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There is no hail of bullets, no crashing cars; no screams or cries of mercy or anger or fear. No, John returns to New York in much the same way he left: quietly.
He sits in the burned out husk of what used to be his home, his dog dutifully sitting by his feet. There had been bullets, of course, and cars and screams and many, many other things besides, but that was before and this is now and now, there is just the quiet.
He isn’t sure how long he sits there but he’s not surprised when the sleek town car comes smoothly up what remained of the driveway. Charon emerges, impeccably dressed and impeccably polite as always, and informs him that Winston would like to speak to him.
“Speak?” John asks, carefully.
“Speak,” Charon confirms.
Speak, John thinks. Not talk.
“Why didn’t he come himself?” John asks, unable to stop himself, and now he knows it’s been a while, knows that he’s been running for longer than he’d really wanted to believe. He would never have asked something with so obvious an answer before—he's out of practice, and it shows. Not that Charon betrays it; his face is as inscrutable as ever.
“He would prefer you to make the overture yourself,” is the calm reply. John has to smile at that, a little amused and a little bitter but obscurely relieved, too. Some things, at least, never changed.
“Of course he would,” he says.
The dog looks up at Charon with only vague interest, not considering him a threat. And he isn’t, not in the way John’s been under threat from dozens—hundreds—of other people. But that doesn't mean that John is safe, either.
He considers his next move but really, there’s only one that he can make.
“Is he at The Continental?”
“Yes.” Charon pauses. “You are welcome there, Mr. Wick.”
“Welcome,” John repeats. “What a precise choice of words, Charon.”
“I am a precise person.”
“That you are.” John gestures to the dog. “Is he welcome, too?”
“A good dog is always welcome, Mr. Wick.”
John takes a deep breath. He pretends he can smell the ashes, the scorched wood, the wet soil and rusting metal. And underneath it all, there is something he definitely can smell—the persistent scent of sweet, cloying decay. It seems to follow him everywhere, these days. Whether it comes from something he’d wrought himself is a thought he never lingers on.
John stands.
“Do what you do, Charon. Lead the way.”
**
The hotel is just as he remembers it. Grand and elegant; a little tired, maybe, but aging gracefully. Much like the man he’s here to meet, John thinks, and chuckles a little at the thought.
“Something amusing you, Jonathan?”
John sucks in a breath. It’s been so long since he’s heard that voice, so long that he’d forgotten what it could do to him. Hearing it shape his name is like a sudden deep cut from a very sharp knife—almost painless until you realise how much blood you're losing. And then—well. Then it almost hurts like hell.
Almost.
“Winston.”
He turns. Winston emerges from a dark corner of the lobby like something out of a cheesy horror movie, complete with perfectly tailored suit and perfectly coiffed hair. John would laugh if the sight of him didn’t hit like a punch to the gut; like a blunt force trauma, right in the chest. Has he really been gone so long, that one look would affect him this strongly?
“Three years, give or take,” Winston says, answering the question John knows never came out of his mouth. Winston steps closer and John’s fingers twitch. He isn’t sure if they’re looking for a gun or something else entirely.
“You told you me you wouldn’t do that anymore.”
Winston shrugs. “Maybe I’m out of practice.” He comes even closer, hand reaching out and hovering in the air between them. “You always did think far more loudly than you spoke. It’s hard to ignore.”
His hand finally lands on John’s shoulder, heavy and warm and—familiar. John resists the urge to lean into it but Winston smiles suddenly and John knows he isn’t fooling anybody. Still, it's the principle of the thing. He keeps his back straight, muscles tensing with the effort of keeping still, and feels the faint tickle of Winston’s amusement at the base of his skull.
“Very well,” Winston says. He withdraws his hand. “We can do this your way, if you wish.” He turns to Charon, who is back behind the concierge desk a discreet distance away. “Prepare a table, please.”
“Your private quarters, sir?"
“Yes. Oh, and Charon?” He smiles, wide and sharp, all teeth. “Ensure there are no interruptions.”
Winston turns to face him again, but his eyes barely graze John’s face before he steps past him and heads for the courtyard.
“Eight o’clock, Jonathan,” he adds, and walks away before John can respond.
“Shall I confirm that you’ll be joining him, Mr. Wick?” Charon asks.
John takes a deep breath, watching as Winston disappears outside. He doesn’t look back, not even once, entirely confident that John won’t refuse him. The heavy doors close behind him with a dull thud and it’s like the aural equivalent of a full stop, because—
“Yes,” John says.
