Page 127 of Hate Mates

Snow seemed keenly aware that I was lying to her. She knew Roux when he was a child, through his parents, and he was the same then. Mercurial and wilful and too beautiful, always too beautiful for his own good. Not quite as rebellious as his brother, my oldest friend, Maddox, or as ambitious as Alex, their older brother, the Nova who would go on to ruin us all in the name of protecting himself from a loss too impossible for a man like him to accept.

Snow can’t expect me to tell her the truth about Roux. I won’t. Not if he’s pouring gasoline over an orphanage. I betrayed him once, and it almost killed me, and unlike some people, I like to think I can learn from a mistake that was that soul-destroying.

But Snow does expect me to protect Roux, which is the real reason she asked me to watch him. Either way, Roux will hate it. But I don’t care about that nearly as much as a good man would. I’m not good at all, not when it comes to him, and I never have been. Roux saps all that goodness out of me with one cruel twist of his pretty mouth.

Roux has moved himself into a small seaside town called Colbie, which sits right outside the city, close enough that he can commute to work at the agency’s underground base but far enough away to give him the illusion of safety from Director Snow’s prying gaze.

Of all the places for him to go, a weird little town by the ocean would have been the last place I’d have guessed. For one, Roux hates the ocean. He almost drowned, body boarding one summer when he was a kid, and spent fifteen minutes standing at the edge of the sea yelling every obscenity known to a ten-year-old, which was, thanks to Maddox, quite an extensive list. He stood there, furious, his white-blond hair soaking wet, fringe plastered to his forehead, sticking both middle fingers up at the ocean as he accused it of being a “glittering cunt of salty doom.”

One of the worst things about trying to do surveillance in a tiny British town is that it’s fucking tiny. There’s nowhere to stay hidden, no empty buildings or hotels to rent rooms from to use as a base or surveyance point. You just have to rock up with a car, one that’s shit enough not to be noticed but not too shit—otherwise people complain about the sight of it near their pretty little cottages—and a decent amount of resolve to act as if you belong in a place where you’ve never been and had no intention of ever stepping foot in.

Another problem is the residents. It’s bad enough in a city, where people have busy lives and not much patience for curiosity. In a small town where everyone knows everyone and gossip is tantamount to community entertainment, a strangerlurking around with seemingly no purpose is like a homing signal for military-trained pigeons. I might as well have a flashing neon sign over my head.

It doesn’t help that I’m not exactly the most discreet-looking person in the world. My height alone gets me plenty of side-eyes. But if you’re big and blond and built like all agents are required to be for field missions, then you’re going to be noticed in a place like Colbie. Not exactly ideal for an undercover op.

Still, I do the best I can with what I’ve got. I spend most of my time in my car, parking down the street from the cottage Roux is living in with Rex, the infamous nephew, and what seems to be a middle-aged woman with bright-red, curly hair who favours eccentric fashion choices, including a long witch’s cape and fuzzy green dinosaur slippers. I watch them go to and from the house, occasionally following them to their destination, which nine times out of ten is the beach. I’m most interested in the times when Roux goes out alone, but that’s rare, and even then, he doesn’t leave for anything more interesting than the missions Snow sends him on or random walks on the same beach.

He seems stressed and anxious, ringing his hands and tugging at his hair and rambling to himself continuously about, from what I can tell, bizarre bullshit, but that isn’t unusual. Roux was born talking nonsense and hasn’t shut up for more than a handful of minutes since then.

One thing Roux isn’t, is unobservant, however much he might pretend at playing the doe-eyed innocent.

To be honest, I’m proud to make it two weeks before Roux returns the favour by breaking into my flat when I’m not there and writing a message on my bathroom mirror with purple lipstick, which I presume he stole from his new housemate, the cape wearer. The message reads, in bold, angrily scrawled letters,“Piss off, stalker.”

I leave it there on my mirror, stopping to read it over and over again each morning, tracing my fingers along each word as if it’s a love note. In some ways, it is. Every scrap of attention Roux throws at me feels like a horrible, ugly accomplishment, like murder in a colosseum for a screaming crowd, like winning an underground death match when the other person is fighting with a gun to their head. There’s a brutal pleasure in it, knowing that he’s thinking about me, a ruthless and unrefined triumph.

I can’t forget our past, can’t move on or let go or be a better man than the one he tore me apart to create.

Roux lets me watch him for another week before he breaks into my flat again. He scrapes the note off my bathroom mirror, and I’d give half the years left in my life to know exactly what he thought when he saw that I hadn’t wiped it away. He doesn’t leave another message on the mirror, but he does smash every single plate, cup, and glass I own, on my kitchen floor. He must have cut himself on a broken piece of glass because I find a smudge of blood on a single shard. I’m delusional enough to believe he left it for me on purpose, and I keep it locked away in my bedside drawer, along with the picture I took of him the day before when he was alone on Colbie beach, standing near the water’s edge, wearing a blue hoodie much too large for him—one of mine that I hadn’t noticed he’d stolen until then—and his pale, bare feet sinking into the wet sand, ocean water lapping at his toes, the shot catching them mid-curl.

