Fish & Chips (Cut & Run 3)

Ty shrugged one sore shoulder. “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” he answered, embarrassed.

“I was pretty much blind, deaf, and scared out of my mind.” Zane admitted. “But I… heard you.”

Ty nodded uncomfortably. It was harder than he thought, knowing an admission of love in return wouldn"t be coming. He was glad to have told Zane, but he sort of wanted to change the subject now.

“I guess that explains why you"ve not minded me being so possessive,” Zane added abruptly a minute later.

Ty raised one eyebrow and shook his head. He was almost relieved that Zane hadn"t tried to deny any of it and seemed to be going for a lighter, less meaningful response. He smiled gratefully. “Try that shit on land, and we"ll see how I react.”

Zane rolled his eyes. “I wondered how much of it was Del and how much of it was you. After a while I wasn"t sure I could tell anymore.”

Ty wasn"t certain what to say to that, and anything else coming to mind just took them back into that territory that might end up being painful if they weren"t careful. He found he was disappointed that Zane"s most natural response to learning Ty loved him was to talk about their case. He watched Zane for a moment longer before turning to rest his shoulders against the wall behind him and looking down at his fingers again. In his peripheral vision, he saw Zane do the same.

They sat in a somewhat tense silence until Zane spoke.

“I"m thinking I"ll take my chances.”

“On what?” Ty asked as he looked over at Zane with a frown.

A smile slowly pulled at Zane"s lips. “Trying that shit on land.”

Ty leaned away from him and turned his head to be able to see him better. He hadn"t expected to hear an “I love you” from Zane. If he had gotten one, he probably wouldn"t have believed it. But he supposed

“trying that shit on land”—and the implication behind it that Zane wanted Ty to himself—was about as close as he"d get. The realization made him smile slowly.

“You"re so easy,” he told Zane in satisfaction as he looked at the plain white wall again.

“Only for you, doll,” Zane drawled in his Corbin voice.

Ty sighed and ran a hand through his blond hair. “Don"t ever call me that again,” he warned in a tired voice. “Asshole.”

Zane chuckled, visibly releasing the tension he"d been carrying in his shoulders, and he laid his head back against the wall. He didn"t look at all worried. Ty watched him from the corner of his eye. All Ty had to do was keep that look on Zane"s face, that one right there, relaxed and content and slightly amused. Then they"d be just fine.

“Oh, by the way,” Ty murmured. “Merry Christmas, Zane.”

Zane looked at him in some surprise, then glanced to the plastic clock on the opposite wall. It was just past midnight. He snorted softly.

“Merry Christmas, Ty.”

TY HAD anticipated a barrage of questions when they reached dry land, but he had also expected a trip home, a nice shower, and some new clothing first. But there hadn"t been any detours from the waterfront to the Bureau office. They were to be debriefed ASAP.

Ty sat at one of the interrogation tables—on the wrong side. They were bringing in someone to cut the ring off his finger while he wrote up his report, but they also wanted an agent to speak to him, which was unusual. He was a little nervous that he and Zane had missed something or f**ked up somewhere, especially since Zane had been conducted to another room for a separate debriefing.

He tried to tamp down the nerves as he finished up his brief synopsis of what had happened on the ship. He signed the bottom of the report and pushed it away, taking a deep breath to calm himself.

The door opened, and he exhaled slowly as three men entered.

SAIC Dan McCoy smiled at him and held the door open for one of the lab techs and Special Agent Scott Alston, who trailed behind him.

“Grady. Good to have you back,” McCoy greeted as he seated himself across from Ty.

The lab tech rolled out a piece of gauze and extracted a pair of sharp utensils that looked like a cross between scissors and a prop from Hellraiser. Ty swallowed on an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. The last set of utensils he"d seen rolled out in an interrogation hadn"t been used to cut metal. He cleared his throat and looked away quickly, giving the tech his left hand so the man could cut the silver ring off his swollen finger.

He met McCoy"s eyes as the tech began trying to work one side of the wicked scissors under the ring.

“Turned into a real shitstorm, huh?” McCoy said with a sympathetic smile.

Ty snorted. “You could say that. What the hell happened, anyway? There were people trying to kill us left and right!”

“Yes,” McCoy replied slowly, nodding. “We stepped in it. Sorry.”

Ty stared at him incredulously. “Sorry?”

McCoy shrugged. “It looks like you two never really got into the eye of the storm. You were more like… the cows who got tossed around on the outskirts.”

Alston snorted and tried to cover it with a cough and a hand to his mouth.

Ty glanced between them with a frown, unamused. “I"m feeling more like a goat on this one, Mac,” he growled.

McCoy held up his hands in surrender. He had a small dossier in one. “We had no way of knowing all this was going on.” He slid the file across the desk to Ty. “There were four different groups at play.

The feds, the Guardia di Finanza, Vartan Armen"s hired thugs, and a fourth group that appears to be antiquities dealers from Dubai. Where they came from, we have no clue, but they"re the ones who were trying to kill you. I mean Del.”

“Why?” Ty asked dubiously as he opened up the folder.

“There is a tenuous connection between them and Armen"s end of the business, and also between them and Del Porter, whose real name is not Del Porter,” Alston told him. “Apparently the thieves planned to take over the smuggling ring by force. Having all three members of the ring—Vartan Armen, Corbin Porter, and Lorenzo Bianchi—in one place made staging a coup pretty easy.”

“From what we"re getting in interrogations, it appears their intention was to put each of the men out of commission somehow and then take their places at the final meeting on Tortola. Targeting Del—I mean you—was intended to keep Corbin on board the cruise ship with his injured husband. They were going to let the Guardia di Finanza take care of the Bianchis. And it"s anyone"s guess what their original plan was for Armen.