BLACK CARD

"If you're going to take your knots out and compare sizes, can you pick somewhere that isn't crawling with witnesses?"

Silence fell. Viscous and loaded, it lingered over Matt's shoulders and stroked his ears like the seductive touch of a woman. Mattias, not wanting to be guarded like some omega bitch, juddered Cifer off and partially stumbled off to the side. 

"Fine. Fight all you want. I'm gonna go find some work."

Cifer finally broke that terrifyingly dark staring contest he was having with Iosif. "What the fuck? No, you're not?" 

"Let me borrow your black card, then."

"Who the fuck told you about—"

Iosif burst into a fit of laughter; whimsical as it was, it just made Mattias bring his shoulders higher than they already were. 

"That would be me. You really should take better care of your things, Ubiytsa. This isn't Moscow. Powerful or not, the rules in the ruins sector are quite different."

"... Whatever. C'mon. We're leaving."

"So soon? What, you come into my home, neglect to greet me, then leave without so much as a 'thank you for taking care of my new pet?'"

Matt whipped around on his heels and would have gotten himself back into Iosif's face, were it not for the arm that reached out and pivoted his stride down the street instead. 

"I'm not a fucking pet!"

Cifer clicked his tongue. "I'll come for dinner tonight. Would that satisfy you?"

"Only if you bring him~."

Cifer began walking faster, and at first, Matt thought they may be slipping into the crowd, but everyone who caught sight of the man simply veered away from him instead. 

"Fuck off. He's Kremlin territory."

Cifer sent a dismissive wave as they put more distance between them. 

"Nine o'clock, sharp! I want to hear all the details!"

"Go home, Iosif!"

The noise and activity of that packed street could avoid Cifer no longer. It swallowed them up with uncomfortable candor, and so many scents overwhelmed Matt at once he nearly gagged. 

Fuck, how do people not on scent blockers deal with this?? 

"What happened to my guys?" Cifer asked. 

"... That Iosif guy said he took them off for questioning."

"Great. So it's an exchange, then. This puts our schedule back a whole-ass day."

"Your fault for hiring shitty guys, then." Matt grunted as he felt a random, smaller alpha collide against his left side. Momentarily distracted, he let out a warning growl that got eaten by the shouts of men trying to vie for a vendor's attention. He'd have been suspicious about being pickpocketed were he not devoid of literally everything right now. 

In his momentary distraction, he lost track of what Cifer was saying. You know, until Cifer did him dirty and stole his attention back all at once.

"I—" Cifer choked so violently on himself, something inside him panicked. 

Matt turned to see what was wrong, but when he looked, all he saw was that increasingly familiar look the other man had about him. The one that seemed like he was fighting some unseen force for the right to speak, but whatever it was, it always got the best of him. 

Cifer's eyes fell dull again. Flat, glassy, and without a hint of anything that reminded Matty the man was human. For a few horrid seconds, it was as though Cifer had transformed back into the corpse Matt had met back in America. 

"... Where do you go when this happens?" he asked aloud in English, hoping the sea of people would swallow his thoughts down the markets. 

Gloved fingers twitched slightly. Had Cifer heard him? Fuck, what if he was like this forever? But Matt's worries were unfounded. A second later, Cifer sucked in a sharp breath through his nose and brought a massive mitt to claw roughly through his blond locks. 

His own lungs deflated out a sickly stress he hadn't known he harbored. Nor had he realized the pair of them had stopped walking entirely until far after they were making something of a spectacle. 

"... Hurry up. I'll get us a room." Cifer said. 

The larger alpha almost appeared unsteady on his feet as he returned to stomping through the crowd, but that couldn't have actually happened. He'd never seen Cifer lose his fooling that inexplicably in his entire life. 

No, he must have imagined it. 

… § … 

He hadn't imagined a goddamn thing. Cifer was off his game. Normally, that would have been a good thing; it meant Matt could grab the opportunity to take the other man out, or find a way to escape. But the more he'd looked around, the more he realized he'd be out of the frying pan and into the fire. 