Roux used to hate the beach, would complain about the sand getting lodged in every crevice, called it “nature’s fucking glitter.” There’s a lot this new version of Roux seems to have accepted as his penance—taking a job he never wanted with the agency, raising a kid when he always said he didn’t want them, leaving his oldest brother to rot in the dirt before he had the chance to fix what was broken inside his head—and I can’t help thinking his walks along the beach are just another splinterof that atonement, digging in underneath his fingernails. Roux always liked excessive punishment, that isn’t new.

There’s a shorter gap between the break-in’s the next time, but that’s mostly because Roux is sent away on a long mission by Snow, and he only stops by to leave another note for me before he goes. He’s cute with it. Leaves a small bomb under my bed with a timer on it that gives me just enough time to find the bleeping hunk of metal packed with C-4. There’s a message scratched into the back of the digital clock.

“Stay away from the kid, or I’ll cut your heart out.”

It’s a weak threat because we both know he did that years ago, before he even knew how to hold a knife without slicing himself open.

I cut those wires to save my life, but it feels like killing something too, like severing my connection to him, which is as much like dying as any lack of pulse or decomposition would be. If you murder a soul, what’s left anyway, other than the slab of meat it was unwillingly tethered to? It felt like betrayal not to die when Roux choses it, except he gave me a timer when he didn’t have to, so maybe I don’t have to feel bad about surviving.

I’m petty, and I miss him, so I go to Colbie and take pictures of his nephew, the monster’s son, as he climbs around the rock pools on the beach wearing his oversized woolly jumper with a jagged-toothed cartoon duck stitched into it with clumsy hands, and a pair of pink, sparkly Wellington boots. Roux’s new roommate follows the boy around like an overzealous nanny, encouraging him to hunt for starfish and baby crabs, her large velvet cape, entirely inappropriate for the beach, or possibly for life in general, billowing in the harsh seaside wind.

When Roux comes home, I print off the pictures, stuff them in a brown envelope, and leave them for him to find under his pillow. I don’t permit myself to spend too much time in his weird little cottage bedroom with its audaciously low ceilingsand fairy tale vibes that has me feeling like I’ve just walked into an abandoned hostage situation. It does make me pause long enough to search for a pen so I can write“To Goldilocks”on the envelope.

Roux waits another week before he breaks into my flat for the fourth time, except unlike all the others, he lets himself in whilst I’m asleep. We’re trained by the agency to be light sleepers, able to drop off easily and wake up alert. Roux still manages to catch me off guard. For a man who yaps so fucking much, he can be terrifyingly silent when he has the proper motivation.

I’m yanked into consciousness by Roux jabbing a needle in my neck. Whatever it is, it works fast because I’m dragged down back into darkness before I have the chance to complete a murmur of his name. I get one brief look at Roux’s tragically beautiful face, twisted in rage, so much bitter, useless rage, before the drug snatches that coveted sight away from me.

I wake up some time later, naked except for my underwear, handcuffed to a radiator in an old office building. My mouth feels painfully dry, and it tastes like ash. Roux is sat on a metal fold-out chair in front of me, the pictures I took of his nephew strewn across the floor between us like pieces of evidence in an ongoing investigation.

Roux waits for me to be completely conscious before he takes out a knife and points the shining metal tip at the photo closest to him. It’s one of his nephew squatting down next to a rock pool with a green bucket hanging off one little hand; his face, so familiar, so terrible, so obviously Nova in origin, is screwed up in concentration, like’s he’s studying a very rare artifact in the pool of seawater below him. It’s a good photo if you like photos of children who ruined the lives of everyone you care about. I know that isn’t a fair thought to have; all Roux’s nephew did was dare to live and then have the audacity to try not to, but. That was enough.

“What the fuck are you playing at with this shit?” Roux demands, spitting mad about it, his pale-blue eyes glittering with untethered wrath like the surface of a raging ocean mid-storm, cast in silver, shimmering moonlight.

“Can I have some water?” I ask, a definite croak in my voice as a result of my arid throat. Bloody hell, I hate getting post-drugged dryness. It’s really hard to reverse engineer an interrogation with whoever you’ve been kidnapped by if you sound like a frog with strep.

“You can bite your tongue and drink your own blood,” Roux snarls, upper lip curling backwards over his incisors like a guard dog at the end of his patience. “You uninspired fuck.”

There aren’t any windows in the office, so I can’t see if I’ve been out long enough that anyone at the agency would have noticed. I’m supposed to report in for a briefing early in the morning, but it’s unlikely Roux knows that. It’s not as if anyone will work out where to find me in time if Roux decides to be a little more proactive in slashing a chunk off my lifespan.

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