He’d most definitely let them win. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
Harry helped him walk back into the small bedroom when it dawned on Asher... something he hadn’t thought of until now. “Where have you been sleeping?”
Harry tapped the mat on the floor with his foot. “Right here.”
“On the floor?” Asher slowly lowered himself to sit on the bed. “Harry, I—”
“You’ve barely been conscious since we got here,” he said quietly. “And there’s no way I’m leaving you defenceless.”
Oh.
Asher held up his hand. Harry took it and sat beside him. “I’m sorry I’ve been... a liability.” Harry opened his mouth to argue, but Asher shook his head. “No, listen to me. Harry, in our line of work, the weak get thinned out. The injured are a liability and a weak link. We both know it. It’s why you pretended your ankle didn’t hurt when it clearly did. You didn’t want me to think of you as a dead weight.”
Harry couldn’t argue that.
“But I can’t hide this. Not even my face or not being able to see for three days, or all the broken ribs,” Asher said. “But it’s my head. It’s so foggy, and I’m exhausted. If I’d have been with anyone else, they’d have either left me behind or shot me.”
“My dearest Asher,” Harry said sweetly. “If you’d been with anyone else, they probably would have shot you around day one or two. In Morocco or Algeria. Maybe even Spain.”
Asher smiled and squeezed Harry’s hand. He could appreciate the joke, but he needed to say this. “If I was with anyone else, they wouldn’t have come to save me. When you realised they’d taken me, you could have taken off in the opposite direction and been ten hours away before they realised.”
“I’m not anyone else,” he said quietly, serious now. “And there was no way I wasn’t going to find you.”
“And that’s why I’m grateful it’s you.” Asher was embarrassed to say such things out loud and maybe it was the brain-fog and tiredness talking. “If I didn’t have you...”
“Well, let’s not forget the reason they took you and beat you to a bloody pulp wasbecauseof me. So there’s that.”
Asher shook his head. “No. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened. I’m surprised they didn’t just shoot me in the motel room, then wait for you to come back.”
“It was about control,” Harry said. “It would have been Gibson’s idea to take you and lure me out, to teach me a lesson, like he was better than me. To make me beg or some bullshit.”
“He was... bad at it. Just violent and no control. Easy to make angry and impatient.”
“That’s exactly how he was in my unit. I have no regrets for what I did to him.” Harry shrugged. “After your first twenty-four hours, getting you here, you were so out of it and in so much pain, I wanted to kill him again.”
Asher lifted their joined hands and put the back of Harry’s hand to his lips then to his cheek, and he closed his eyes. “You’ve looked after me and cared for me like no one ever has. Not even when I was a very small boy. There have been many things absent from my life, but now I have you.”
“You do,” Harry whispered. “I don’t have anyone either. I thought I had Parrish, but he betrayed me. All I have is you.”
Asher smiled but his eyes were hard to open. “I’m so tired.”
“Lie down and sleep.”
“Will you share the bed with me tonight?”
“Asher, what if I hurt you. If I roll over and hurt your ribs?”
“You won’t. I can’t bear the thought of you on the floor, and honestly, I would really like it if you held me.”
Harry smiled sadly. “Okay.”
* * *
The next morning,Harry had left a rather sizeable sum of cash with Ahmad, Nour, and Hazeema for their troubles, he’d waved goodbye to the kids, and Ahmad drove them to the Gwarda airport, through the private gates to a hangar.
There was a private jet and a well-dressed pilot who was waiting for them. “Is that your Number Four?” Harry asked.
Asher was walking slow, the glare of the sun was giving him a headache and the truck ride hadn’t been exactly pleasant, but Harry’s question made him smile. “No, that’s not him. I’ll tell you something about my Number Four,” Asher said. “Is that one, he’s not a pilot. And two, he never leaves his property.”