Harold Wren alone she got a stack of extremely boring and repetitive pages on LinkedIn and Facebook and a dozen bad PR sites, all parroting the same party line: United Heritage senior vice president Harold Wren attended MIT from 1980 to 1983—
IFT had been started in 1983, when Ingram left MIT. Harold Wren had left at the same time. Top of his class, and then he'd supposedly gone into the insurance business while his middle-of-the-road classmate—his tall, good-looking, sociable, middle-of-the-road classmate—had gone on to change the world? She looked at Harold, his hands darting over the keyboard, pushing his glasses back up his nose with a knuckle as he frowned down at the screen; Harold, who could dial up an IFT jet on five minutes notice. Jesus fucking Christ.
It explained the jet, it explained the money, it explained the way Harold could make pretty much any computer system roll over and beg; but it didn't explain any of the things that really mattered.
IFT wasn't in the news that much these days, not since Ingram had driven his car into that embankment in 2010, and not for a while before then, either. She dug up an article from 2008 from Wired called "The Slow Quiet Death Of IFT," and it gave her the big picture: the company had been on a blazing run throughout the eighties and nineties, miles ahead of what anyone else had been able to do, pumping out new products on a yearly basis built on top of almost miraculous leaps in software, and then suddenly—nothing. The last major success had been IFOS, the operating system that was still the only one approved for secure government installations; since then the company had been coasting—comfortably—on its brand name and its existing patents, but the magic had gone.
They'd launched IFOS in July 2001, long before Ingram had died. Outwardly, nothing changed afterwards. Ingram was still right there, all along, smiling at conferences, schmoozing with politicians, doing nothing different at all. But after all, Ingram hadn't been doing the work. Harold had been the magic. And he hadn't stopped being magic, either; she'd seen that much first-hand. So what the fuck had happened?
She looked at the date. July 2001. Two months later, the world had changed. Harold had found Reese in 2011. What the fuck had Harold been doing during those ten years? He'd turned the software world inside out on an annual basis for two decades before then; what had taken him ten years to build?
She'd hit the end of what there was to find, for now. She cleared her history, cleared everything, started a hard disk wipe, everything Cole had taught her. She shut the laptop to chug through it and pushed it away. Cole would have loved this; digging had always been his favorite part. She hated it. It felt like sliding down a rabbit hole, places up ahead she didn't necessarily want to go. You couldn't unlearn something, even if you and the mission would be better off that way.
For now, it was time to sleep: she pushed the seat button and the overhead lights went off; another button and the seat went completely flat. Harold was still sitting there in his island of light; Sam drifted off to the sound of his typing.
#
By the time they landed, Harold was looking tired and faded around the edges, but he had intel for them: the woman's name was Dr. Carolyn Duval, and she was a researcher at a major Vancouver biotech company, Qualitech. "Her research division is highly secret," Harold said, while a limo sped them towards a hotel in the city center, "but there are some indications: the company's focus is on treatment for rare eye diseases, and her doctoral thesis was on the use of viruses in gene therapy."
"So she's not a medical doctor?" Reese said.
"She's both," Harold said. "And judging from her records, very good at what she does."
"What are the chances we're looking at a biological weapon here?" Sam said bluntly.
Harold hesitated, and looked at Reese, who raised both eyebrows. "Ordinarily," Harold said abruptly, "I would say none. Ordinarily, however, we wouldn't have received this number. So I'm not prepared to completely rule out the possibility."
Well, that was fucking awesome. Sam rubbed a hand over her face. "So we're flying blind?"
"I've taken some steps to get us access to more information," Harold said. "Fortunately, Qualitech has been having some financial difficulties; in the last three years they've laid off more than three quarters of their staff and sold their primary revenue-producing drug to another company. Their stock price has dropped to near-record lows. During our flight, I managed to buy a ten percent stake in the company, which makes me the third largest shareholder. I've sent a notification to the CEO that I'd like to tour the research facility and meet the chief scientists."