It was never even in question.
**
He’s given room 818, the same one he had the last time he’d been here. John wonders if it’s Winston’s idea of a joke—a reminder of what got him into this mess in the first place, a mess that’s taken him years to get out of. But when he raises an eyebrow as Charon slides the key card across the table, Charon simply says that it was the only room currently available.
“Really,” John says.
“Yes, Mr. Wick. Although—” A pause. “Management is very good at forward planning.”
John smiles thinly.
“I'm sure they are.” He goes to take the card but stops halfway. “I don’t have—”
“On the house, Mr. Wick,” Charon interrupts. “Management has taken care of everything.”
John looks up and searches his face, but as always there’s absolutely nothing to read there; no ripple of thought to follow, no cracks to push against. There is nothing but the smooth, mirror-still calm of Charon’s dark, dark eyes, impenetrable to John and even to Winston himself.
John knows the rules. He broke them, after all. But there are other rules, ones that are far older but just as unrelenting, ones with consequences that are every bit as binding. He's read the stories, he knows the legends. Eat the food in the land of the fae and you could be trapped there forever.
Nothing comes for free.
“It is not a gift, Mr. Wick.”
“Oh?” John strokes the card with a fingertip. “So what is it, then?”
“A simple return,” Charon says quietly, eyes boring into his, “of something that was always yours to begin with.”
John swallows. He takes the key.
**
There’s a bottle of Blanton’s waiting for him on the table, and clothes in the closet, and several types of dog food arranged neatly by the bathroom door. John gets the dog’s food and water ready before he takes a closer look around. If he’s stalling, no one but him and the dog would know it.
The clothes are divided into two clear sections—work on the left, civilian on the right. John contemplates them in silence as he nurses a glass of bourbon. The suits are tailor-made but that’s all they are—suits. Cut for his body alone, not for additions of holsters or magazines or bulletproof vests. Lining of plain silk, nothing tactical. And there are no weapons in the room at all—nothing, not even a butter knife. John can turn pretty much anything into a weapon, of course, but the lack of anything obvious surprises him.
He takes a long shower, mind oddly blank. It was, John supposes, inevitable that he ended up here again, in this hotel, getting ready for another dinner with Winston. Just as he’s done hundreds, thousands, countless times before. But that's the rub, isn't it? The more things change, the more they stay the same, and when you more or less live forever it’s less an annoying platitude than it is an unlikely curse.
After some deliberation John chooses to wear something from both sides of the wardrobe—a suit from the left and a plain white henley from the right. It’s strange, being dressed for work but without the weight of hidden weapons against him, without the feeling of holster straps wrapping around his ankles and chest.
It takes him a moment to realise that he hasn’t worn an ordinary suit since the day of Helen’s funeral. John glances at the bracelet laid carefully across the bedside table, right next to Daisy’s dog collar. He thinks of the dozens and dozens of people who’ve died for those two tiny trinkets, of the rivers of blood he’s spilled—and drunk—to protect to them. A simple silver bracelet and a plain strip of leather. Worth so much more to him than so many human lives.
He wonders if Helen would even recognise him now.
The phone starts ringing and John knows without checking that it’s almost eight.
“I’m on my way,” he says without preamble, and hangs up before Charon can reply.
The dog follows him to the door but sits by the bed when John orders him to stay.
“Good dog,” he says. “I’ll—” John sighs. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
The dog tilts his head to the side and just stares up at him, silent and assessing.
“Yeah,” John agrees. “I think I’m full of shit, too.”
**
Winston looks him over when he enters the room, a flicker of surprise in his eyes, there and gone in an instant.
“No shirt and tie, Jonathan?”
John shrugs.
“I’m not here to work.” He pauses. “Am I?”
Winston chuckles.
“Of course not. Of all the things I need, another killer—”
John flinches before he can stop himself. It's only the barest twitch of muscle, imperceptible to anyone else, but Winston still sees it.
“—is not one of them,” Winston finishes, slowly, gaze sharpening as he ends the sentence. He sighs and shakes his head. “I did warn you, you know.”
“About what,” John asks, voice flat. He already knows the answer, of course, but if Winston wants to be petty then John can be, too. He feels the flare of Winston’s annoyance like a cigarette burn on his skin but Winston’s face shows nothing but faint amusement, as though acknowledging the game they’re playing.
