Chapter 49: We Meet Again, Mike!
The suit went back on the hanger with more care than it deserved given where it had spent the night.
Liam stood in his bedroom in the quiet of his own apartment, which felt noticeably still after the last twelve hours. He moved through it with the autopilot efficiency of someone whose morning routine had been drilled into muscle memory — shower, change, check the phone, assess the day.
He had half-expected to find something from Vanessa on the way in. A note slipped under the door, a message, some indication that Harlan and Associates was still running plays in his direction. It had been empty. His phone had nothing from her number.
He stood in the kitchen for a moment considering how he felt about that.
Relieved, mostly.
Slightly something else, which he declined to examine too closely.
He put the kettle on, drank half a cup of coffee standing up, and started pulling together his gym bag.
The decision not to drive came to him while he was lacing his shoes. He looked at his keys on the counter and simply left them there. No particular reason beyond the fact that he didn’t want to sit in traffic with his own thoughts for company. An Uber was cleaner and easier. He could look out the window and be nobody going somewhere for eleven minutes without the obligation of navigation.
He ordered one, shouldered his bag, and headed out.
The ride was exactly what he needed — unremarkable, air-conditioned, the driver playing something low and instrumental that asked nothing of him.
Liam watched the city scroll past the window and let his mind run through the Mrs. Harriet situation at a low idle.
Her counter-offer.
His terms, repackaged. The same skeleton wearing different clothes and her signature at the bottom instead of a concession. It was the move of someone who needed to feel like they had won something in order to agree to anything, which told him more about her position than the terms themselves did.
She wasn’t fighting him.
She was just refusing to be seen losing to him.
He could work with that.
The Uber pulled up outside Pike Peak Fitness and Liam climbed out, swinging his bag over one shoulder, squinting against the mid-morning light. He did a quick scan of the entrance out of habit — he wasn’t going to pretend he wasn’t at least partially curious whether a certain Latina hair stylist had a gym schedule that overlapped with his.
The entrance was clear.
And then it wasn’t, because Mike was standing directly in front of it.
All six feet six inches of him. Arms at his sides, bald head gleaming, beard trimmed close, staring at Liam with the focused intensity of a man who had identified a target.
Liam stopped walking.
"The devil..." he muttered under his breath, "... is truly everywhere you look."
For one full second neither of them moved.
Then Mike charged.
There was no other word for it. The man simply lowered his centre of gravity and came forward at a speed that had absolutely no business existing in a human being of that size, covering the distance between them in a straight line like something had been fired from a cannon.
Liam’s body made the decision before his brain did. He took two full steps backward, heel catching the kerb, arms coming up — pure animal instinct.
Mike stopped an inch in front of him.
Dead stop. Precise. Like he had a built-in brake system.
The Uber behind Liam hadn’t pulled away yet.
Liam stood there breathing hard, gym bag half-raised like a shield, heart doing something completely unreasonable inside his chest.
"What..." he said, in a voice that came out significantly higher than intended, "... the hell is wrong with you?!"
Mike smiled. It was a warm smile — genuinely warm. He reached out one hand.
"Your bag. I will carry it."
Liam stared at him.
"You — you just ran at me like you were going to tackle me through a wall and now you want to carry my bag."
"Your arm." Mike pointed at Liam’s right arm with the calm authority of a man reading a medical chart. "It is shaking. Small tremor in the forearm. Delayed onset muscle response from Tuesday." The smile widened. "This is very good. It means we caused real damage to the tissue."
"That is not the reassurance you think it is!"
"We go harder today."
"We absolutely will not—"
Mike reached for the bag. Liam handed it over on pure reflex, the way you comply with something before the protesting part of your brain gets the message through. Mike took it with one hand and turned toward the entrance.
Liam looked at the Uber.
The driver was still there, indicator still blinking, not yet merged back into traffic.
The car was right there. The door handle was right there. He could be back inside in two seconds, back home in eleven minutes, with a protein shake and a completely intact skeletal structure.
He reached for the handle.
A hand closed around the back of his collar.
The ground disappeared in an instant.
Liam had exactly enough time to register that he was no longer vertical before he was horizontal, draped over Mike’s shoulder like a gym bag himself, his actual gym bag hanging from Mike’s other hand, the pavement moving past below him at a height he did not enjoy.
"This is kidnapping!" The words came out upside down and slightly breathless. "I want to be very clear — this is kidnapping! Someone help me!"
The handful of people near the entrance looked up. One woman just shook her head like she had seen it one too many times.
Mike laughed. It started somewhere deep in his chest and came out big and genuine, the laugh of a man completely at peace with every decision he had ever made. He pushed through the gym entrance with his free hand, Liam still over his shoulder, the doors swinging shut behind them.
The front desk attendant didn’t even look up.
Liam braced both hands against Mike’s back and lifted his head to look around the gym floor from his upside-down vantage point.
Treadmills, weight racks, the cable machines from Tuesday that he now associated exclusively with suffering.
"No Sophia."
He dropped his head back down.
"Mike."
"Yes."
"Put me down."
"After warmup."
"I will report you to every relevant authority!"
"Warmup is fifteen minutes today. Your legs are fine. We focus on legs."
Liam closed his eyes.
"I should just have gone to sleep," he said, to no one in particular.
Mike laughed again and carried him toward the weight floor.