There were villains and criminals everywhere, some in full nitranium setups that would spell instant death for anyone not wearing nitranium armor, too. Besides, a few things had stuck out to Matt that he just couldn't ignore. He needed more intel, and for the moment, it appeared as though Cifer had finally grown weary of his own temper enough that Matt could ask. So, Mattias patiently waited whilst they entered one of the shanty buildings that offered places to stay. 

These inns were everywhere. It made sense, considering the city above amounted to little more than hazardous ruins. More war memorabilia and trophies of the dead adorned the walls of this place, and Matt deliberately refrained from looking at the cramped decor in the small building to begin with. 

His nightmares were hard enough to contend with. He didn't need a visual reminder of the horrors that robbed him of his childhood and his friends of their lives. 

"... Isn't there a nicer place to stay around here?" he asked in English again. The dark-haired alpha was tired of translating everything in his head.

"Not if you don't want Kvasov breathing up your ass."

"The fuck kind of a visual is—Kvasov." The pair of them had to turn sideways to avoid a man wearing a clearly illegal, very much so death knight-like super suit.

"Iosif Kvasov. King of the ruins sector and head of the Kvasov family."

"... How'd he find me so fast? It can't have been a coincidence. This reeks."

"Probably because this place is technically under his governance, though it's not completely under his command. He's just the man with the largest wallet in Nizhny Novgorod, and money talks. Likely got curious when he heard I was in town with a knocked out stranger in tow. Came to check you out. Sick fuck."

He didn't want to know why Cifer sounded so territorial right now. So he decided to ask something else as tactfully as he could—

"And you're the guy with the largest wallet in Moscow?"

Cifer never said a word as they exited the hall that led out of the registration lobby and into the Inn proper. 

"I'm taking that as a yes."

"Do you have to keep prying into everything you hear? Fuck, you're such a nerd."

But there was a defensiveness to Cifer's posture, and that irked Matt even more. "Yes."

Cifer hissed through his teeth as they reached a large, plain, square hall with multiple room numbers on them. "Room 15."

They headed to the right. "Where's Lev and the others?"

"Back in our inn. The usual one."

"Isn't that back in Moscow?"

"Yes. And no."

"It's be easier to be less of a nerd if you started making an ounce of sense, Ci—Zak."

Cifer froze where he was, black card in hand as he held it poised in the air just inches away from the door. "What did you just call me?"

A fraction of a second was wasted purely on hesitation. "I'm not calling you by your fantasy name. Your title feels like some kind of joke, and you hate your actual name. So. Take it or fucking leave it."

The card trembled in the air before it pulled away entirely. 

"You wanna know how all this works?"

Shit. Did Matt actually win an argument for once? How? He wasn't even trying to! "Yes."

Cifer reached one of his other hands out, gripped the handle of the door and tugged it open. Matt was initially confused by the unlocked door. But then he saw the flat metal wall behind the door itself and balked. 

"Why would they—"

Cifer shut the door again. This time, he pointedly lifted the card up for Matty to see before he finally pressed it against the door. After a moment or two, another beep sounded, and he opened the door again. This time, it swung open to an actual hotel room—one with a king sized bed, a television, a kitchenette, attached bathroom and what looked like a balcony. 

Matt immediately shouldered past Cifer to look for the mechanisms that had somehow moved the metal wall away entirely. However, upon further inspection, he couldn't find anything—he felt around, searched for seams, tapped and scratched at the smooth surface that made up the shanty doorframe. 

Nothing. 

"You're taking forever," Cifer said as he reached a hand out and pushed Matt into the room.

The smaller alpha was unprepared, so he had to catch himself before he stumbled too far.

"How?"

Ah, yes—the man's eloquence strikes again. 

"I don't know. My family isn't the one that maintains these places. The Ivanovs are." 

Matt turned to send the blond a deep, ponderous look before he wandered further inside to their rather mediocre space. "These. You mean the one here, in the ruins, and the inn in Moscow?"