“About what would happen if you came back,” Winston says, indulging him. “You didn’t need to go after the Tarasov boy. You didn’t need to go after his father. But you did, because you wanted to.” Winston looks him over again, slow and thorough this time, taking in every last detail—every cut and scrape, every scratch and bruise. “Because that’s who you are.”
John doesn’t bother denying it, not anymore.
“You left, Jonathan,” Winston adds softly. “You got out. And they would have left you alone—Santino, the Camorra, the Bowery King. But you came back instead, and that’s what I warned you about. That’s all it takes.”
“What does?”
“One taste,” Winston says, a sudden flare of heat in his eyes. “You think you’re fine but one tiny taste and suddenly—” He smiles. “You’re ravenous.”
John takes a deep breath. He can feel the responding rush of need in his own veins but he ignores it for now, despite knowing full well that he has no defense, no denial that Winston wouldn’t see right through.
“Is that why you asked me to see me?” he asks instead. His mouth curves into a humourless smile. “To welcome me back to the fold?”
“Jonathan,” Winston says, laughter brightening his darkened eyes. “That assumes you left in the first place.”
“You just said that I got out,” John snaps, and immediately regrets it. Winton’s amusement intensifies, hitting John like the buzz of a thousand insects inside his own head, getting louder and louder the further his mask of control slips away.
“You ‘got out’,” Winston says, enunciating each word with great precision, “because I let you have a temporary reprieve. I let you play at being mortal. Now, whether you wish to admit it to yourself or not, we both know that you were incapable of sustaining the illusion for long.”
John thinks of Helen, of the warmth in her eyes, the tenderness in her hands, the compassion in her voice. The way she kept trying to give him hope even after she was dead and buried. After so many years of seeing people as little more than targets, as weak and frail and small, Helen reminded him that they could be so much more than that. And that maybe—maybe, he could still be, too.
John’s jaw tightens.
“It wasn’t an illusion,” he grits out.
Winston’s eyebrows rise.
“Oh, I don’t doubt that you loved her,” he says. His voice, though not exactly sympathetic, isn’t unkind. “I know very well just how deep your feelings can run… still waters, and all that.” Winston shrugs. “All I meant was the illusion of an ordinary human life.”
Winston trails off, lost in thought for a moment, before standing and walking over to the window. He stares out over the city far below them, a king contemplating his kingdom.
“That was something you gave up a long time ago,” he muses. “Something you gave up to me. Quite willingly, I might add.”
His voice has become a murmur, a bare whisper of sound, but John still feels it, thrumming in his veins, vibrating up his spine, and with it comes the old, old pull of temptation, the memory of a mouth still warm and sticky with another person’s blood, the searing heat of a thigh between his legs, the inhuman strength of hands with centuries of experience systematically taking him apart.
John has no control over his reaction and he sees Winston’s reflection in the window smile before Winston turns to face him. There’s a definite heat in Winston’s eyes again, an intensity that makes John’s pulse start to race, but all Winston does is gesture to the table.
“Sit, Jonathan,” he says. “Have something to eat.” His smile widens. “Or would you prefer something to drink?”
John licks his lips but if nothing else, the last three years certainly hadn’t left him starving. He didn’t have to hunt or bother with being discreet when prey came right to him, and no one was going to raise any eyebrows if an assassin’s body showed up missing a few pints of blood. Waste not, want not.
“I’m,” John starts. “I’m not thirsty.”
“Yes,” Winston agrees. He looks John up and down, slowly, openly assessing and openly appreciative. “I thought you looked remarkably well, all things considered. Still,” he adds with a sharp smile, “the night is young. And so are you. Comparatively speaking.”
They sit down and start on dinner, and it should be strange but it isn’t, not at all. If anything it’s something of a relief—being able to just sit and enjoy a normal, human meal; to not have to constantly be on guard, not have to pretend. The irony, of course, is that Winston is far more dangerous than all of the people who’ve tried to kill him combined.
“Do you remember when you first came to me?”
John looks up from his plate, surprised.
“When I came to you?” he asks. “Don’t you mean when you came to me?”
Winston chuckles.
“I never go anywhere without an invitation, Jonathan.”
John takes a moment to let that sink in. He’s known, on an abstract level, that thousands—hundreds of thousands, millions even—offer themselves to Winston every single day. Some do it consciously, most do not, but John knows that Winston hears them all—every whispered question in the darkness, every barely acknowledged plea: give me this one thing and you can have me, you can have any part of me that you want.
Perhaps John had been no different.