Reese nodded. "With your asset manager and your...?" he glanced at her.
"Executive assistant works," Sam said. "No one looks twice at a secretary." She gave him a wintry smile. "Some of us take the undercover thing a little more seriously than others."
"There is more of me to cover," Reese said, in injured tones. Sam snorted.
The CEO, William Langdon, was apparently impressed enough by Harold's cash to appoint himself their tour guide. He was very, very nervous, and it wasn't just the kind of nervous that came from being in charge of a sinking ship and watching his stock options turn worthless. The tour took them through half a dozen laboratories that were very clean and full of people in lab coats pushing paper. Sam traded a look with Reese, who nodded very slightly: fronts.
They weren't introduced to Dr. Duval; she wasn't even in any of the labs. As Langdon tried to steer them back upstairs to his office, Harold glanced at Reese and Sam, then quirked his mouth and turned back and said, gently, "Mr. Langdon, my time is extremely valuable; I'd appreciate if you stopped wasting it. Do you really think I've invested this much money without knowing what I'm buying?"
Langdon stopped, his face going stiff and blank. Sam shrugged her shoulders a little in her suit jacket, loosening things up, and rested a hand on her buckle, in position to pull her underarm piece. If the place was really a front for some kind of terrorist plot, they were about to start getting shot at, which Sam disliked anyway and especially disliked with Harold to protect. She threw a glance at Reese; he had that distant, relaxed look on, the one he wore when he expected to kill people instead of just patting them on the head and shooting them in the knees.
Langdon didn't say anything; Harold gave him a small, prim smile and pushed. "I'd like to meet Dr. Duval and her team. Now, please."
Langdon cleared his throat. "I'm afraid that's not—"
"Now," Harold said, and there was abruptly a bite in his voice, a note of steel that jerked Langdon's head around; Harold's face had gone coldly polite, the humor and gentleness gone out of it like a blown candle.
Langdon flinched. It was pretty impressive. Sam controlled her own face with difficulty; Reese shifted slightly next to her for no reason she could figure out, and she slanted a look—oh, for fuck's sake; Reese was turned on. She glared at him, hard; he had the grace to go faintly pink in the cheekbones, and he stopped keeping Harold in his peripheral vision and put his full attention back on the other end of the hallway where it belonged.
"Perhaps—" Langdon darted a look at them and then at Harold. "Perhaps we could privately—"
"No," Reese said, quietly, flatly. Langdon flinched even harder; Reese had straightened up and was radiating killer like a beacon straight to the lizard brain. Sam dropped her own eyes and held her tablet in front of her, protective body language saying she was just a harmless secretary who'd seen bad, bad things happen before in situations like this; she felt Langdon's eyes on the top of her head.
Langdon folded. "Mr. Crane, I—I hope I don't need to emphasize the absolute necessity of confidentiality—"
"Not at all," Harold said mildly, his face easily folding back into an amiable smile. "Lead the way."
The real lab was two floors underground, with a wall full of mice in glass-fronted cages behind a three-chambered airtight door lock system. Dr. Duval had to go through a fifteen minute decontamination process before she could come out, which involved hosing down her closed hazmat suit with chemicals and then steaming water. She looked sweaty and annoyed when she finally emerged, in black leggings and a thin Duran Duran t-shirt she'd probably had since the 1980s.
"You do realize you've just blown half my day," she said, angrily, clearly not in the least impressed by her own CEO, before Langdon managed to corral her and whisper urgently enough to convince her to look at Harold only half belligerently. She still wasn't anxious, though: probably not an illegal operation, then.
"Unfortunately," Harold said afterwards, in the ridiculous two-story suite he'd rented them at the Fairmont, "that doesn't mean it can't result in the deaths of a great many people." He was frowning at his screens: three had already been waiting down at the front desk by the time they'd checked in. "However, I do agree, Sam," he added. "They don't seem to fear being caught in something criminal. I think Mr. Langdon's concern is entirely for the vast sums of money to be made by himself and his patrons on the board when Duval's new viral delivery system for gene therapy is patented—sums which will be all the larger the lower the stock price goes beforehand, and the fewer employees with vested options that remain."