"I mean fucking everywhere in Russia," the door closed behind Cifer as he entered, "it's some kind of pocket in space. Rumors say it's a super technology the Ivanovs cooked up during the war, but loads of people insist these pocket spaces were here before then. Ivanov insists he just found them as they were and made a system to maintain it."

"Oh, god. If you say 'we're in another dimension,' I'm jumping off the balcony."

Cifer laughed; for once, it seemed dragged down by an exhaustion and remiss of its usual cockiness. "Nah. At least, I don't think we are. Point is, the Cradle is a massive underground network of pockets in space, and the black cards are the keys to get in."

Matt made a face, "how come the army isn't swarming this place? It's not like they were even trying to hide the entrance." His arms crossed over his chest as he wandered over to the balcony. 

"Some kind of defense mechanism. Again, I'm not an Ivanov, so I don't know how anything works. But if anyone with intentions of whistleblowing or attacking the Cradle approaches, the entrance and everyone standing around it just… vanish."

"Because that makes sense." His eyes almost rolled out of his skull. Hands pressed against the handles of the glass doors before he opened them up and stepped out into the not-so-fresh air. The bustling market sounds immediately flooded in and broke the peaceful quiet as Matt rested his arms against the railing and leaned down to look. It smelled overwhelming, but less so now that they were higher up.

"So, a pocket in space. If nobody with shit intentions can find it and they started with sonar or digging, they'd just hit dirt?"

"Exactly," came Cifer's reply from the doorway behind him, "and if some idiot cop wanders in, they'll just see empty ruins that lead to a dead end."

"Hm." What a terrifying place. "Could it collapse on us?" 

"Ivanovs say no."

"Dunno if I'm gonna believe some guy's word on it, but I guess that's better than nothing."

Heat radiated at his back—it was pleasant, perhaps overly warm considering the temperature of this place, but not entirely unwelcome. Cifer's voice came from the direction of that warmth, though. Which made Matt change his mind. It was officially unwelcome and he hated it.

"You need keys to get down here, but if you've got a key, and you approached a designated access point, you could theoretically go to whatever pocket your card is registered to. Only one pocket access registration at a time, though. Fucks with the system. "

"…. So you can get down there even if that pocket is in Moscow, and you're in the ruins." 

Finally, things were feeling less frustrating. Matt shut his eyes and idly brushed the tip of his thumb against lips. "Why didn't we head back to 'our' inn?" 

"Because this is Kvasov's territory. If I use my card to take us out to a Moscow location, he's going to think I bailed without paying his family resects and get offended. Twisted fuck as he is, my family does business with his. I can't afford to piss them off over a misunderstanding."

Matt melted against the railing, watching the criminals go about their day. "Weren't we on the bottom floor?"

"Yes."

"And now we're—what, six floors up?"

"Yeah."

"... I'm done questioning it. My head feels like it's going to explode."

"Wait here. I'll grab your meds."

The lumbering jack ass was already off the tiny balcony and back inside the room without so much as listening to any protests. Head hanging low, Matt eventually straightened up and turned to face the room. His arms crossed, legs did, too, as he leaned back against the solid railing and sent Cifer a look.

"Hey. That… spot. On your back. What is it? It's not like any injury I've ever seen before."

Cifer's body went rigid, though the man crouched down by a travel trunk near the base of the bed and pressed his card against it. After another beep sounded, he opened the chest and revealed familiar items. So, it worked for smaller spaces, too. Convenient, but at what cost? 

"What is this, twenty-one questions? Shit." Cifer glared down at the trunk even harder. "Probably because it's not an injury."

"What is it, then? You didn't have that when we were small, so it can't have been a factory defect."

No self respecting designer baby facility would pop out a baby with something that ugly on it. 

"... It's a scar."

Mattias opened his mouth, but found himself bereft of words. A scar? In this day and age? When people were specifically bred not to scar, with perfect healing genetics that not only made them heal faster, but kept them looking younger for far longer? 

"But you heal just as fast as anyone else. I've seen it."

"Sure," Cifer said, his hands finally rummaging through the contents of the trunk. 

"So how'd you get it?"

"You gave it to me. When you left me to die alone in that factory."

… Oh.