The man stopped breathing at 11:47 PM.
Dorian knew the exact time because he checked his watch while he waited for the body to finish.
It wasn't cruelty. It was habit. Because his hands needed something to do in the silence after.
He stood in the corner of the hotel room with his back to the wall and waited. The body on the bed had stopped moving two minutes ago but he always waited five. That was the rule, his rule. One of the few he had made for himself in eighteen years of following everyone else's.
The television was on, a woman had just said yes to her lover and the crowd were clapping in excitement for them.
Dorian's hand reached out quickly to turn it off then he moved quickly, automatically. He wiped the surfaces he had touched, checked the bathroom, the door handle.
Then he gathered the two items he had brought in and slid them back into the interior pocket of his jacket.
Ninety seconds, start to finish. That was the time he had used on this assignment.
When he got to the door, he paused.
Not from sentiment. Dorian didn't do sentiment. He paused because that was the protocol; one full stop before exiting, scan the room, confirm nothing was left behind.
His eyes moved across the space and his gaze checked out everything all at once; Bed, window, floor.
When he was satisfied that there was no traces of him, he walked out of the door.
The hotel was downtown. Twelve floors up, service elevator, side exit onto a street that fed into three different directions. He took the middle one because it was the one with the most cover.
He walked without hurrying because he knew a man leaving a hotel was unremarkable. A man running from one was not.
After a few seconds, his phone vibrated.
"Clean?" The message from Isolde read.
"Yes." Dorian texted back quickly. After a split second, the response came in.
"Good. Sleep well, darling."
Darling...
The word had teeth once. When he was ten and half-starved and sleeping in a train station and Isolde had crouched down in front of him with warm eyes and a warmer coat and said;
"You look like someone I could use."
He hadn't understood then that being useful was the only reason she kept anything. But he understood it now. Completely and permanently.
He pocketed the phone and continued walking. He turned a corner and stopped.
Not on purpose. His feet just stopped.
There was a group of men outside a bar across the street. Five of them clustered under the awning out of the rain. His age, roughly. Mid to late twenties. One of them said something and the rest collapsed burst into laughter. The kind that came from nowhere and meant nothing except that something was funny and they were together and that was enough.
Dorian stood on the pavement and watched them.
He didn't know what they were laughing at. He couldn't hear it from here. What he could see was the body language , loose, careless, leaning into each other without calculation. The way people moved when they weren't monitoring themselves.
He had never moved like that.
Not once. Not even before Isolde. Before her there had been hunger and cold and the permanent vigilance of a child alone in a city that didn't care whether he lived. After her there had been training, and discipline, and the different kind of vigilance that kept him alive for other reasons.
The group started moving, still laughing, heading somewhere together. One of them jogged a few steps to catch up and the others waited without being asked.
Dorian watched until they turned the corner.
Then he stood in the empty wet street for a moment, hands in his pockets.
"I don't know what that is." He muttered.
And then underneath it, quieter, a thought he didn't examine came up:
"I want to know what that is."
Not those men or the bar specifically. Just- something that wasn't this, an assignment to go finish off someone.
Maybe one night outside the architecture Isolde had built for him. One night that was shapeless and unassigned and entirely his own.
He pulled out his phone and opened a map.
He was going to look for a club because he felt he needed any other direction that wasn't home.
~~~~~~~~
Meanwhile, at another part of the city;
Finn Bellamy was on the floor of his large bedroom when it hit him...
The grief.
He had ended up on the floor the way he always did; one moment sitting at the edge of the mattress staring at nothing, the next on his side with his knees drawn up and the cold floor bleeding through his shirt and no memory of the transition between the two.
His body knew the shape before his mind caught up.
His phone which was sitting on the nightstand lit up and he glanced at it- it was his father calling.
With a blank expression, he listened to the ringtone till It stopped.
Afterwards, Finn turned his face into the carpet.
Three years...
It arrived the way it always arrived, not gradually, not politely. All at once. The full weight of it dropping onto his chest like something had been cut loose from a great height and landed directly on him.
The memory of that night...
He'd been drunk that night. Not blackout. Just enough that when his mother's name lit up his screen he had looked at it and thought, "Later. I'll call her back later." Set the phone down and went back to whatever forgettable thing he'd been doing instead.
But there was no later.
"You knew," One voice said in his mind.
It was the version that lived in the back of his skull and didn't bother with kindness.
"You knew something was wrong yet---"
"Stop," he said out loud but the voice continued.
"If you had been with her that night---"
"Stop."
"...she wouldn't have been alone. If you had picked up. If you had driven her like she asked and you said no because you had somewhere better to be---"
He curled tighter, his arms wrapped around himself, forehead almost to the carpet, the position of a man trying to compress himself into something too small to be found.
The sound that came out of him was ugly.
"She would still be here." The voice didn't shout. That was the worst part. It was always so calm. "If you had been there. You know that."
Finn's body started to shake at that undeniably point.
As usual, the shaking didn't stop until after a few seconds. When it was done he lay still and let the silence settle.
Then he got up.
He went to the bathroom, washed his face with cold water twice. And when he saw that his eyes were red from the tears, he took out the eye drops he kept specifically for occasions like this in the cabinet, and used them.
Then he went back to the bedroom. He entered his walk-in wardrobe and began to search for an outfit.
A few minutes later, the teary, shaky young man had disappeared and in its place was the gorgeous, expensively dressed Finn Bellamy that the world knew.
He picked up his phone and dialled a number, one of his assistants.
"Mr. Bellamy---" Kev answered instantly but Finn didn't allow him to speak before issuing a command;
"Get the cars ready. Full convoy."
"It's past midnight, sir." Kev said hesitantly.
"I know what time it is, Kev." Finn snapped.
Kev had been with him long enough to know that tone. He wouldn't dare argue further.
"Where are we going, sir?" He inquired politely.
"Everywhere. I want to be seen. Every club that has a door policy, every place that'll have a photographer outside. I want it in three blogs before sunrise." Finn said casually then hung up.
Then he walked to his dressing mirror, stared at his reflection for a moment and slowly, a smirk crept on his face.
"I need some noise and heat tonight." Finn mumbled under his breath and headed out.
His smirk grew bigger as he walked towards the convoy waiting for him.
Finn Bellamy had no idea that just as he was going in search of heat, so was something dangerous.
Someone actually...