"Not very nice of them, but it doesn't make them murderers. So what's the problem?" Reese said, sprawled over one of the couches cleaning his guns. "Duval sounded like she knew what she was talking about. You think she's screwed up somehow?"
"Difficult to say," Harold said. He hesitated, glancing at Sam, then said, "The source of the threat can't be a mistake on the scientific level, something that would require expertise in the field to comprehend."
Sam kept her head down over her own kit and didn't flicker an eye to show she'd noticed Harold looking, or that she'd gotten anything out of what he was saying, but internally it was going in the hopper with everything else. How could Harold be sure Research hadn't spotted something Duval had gotten wrong? That was a hell of a lot more certainty than Sam and Cole had ever had with their cases.
"What if it's something else?" Reese said. "Something she just didn't see. Some lab assistant put in the wrong numbers—"
Harold templed his fingers against his lips. "A possibility," he said. "Some kind of data that would be an obvious counterindication—"
"Does it matter?" Sam said, keeping her head down. "We don't get the numbers until there's imminent danger, right?" They were both silent, a confirmation. "So what really matters is what Duval's about to do in the next couple of days. And how it's going to go very fucking wrong."
"Good point," Reese said.
Over dinner, Harold built them ID cards and a phone app that would get them into anywhere in the building, including Duval's laboratory. Shortly after midnight, she and Reese headed back to the Qualitech offices. The place was silent and still, emptied—hazards of laying off hundreds of your employees—and with Harold disabling the security cameras from afar, it wasn't a problem to get inside.
Duval was still in her lab, though, painstakingly transferring pale amber liquid from one large jug to a series of vials with a giant, long-nosed eyedropper. She made a note every time she squeezed so much as one drop, and checked her numbers after every pass. Sam and Reese backed off from the door into the hallway. "I don't know, Harold," Reese said. "She seems pretty meticulous."
"She is getting ready for something," Sam said. "She's going to inject the mice with that stuff—what if it's going to go haywire? This is a virus, right? If it got out—"
"I'm pretty sure I've seen that movie," Reese said, a twist of his mouth.
"No," Harold said, unequivocal. "We wouldn't receive that kind of threat."
Right. Because it would have gone to her and Cole, to a team like theirs. Except where did you draw the line, and how the fuck could Harold be so sure he knew where it was?
"What if it's not going to get out?" Reese said. "Their precautions seem pretty good. What if it's just Duval? What if she's going to be the victim and the perpetrator?"
"Again, no," Harold said. "As remarkable as Dr. Duval and her work are, her life is not more valuable than the lives of the numbers we would be able to save closer to home. She wouldn't be prioritized—oh." He stopped. Sam raised an eyebrow to Reese. There was a long silence. "Yes. Yes, of course, that makes perfect sense," Harold said softly, finally. "It's the other way arou—aughaf."
Reese flinched hard, next to her; Sam's hand had gone to her gun. "Harold," he said. "Harold."
The line went dead. Reese was already moving; Sam threw one frustrated look back at the door to the lab, but she didn't have enough fucking intel; she couldn't even tell if shooting Duval was exactly the right or exactly the wrong thing to do. She went after Reese.
#
The suite was empty: Harold was gone, his laptop was gone, his cellphone was gone. Reese threw one wild desperate look around the living room. "Check the bedroom," Sam said sharply. "See if they took any clothes," which was idiotic, but Reese's brain wasn't going to let him recognize how fucked they were for a little while longer, so it worked to get him out of the way. As soon as he was out of sight, Sam went outside to the terrace, because if she'd been setting up a murder here, she'd have drowned Harold in the pool.
Harold wasn't in the pool. She caught a glimpse of something small and gleaming on the stones near the railing, though: a sliver of plastic, maybe a piece of a broken cellphone. There was a faint chalky white scuff mark on the railing nearby. She looked back at the living room, then down over the railing. It let out onto the terrace of the suite below.