“No,” he answers, honestly. “I don’t remember.” He hesitates, but only briefly. “Do you?"
“Of course I do.” Winston spears a piece of steak with a fork and smiles again, almost fond. “It’s unusual, I suppose. I’m not really one for sentiment. But you are one of my favourite children.”
John isn’t sure how to respond to that. He knows that Winston had favoured him from the beginning—very few others were turned, no matter how skilled their service was. But Winston rarely voiced his praise like this—plainly, simply, without a hidden barb beneath the surface. And, as John is increasingly starting to suspect, perhaps this half-life he was given isn't even a reward at all.
“That depends on your perspective, Jonathan.”
Winston chuckles when John gives him an irritated look.
“Sorry,” he adds, not sounding sorry at all. “You really are very out of practice, aren’t you?”
“I haven’t been able to spend much time with other mind-reading demons over the last few years,” John replies, deadpan.
Winston suddenly goes absolutely still, unnaturally so; as still as a statue, as still as the dead. The light in the room fades, as though unable to compete with the sudden darkness in Winston’s eyes, an inhuman pitch-black—darker than a moonless night, darker than very the bottom of the sea.
“I’m not a demon, Jonathan.”
He leans forward, something glowing in the depths of his monstrously black eyes.
“I’m the demon,” he adds. His voice is very quiet but John feels it in every cell, hears it reverberating in every dark crevice of his skull. “The first demon. The first of many things… the first born. The first to fall. And you are only here now because I will it to be this way.” He smiles, teeth glinting in the unnatural darkness. “Do you think I don’t know why you came back? Do you think I can’t smell it on you? Human desire is one thing I understood from the very beginning, more fully than they ever did.”
John doesn’t need to ask who they are.
Winston tilts his head to the side, looking, for once, like exactly what he is. For all of John’s abilities he’s forcibly reminded that his entire life—his entire existence, really—is due only to the strange mercies of a being he could never hope to understand.
Winston smiles suddenly, a terrible twist of lips and a flash of white teeth.
“It’s always wise to be aware of one’s limitations, Jonathan.”
The room lightens again and John takes a deep, deep breath.
“Would you have come to find me? If I didn’t come back?”
He isn’t sure why he asks; he always knew he was coming back. Three years, thirty, three hundred—however long it took him to clean up the mess, he was always going to come back. He knew that. They both did.
Winston gives him a curious look.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
Winston is silent for a long time.
“No,” Winston says eventually. “I wouldn’t have gone to find you.”
John is surprised at how much that answer cuts him, right to the bone. Deeper, even.
“Why not?” he asks, even as he knows it tips the balance, that it’s a weakness to want an answer.
“There’s nothing wrong with weakness, Jonathan.” A pause. “Knowing what your own are only makes it harder for someone else to use them against you.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“No,” Winston agrees, a hard glitter of amusement in his eyes. “I didn’t."
John tightens his jaw and Winston laughs quietly.
“After all these years,” he murmurs, “you’re sometimes still so childish.” He reaches out and runs a fingertip over John’s hand on the table. “I already gave you an answer, Jonathan. I don’t go anywhere without an invitation.”
John licks his lips. He tastes the steak they had for dinner, the wine that washed it all down. One rare and the other red. Just the way he likes it.
It’s just a game, John thinks. He knows how to play, just as he knows that he’ll never win. But in a life drawn out to such absurd lengths, in an existence punctuated by endings as inevitable as a killshot to the head, John knows this is as close to a guarantee as he’s ever likely to get. Winston is his only constant.
John swallows.
“Touch me.”
Winston smiles. But he doesn’t move, not at all, and the only point of physical contact between them is Winston’s fingertip against his wrist.
“I said—”
“I heard you, Jonathan.”
Winston continues to stare at him, smile never wavering. John isn’t sure what to do—it’s never been this way before. When he’d asked, he received—or gave, if that’s what Winston wanted—but this is different. Winston still seems to be waiting.
“Do you want me to beg?” he asks, ignoring the flush of shame that comes with the knowledge that he would, if Winston demanded it. They both know that there's very little John wouldn’t do once he has a goal in mind. The fact that this one doesn't end with a bullet in someone’s skull makes no difference.
Winston laughs, a quiet rumble of sound that John feels like a tug in his belly, like the deeper kind of hunger that only one thing will sate.
“Just tell me what you want me to—”
He cuts off with a sudden gasp.
