Chapter Text
Chapter Twenty-three—They All Go Down
The power arced through his hands, sparks evident in the waning light. It was dark where they had landed. No one knew about these tunnels. It was a great place to regroup and plan. Nate thought his father would think that all of this was ironic. These tunnels saved Jimmy Ford’s life once or twice. He bet the old man was laughing, in hell. But he had saved his only son’s life. There was that.
Dubenich took down Jimmy. Latimer took in millions from all their jobs. His grandmother. Oh, his grandmother profited even more from what they’d accomplished over the past four years. Whatever ill-gotten gains Latimer had gotten his hands on, his grandmother had quadrupled it. She could use her powers to do whatever the hell she wanted. And he couldn’t? All three were going down.
The cans at the end of the abandoned tunnel stood in a line. Nate could have used a gun for target practice. Guns in this instance wouldn’t get him anywhere. It was time he unleashed what he’d been holding back. Sophie might not like what he had planned. She might even beg him To not do this or try to stop him. The can at the end crumpled with the flick of a finger.
Nate had thought he would tune her out until she started quoting Kenny Rogers. Didn’t she care what he had planned?
“And don’t get involved with a murderer.”
Nate closed his eyes, thinking back to before Virginia, before going to Illinois to confront Dubenich, back to San Lorenzo, when everything changed between the two of them.
Was what they had just a casual thing or something deeper? Was she just keeping him under her thumb just in case he went nuclear? He bet door number three on plenty of occasions. It was rare that she had to pull him back, make sure he didn’t snap someone’s neck with a nod and a wave. If she only knew how many times he could have just flicked his finger, just like he’d done to the can at the end of the tunnel, she might think otherwise.
He also knew she had some kind of power of her own. She thought she could hide it from him, until she couldn’t, especially after San Lorenzo. Definitely after San Lorenzo.
“Nate?” Sophie questioned.
He felt the burn, how his blood started to boil just thinking of Dubenich and what he’d done.
“There are other ways,” she answered before he could even tell her what he thought. “Like I said, you’re very bright.”
Instead of grabbing his hand to cool whatever was brewing inside him, she gently placed a kiss on his cheek. Her lips felt almost arctic compared to what he was feeling. The momentary shock had him releasing whatever breath he had been holding.
She knew exactly what to do. Always.
The year before, Nate had run out of contingencies.
Nate always had a plan. That didn’t mean those plans always worked out. That’s why he always had contingencies. All his contingencies went out the window early that morning, as Sophie lay in his arms, finally satiated. He would have thought that sleep would have come easily. But his mind was always moving, plotting, scheming. Sophie had made him achieve oblivion for once in his life. It had come at a price though. Now he knew exactly who and what she was. She let her guard down. How would he handle it? He had no idea.
It all had started with a friendly drink. Moreau was in jail. The country was free from the criminals who ran it. Sure, Sophie was “dead” to the rest of the world. Or should he say “Rebecca” was dead. Sophie really did play a death scene spectacularly. His plan had gone off without a hitch. That was a first. No planning on the fly. Moreau had taken the bait; everyone had been on point. Now all they needed to do was celebrate. Six months of dealing with the Italian, of attempting to get closer to Moreau. It all had been handed to him. It shouldn’t have worked. But it did.
After a few drinks, Sophie’s hands started to roam, so instead of causing a scene where someone might recognize her, Nate dragged her into an elevator, all with the idea of leading her to her room to sleep off all the alcohol in her system. She had other ideas. Taking his key card, she led the way to his room, heels off now, and swinging in her hands.
“Death scenes are so much fun to play.”
Her heels went flying as did her hat. Perched at the end of the bed, Sophie smiled at him, beckoning him to come closer. His head did swim a little, but he wasn’t that drunk. He’d been worse. His hat then fell to the floor along with his jacket. She grabbed him by the front of his shirt, dragging her hands up and down. Nate kept thinking that he might be burned literally this time, even without any skin-to-skin contact.
“Soph, you know, maybe, well, is this what you want?”
“Remember when I said partners in crime?”
“Kinda remember that part.”
“Why don’t we define that? Shall we?”
Nate leaned into her, smelling the jasmine at her neck, the smoky aroma of the whiskey she had downed with him by her side.
Leaning a little too far, Nate caught himself before he was plastered to her front. Instead, he eased himself down until he was now parallel with her body.
“Are you sure?”
“Dammit, Nate. Get on with it.”
She arched her body toward him, fully intending for him to sink down onto her. He still was expecting to get burned at some point. No idea why those first few encounters had seen him with sunburns from contact, now it was all bliss. Her skin was warm, but only because of what he was doing to her.
What he didn’t know at the time and finally found out a few hours after was Sophie had cracked the code right before San Lorenzo. He’d only found out about the book and the translation of some archaic text that meant precisely nothing to him and the world to her. They could carry on, skin intact.
His mind wandered back to the task at hand.
“We settle this…”
Sophie stared him down during the meeting, watching him like a hawk. Mere hours before she had explained to him what she was and what the book meant. It wasn’t like she was intentionally lying to him about why she’d come back after her period of discovery. Withholding information, yes. Lying, no. He would have had to ask the right questions for her to actually lie. Plus, she did that for a living, so there was that.
“Dubenich is mine. Understand?”