Reese was there next to her; she held out the piece of plastic silently and pointed to the scuff; he grabbed the railing and went over without another word, one jump and dropping to the floor twelve feet below. She swore under her breath and went after him again. "Quit fucking moving faster than your brain," she snarled at him, catching him at the door to the interior of the suite; he only acknowledged with a single nod as they drew their guns. They went in together, clearing the rooms: the place was empty.
But Reese caught her arm at the edge of the carpet in the living room, just before she stepped on it. She looked down: it had been vacuumed freshly, and it was thick enough it showed traces of footprints and—wheelchair tracks.
The bellmen remembered the wheelchair, and the van that had picked it up. A hundred dollar tip got them into the security room and to the footage: but these people weren't fucking amateurs. They'd come into the hotel's lobby overhang on an angle that hid the license plate, and they'd kept their faces turned away from the cameras. Three guys, the driver and two others. They'd been gone for twenty minutes.
Reese straightened up from the video footage. The bell captain glanced at his face and said uncertainly, "Should we call the police? Has something—"
"No," Sam said. "We're good." She took Reese by the arm and got him out.
"Langdon," Reese said flatly, as she flagged down a cab.
"Yeah," she said.
They got his home address out of the dossier Harold had prepped, still on their phones. It was ten minutes away, and she could see Reese going over the edge a little more with every streetlamp that flashed on his face, going by. She closed the divider between them and the driver and reached out and gripped his arm, painfully hard, dug her thumb into the knot of nerves at the elbow. He didn't flinch, which was a bad sign. He looked over at her.
"Right now, from what we know, this is about greed," she said, low. "You make it about survival, you're hurting Harold's odds."
He said, his voice raw and strange, "If he—"
"If they kill him," she said, "they're dead. We don't want them to think they're fucking dead anyway."
He nodded after a moment, once.
Langdon lived in a gorgeous big townhouse with a wife and two small kids. Sam cursed under her breath, but she knew Reese wasn't going to let her do the interrogation. "Don't kill him," she said to Reese flatly. "Tell me you got it."
"I've got it, Shaw," he said, dead calm. "Keep them out of the way."
The wife's eyes were wide and terrified above her hand, in the bed, while Reese dragged Langdon out on the other side and into the bathroom. He shut the door; water started running noisily on the other side. The woman's eyes darted after him, back to Sam's face.
"Here's how this works," Sam said. "I'm going to let you up. We're going to go sit outside the kids' rooms. If one of them wakes up, you're going to put them in the same room and stay with them and keep them quiet. You do what I say, the three of you are going to be fine. Your husband might not be, but that's because he made a big fucking mistake. Do you understand?"
Sam could tell from the woman's eyes that she got it, and also that she wasn't going to be stupid. Reese was back in five minutes, his face bleak, and the kids hadn't woken up, so that was something in this complete clusterfuck; Sam zip-tied the woman to the banister and dropped a pair of manicure scissors just barely in reach of her feet as they left.
"Well?" she said, as they went back to the car.
"He didn't know anything about it," Reese said. "He spoke to the rest of the board this afternoon and told them; there are eight of them who could be behind it."
"Where?"
"Two in Montreal, one in Seattle, three in New York," Reese said. "One in Geneva, one in Tokyo."
"Shit," Sam said. "Why'd you leave him back there?"
"They're not going to trade," Reese said. "They took Harold to make him dump his stock before they kill him."
"And I repeat, why did you leave Langdon?" she snapped. "Our only chance is to get to them, and he's our only link—"
"It's not enough time, Shaw," Reese said. "Even if we guessed right on the first shot, by the time we get to any one of them, it'll be too late."
"You have any fucking better ideas?" she said. "You want to drive around the city, see if anyone's noticed a van?"