There’s a touch of something on his thigh, a light pressure trailing up, up, up. John stares as Winston’s smile widens, but he hasn’t otherwise moved at all, hands perfectly still on the table as invisible fingers continue to creep slowly up John’s thigh.
Another touch, at his chest this time, circling over his nipples through the thin fabric of his shirt. John inhales sharply and Winston narrows his eyes. The touch becomes firmer, pinching hard enough to hurt, and John can’t stop the moan from escaping as his eyes flutter closed.
“Oh, I have missed this.”
Winston’s voice is deeply amused. Before John can think of a reply the touch on his thighs abruptly moves up, ghosting over the growing bulge in his pants. It’s too light a touch, too soft, it’s not nearly enough, but John forces himself to remain still.
“Jonathan,” Winston chides. “There’s no one here but you and me.” He leans forward, just a little. “No one else will know if you just…” Winston licks his lips. “Give in.”
The touch on John’s groin suddenly presses down, enveloping him completely, a strong warm pressure all around. He barely has a chance to groan before the pressure coalesces into a ring, and then the ring moves—up and down, over and over again, working up a maddeningly slow rhythm over his rapidly hardening cock.
“Fuck,” John gasps, closing his eyes.
“Do you know why you’re one of my favourites, Jonathan?”
Winston still hasn’t moved from the other side of the table but his voice is somehow right against John’s ear, his words rough and his breath very, very hot.
“It’s because I can see you,” he continues. “All of you. The hidden dark corners of your mind, all your most secret wants and desires. The filthiest, most repulsive, most reprehensible things, the things you can’t even consciously acknowledge.”
The invisible grip on John’s cock suddenly tightens and John shudders, hips bucking up, half trying to retain some semblance of control and half no longer caring.
“I know them all,” Winston adds. “I accept them all.” His voice gets softer as his breath starts to burn. “I love them all.”
The movement around John’s cock speeds up, ripping a moan out of him, and John grips either side of the chair as he feels his legs being pushed apart. His hips keep moving, unable to stop, and although he wants to make it last he knows he can’t hold out much longer. It’s been too long, and Winston knows him too well and—fuck, it just feels too goddamn good to just give into—
“God,” he moans.
Winston’s low chuckle is like another phantom caress.
“Not quite, Jonathan.”
There’s another touch between his legs, farther back this time, and yes, yes, he thinks feverishly, pushing back against it, biting his lip until the skin yields and blood coats his tongue, the taste making him moan again, obscenely loud. More, he thinks desperately, more—
“Why do you think I turned you instead of all the others? The ones like Miss Perkins, who wore her amorality like fine jewellery? The ones like Santino, whose cowardice reeked from every pore? Why you and not them?”
The movement on his cock abruptly slows down and John’s eyes fly open, a desperate sound escaping his lips. He stares, eyes glazed, at Winston across the table, who still looks entirely calm and composed.
“Because I see what you are at your core, Jonathan,” Winston says, answering his own question. His voice is back to normal, no longer warm and heavy in John’s ear, and John gasps a little at the loss, as desperate for it to return as he is for the grip around his cock to speed up again.
“And despite those sick longings,” Winston continues, completely ignoring John’s groan of frustration, “you are still so wonderfully, tragically human. Not just human in form, but human in all the ways that really count.”
Winston stands and walks around the table. One hand slips under John’s jaw, tilting his head up so they can look at each other in the eye, and the other curls around John’s neck, his fingers scaldingly hot against John’s throat. John swallows, Adam’s apple pressing hard against Winston’s palm. The tightness of the grip makes a splinter of fear pierce John's chest but all it does is make him that much harder.
“That’s why you’re my favourite, Jonathan.” Winston leans down and John closes his eyes, surrendering. “You're irrefutable proof of exactly what his favoured children are capable of.”
Winston’s voice is very close again, his words burning as he whispers against John’s waiting mouth.
“Please,” John starts, but Winston abruptly straightens and lets go of John’s neck. The sudden loss of contact is disorienting. “What—”
But Winston is already halfway across the room, heading for the darkness of an unlit hallway at the other end of the suite.
John shakily gets to his feet. He knows where that hallway leads and his cock twitches at the thought of it, as a thousand sense-memories remind him of exactly what might be in store for him.
John glances at the front door, only a few short steps away. He could leave if he wanted to. Easily.
“Come along, Jonathan,” Winston calls.
He doesn’t pause or look back or wait, and he certainly doesn’t ask John to stay. He doesn’t need to.
John turns away from the door and follows Winston into the darkness.
It was never even in question.