Their guests understood. Parker and Hardison definitely agreed. Eliot, not so much. He was the one with which Nate was concerned. Hence the need for Nate to end this before Eliot went too far. The man thought he was immortal. Hard to kill did not equal immortal. He would not be responsible for Eliot going all Rambo on the bad guys, nor did he want Hardison in the line of fire. And he had to protect Parker now that he knew. Oh god, what was he going to do about that? She didn’t know. How could she know? Someone was going to spill the beans eventually or put two and two together. She couldn’t control anything if she didn’t know. At least he had a shot at controlling what he possessed. Parker most certainly did not. She’d learn, with time.
Once Dubenich and Latimer were out of the way, then it would be time. He could quietly sit down with Parker and explain everything. He was a bit surprised that Hardison hadn’t put two and two together since he had inadvertently found the information while pulling together their last job before making a run at Moreau. The Italian’s files were thorough. Parker’s name was there, her real name, her birth name. It took a bit of time for him to put it all together. Mark Vector provided the last clue with Hardison’s help.
As Nate looked at everything, how they could take Vector down, he saw the news story, the one where Vector’s father had been accused of murder. It had been buried deep and really didn’t mean all that much to what he had planned for the ex-hockey player. The photo of Annie Logue stared back at him. It was almost like he was seeing a ghost who was mere feet from him. Parker had no idea, none whatsoever. The woman’s hair was a lighter blonde, with a curl like his instead of straight like Parker’s. The eyes were a sky blue, something that ran through the family for generations. His mother had that same blue as did he. Parker did not, which meant she must have favored her father, whoever he was. He was probably not Vector’s father. At least at the time, he hoped he wasn’t. Just like Mark Vector, his father was a beast of a man, large and imposing.
Whoever Vector Senior knew got him off on charges of the beating death of Annie Logue. There was no way that man could have beaten Logue because he was injured in whatever blast had occurred. At least that was the story everyone had been fed. Mark Vector had already started making a name for himself in hockey as a young adult, with scholarship offers and agents knocking at his door. His father couldn’t be responsible. He was just an innocent bystander. Right? Nate wasn’t fooled. Annie Logue’s small children were placed in the system after her death.
After Sophie had told him about the book and his family’s origins, Nate didn’t tell a soul about what he’d found out regarding Parker. What good would it do? He needed to fill in the pieces of the puzzle before telling them all the truth. The timeline of Sophie’s book lay in front of him, a map of every single birth, death, marriage. Annie Logue, daughter of Maeve Logue, who was Katherine Logue’s much younger sister.
Maeve hadn’t possessed any magical powers at birth. Katherine must have dismissed her younger sibling as not worth her time. Maeve had several children with several different men, Annie being one of them. None of the boys (three in all), made it past the age of five. Her three girls did not possess one ounce of power. Katherine had probably made sure of that. Once two generations had passed, she probably assumed that with Maeve, that line had ceased with any kind of powers. Annie had disappeared off the family’s radar. There was even a question mark in Sophie’s genealogy regarding her. Parker survived her childhood. Her brother did not. Only he had died in an accident at the age of six, not because of any type of magic. Had that triggered Parker’s abilities to surface? Or was she responsible for Mark Vector’s father’s possible brain damage? He’d never know. He doubted that Parker remembered anything of what had happened that day. She was four.
Then there was Eliot to contend with along with Sophie and her damn book and supposed job at keeping him under control. Thank god Hardison was the normal one. Too smart for his own good sometimes but damn, he couldn’t take another surprise.
“We gotta go, Nate,” Hardison yelled from the entrance to their new lair.
He hoped he could trust Chaos, Quinn, and Leach. He had heard Sophie warn Chaos that if he so much as stepped out of line one inch she would do away with him. Quinn was in it for the money (and the favor from Eliot). Leach somehow actually cared about Parker in his own way, so he wouldn’t mess anything up. He was a professional.
His conversation with Eliot about killing Dubenich hadn’t gone as planned. He had wanted to make sure Eliot wouldn’t do the thing that he had wanted to do himself. In several scenarios that he had worked out, Eliot decides to take out Dubenich just to save Nate the trouble. Telling Eliot that they were on plan G instead of A through F wouldn’t make a bit of difference to the man. Now that the plan was in motion, Nate would have to prepare for anything to occur.
With only a few minor surprises (dammit Sophie for bringing Maggie into it), they did manage to finally get Dubenich and Latimer in the same place at the same time. His shoulder hurt like a son of a bitch. He should have ducked. Next time.
His palm warmed as Dubenich explained to him about Jimmy. They both wanted Nate to kill the other and let them go. His shoulder hurt like hell, he hadn’t slept in ages and the team was staring down at him, begging him not to pull the trigger on Jimmy’s gun. And here Sophie thought he’d use his powers on these two yahoos. They weren’t worth it in the end. Ruining both of them was too easy. He had bigger fish to fry.
He let the two of them settle it between themselves which meant the two men went for the gun at the same time, wrestling for it until they tipped over the edge of the dam. That was down the list on Nate’s contingencies, the top one being the fact that one of them could have shot him again if there had been any bullets left in the gun. He had unloaded it unbeknownst to them before placing it down on the ground to walk away. He wasn’t that stupid.
The blood loss was making his thought processes a bit loopy. All he could hear in addition to the water crashing in the background was the three of them arguing about some kind of bat signal. Sophie was trying her damnedest to stop the bleeding on his shoulder. It needed stitches. He needed a shower and some food and probably a long, long nap. Parker could wait. But not for long. He had to take on the most difficult challenge of his life. And he had to do it alone.
“Don’t even think about it,” Sophie whispered in his ear as she loaded him into the car.
Time to plan a murder.