She paused at the street, looking for a likely car to jack, but Reese just kept going towards the nearest intersection. She stared and then caught him up, having to jog; he stopped on the corner and stared up. She followed his line of sight: there was a traffic camera. "You're worried about time and you want to hack Vancouver's traffic cam system?" she said. "If we had Harold and a week to do it in—"
"We need help," Reese said.
"We're not going to get it standing around here," she said.
"We can't find him in time," Reese said, and Sam abruptly realized Reese wasn't talking to her. She looked back up at the traffic camera, blankly; what the fuck—
"You need to give us something," Reese said. "Please." He was still staring at the camera—at a random fucking traffic cam in the middle of Vancouver, like he thought someone was monitoring it right this second—
A phone rang distantly. Sam jerked around: there was an old public phone booth across the street, on the other side of the intersection. Reese was already crossing the street towards it. She watched him, baffled, then followed. He picked it up, listened, said, "Thank you," and hung up. "Come on, Shaw."
She closed her mouth hard on the stupid questions, the ones Reese was going to ignore, and followed him down the block; he jacked a car in a few movements. "Navigate for me," Reese said, tossing her his phone: he'd just looked up a Vancouver driver's license number, and there was a picture of a grim-faced man, bearded, with an address out in the suburbs.
#
When they got there, there was a nondescript black van parked in the driveway, rear end in. Sam stared at it out the front windshield.
The truth about a group of people you call Research, Harold had said. That they don't exist. Except apparently they existed enough to watch Reese and Finch literally twenty-four-seven, and could track a single van across the city of Vancouver.
"They've probably got him in the basement," Reese said, pulling the Vector submachine gun out of his bag.
"Yeah," she said.
They went in straight and fast and hard. The house had the hollow unlived feeling of a front: generic flowered couch and curtains in the living room, a beige rug; shiny counters, empty sink in the kitchen. There was a single black glove tossed on the counter next to the fridge and television noise coming in from a den in back: a hockey game on, turned up too loud, to cover stray noises.
Two of the men were there, theoretically covering the basement door, but they had their guns down, relaxed; they were half watching the game, and one of them had opened a beer. Sam couldn't even blame them that much; in their place, she would've felt a hundred percent in the clear, too.
Reese shot them both with perfect precision, single bullet to the head apiece, only the thock-thock of the silenced shots and they went down. The second man's beer even stayed unspilled, upright in his hand as he slid glassy-eyed down the wall, leaving a thin red streak on the wallpaper.
As Sam got the basement door open, Harold's voice drifted up in a gasp, low and in pain. Reese went, flying past her, and she had to scramble to keep up close enough to cover him. The third man was on Harold's far side, holding wires connected to a car battery. Reese dropped him, but there was a fourth guy, on the other side of the room with a clear view of the stairs, with a gun. She threw herself forward, firing, and took him out at the belly; his shot missed Reese's head by inches.
She came down the last few steps in a roll and was back up on her feet. She kicked the man's gun away and flattened him, knees on his arms and the stock of her gun in his throat, but it wasn't necessary: he was going, gone.
Reese was already at Harold's side, getting him loose, murmuring soft and desperately. Sam rolled her eyes and got up and went to help. Harold's face was grey and creased with pain; his laptop was on the table next to the battery, open to a trading site, a password-cracking routine running, clearly without luck. Harold's chest was spotted with angry red marks, faint electrical burns. Reese was already yanking open his bag one-handed, groping for cream and gauze; Harold's eyes were closed and he had his head tipped against Reese's shoulder.
"Hold him," Sam told Reese, grabbing the bag away from him. "And next time you blow past me like that, I'm going to let you walk into a fucking bullet."
"Thank you," Reese said, quietly.
"Shut the fuck up," Sam said.
Harold managed to open his eyes and give her a small, painful smile. Sam resisted the urge to tell him to shut up, too.
They got Harold bandaged up and into the car; they traded up a few times to break the trail of any police investigation, until they got back into the city and could catch a taxi to the hotel. Harold was able to limp in on John's arm, slowly, to the private elevator, his eyes almost closed; they got him into the bed and John got out the bigger medical kit to give him a shot of morphine.
"Wait," Harold said faintly, his fingers twitching out to catch John's arm. "Duval."
"Do we need to stop her?" Sam asked.
"No," Harold said, thready. "No. Opposite."
"The other way around," John said. "That's what you said."
"Yes," Harold said. "The results—will be negative."
"How is that going to—" Shaw paused as she got it. The tests failing, that wasn't going to kill anyone. It just wasn't going to save lives. All the lives Duval's new treatment would help.
"Harold," Reese said, "I'm not handing this to these guys—"
Harold flicked his fingers, saying clearly, that doesn't matter. Sam ignored that and said to Reese, "Don't worry about it. I checked their phones before I dumped them; the squad got a call from Geneva."
Reese looked at her, then nodded slightly: understood. They'd take care of that afterwards. "Do you mind—"
"I've got it," she said, standing up. "Stay with him."
It was almost two in the morning, but Duval was still at the lab. She jumped nearly a foot when Sam tapped on the glass wall between them. Sam picked up the handset and pointed at the one inside; after a moment Duval picked it up.
"There's a problem with your setup," Sam said without preamble. "A problem that's going to make your tests come back negative when they shouldn't."
"Excuse me?" Duval said. "What the hell are you even—and how would you know?"
Sam glanced up. There were four security cameras mounted on the ceiling of the lab, covering the room. "Call it an inside source," she said. She looked back at Duval. "You don't need to take my word for it. Run the tests. When they come back negative, redo everything. Double check the work your assistants did, especially anything you weren't overseeing yourself. You'll find something. Then try again."
Duval stared at her, uncertainty crossing her face. "I was out for a week with the flu," she said slowly.
"Sounds like a good place to start," Sam said. She turned to go and looked back. "Oh, and a word of advice? You've picked some bad people to work for. Make sure that if something happens to you, your work gets published. Just to be safe."
She left Duval staring after her through the glass.
#
Harold was asleep when she got back to the hotel. Reese was in the living room with the lights off, staring into nothing, hollow-eyed, his elbows resting on his knees. He jerked and blinked at her as she turned on the lights. She set the flask of whiskey she'd picked up on the table in front of him. "Go ahead," she said.
He glanced at her, warily, and shook his head a little.
"Fine, if you won't, I will." She sat down next to him, cracked it and slugged back a swallow. He was tense, muscles taut, waiting.
"It's a surveillance system," she said. "An AI. And he built it."
After a moment, Reese nodded.
Fuck. She took another pull and held out the bottle. Reese took it and tipped it back for a swallow, held it cradled in his hands.
A system that knew—everything; that could be watching every single traffic cam and listening to every single phone call, at the same time. Something that could catch terrorists in Berlin and murderers in New York and clerical errors in Vancouver, all at the same time. And Harold was the one who'd built it. Alone, apparently, when the best developer teams money could buy had all failed so spectacularly that even the public had heard about their projects.
She knew what she was supposed to do now. She was supposed to call that asshole in the Office of Special Counsel and tell him, so that they could close the back door Harold had built himself—assuming that they could—and for that matter send some people to get Harold and persuade him to quit saving people one at a time and turn his attention to building weapons for the cyberwar that they were probably going to have at some point in the next five years.
And conveniently, she could also tell him that if they needed help with the persuasion, all it would take would be a gun pointed at John Reese's head.
"Shaw," Reese said, not looking up, "I know you don't think the irrelevant numbers matter—"
"We just saved god only knows how many people's lives by catching a typo in some third-tier industry lab in Canada," Sam said. "I'm not going to rain on your fucking parade. Give me back the bottle."
Tension ran out of him like water; he sat back into the cushions. "Take-backs aren't very nice, Sam," he said, and drank almost half the bottle just to keep it away from her, fending her off obnoxiously until she managed to get him to fall for a feint at a kidney-punch and grab it back.
He relaxed bonelessly back against the couch, smirking at her glare, long-legged and irritating. She kicked him in the ankle. "Ow," he said, reproachfully.
"I seriously don't know how Harold puts up with your shit," she said, taking a slug off the bottle.
He smirked again, and put on a little display of sprawling even more bonelessly against the cushions. "I have redeeming qualities." Then he covered his mouth with a fist and hiccuped.
"Yeah, I can see them from here," she said.
He grinned at her, eyes already drunkenly fuzzy. "Admit it, Sam, you like us."
"I like Harold," she said pointedly. "Harold isn't a dick."
Reese made a noise that she was classifying as a giggle. She kicked him again. "Stop gloating about your sex life to me. I'm the reason you have it."
"And I'm very, very grateful," Reese said solemnly, and leaned towards her. And kept leaning.
"What are you—oh no, we are not—get off me, you asshole," she said, shoving at him as he squashed her into a giant sloppy hug. They toppled over onto the couch. "In one second I'm going to seriously undermine your sex life for at least a week," she told him. Reese hiccuped warmly against her collarbone. One of his legs had slid off the couch, but he was so fucking long it was just propping him up. "If you even think about falling asleep on me—"
Harold's head came into view as he leaned over the back of the couch. "John? Sam?" He was creased and groggy, his hair pressed into a pointy swoop to one side of his head.
John's head popped right back up: his master's voice. "Harold!" he said. Then he fell off the couch.
"Serves you fucking right," Sam told him. "Are you okay?" she asked Harold.
"I'm feeling considerably better, yes," Harold said, blinking at her in the unfocused way of a man still pretty far gone on morphine. "What's wrong with John?"
John was lying flat on his back mostly unconscious, smiling vaguely. "He's a dick," Sam said. "And he drank about twelve shots of whiskey in ten minutes on an empty stomach."
"Oh," Harold said. He blinked again. "Why don't you come to bed?"
She'd drunk enough herself that it sounded like a perfectly good idea, which was how she woke up the next morning in bed with the two of them, Harold hissing, "John—John, wait—" as Reese apparently went for a morning quickie without bothering to open his eyes first, or possibly to care.
She cracked an eye and peered at John over Harold's chest. John looked back at her innocently, but Harold's expression made it completely obvious he was still going for it. Sam glared at him and then reached over and slid her hand under the sheets, tangling with his around Harold's cock. "Later, or sharing," she said.
Reese thought about it, then shrugged. "Sharing works."
Harold was lying flat on his back staring up at the ceiling wide-eyed and doubtful. "I'm not entirely certain I'm comfortable with this situation."
Sam looked down at him. His cock very clearly didn't have any issues. "What do you need to get comfortable?"
Harold continued to stare at the ceiling. "This isn't something I ever expected to happen to me." He sighed and then his mouth quirked. "But I suppose I don't have any fundamental objections. How shall we arrange ourselves?"
Getting fucked was a very good look for John, she'd say that much. Something about the way his eyes went dazed and heavy, the slack gasping softness of his mouth; he gave it up so completely, so happily. She also appreciated as a practical matter how hard his cock stayed, the entire time, even when Harold needed to take a break from thrusting now and then.
"You are so fucking owned, aren't you," she said to John, and his cock jerked inside her; he laughed a little, breathily and gave her a slow-as-molasses smile, smug smug smug. Her eyes narrowed and she leaned in and said, low and deliberate, "All you need is for him to wrap a collar around your neck—"
He made a choked whimpering noise and reached around to grab onto Harold's hip. Harold had his head resting on John's shoulder, panting. "A collar can't possibly be either comfortable or discreet," he muttered. "A ring, surely—" John made an even more desperate noise and came, shuddering.
Which meant that Harold was free to spend the next half hour polishing her off. Sam smirked at John, who gave her a half-hearted glare from the next pillow over, too limp and happy to actually build up any heat behind it, and then they pushed Harold down between them and finished him off with their mouths.
Sam let John do the swallowing; he was the one in love.
# End