There was nothing good inside Diego's suite, but Baz had already resigned to that. The fact alone was not enough to deter him.
He dropped the towel-filled duffle bag outside the door and let himself in. The door knob turned in his hand, yet another sure sign all was not right in the world.
Letting himself in only confirmed.
Diego sat at the round kitchen table across from Jasper, a gun between them. Jasper's hand rested casually over it, if it was possible for someone to casually point a gun at someone. To his credit, Diego appeared to be handling it quite well, giving Jasper an extended version of his typical disapproving stare.
If it wasn't for that gun, Diego versus Jasper would have been a strikingly mismatched fight.
Cheng's movement at the counter caught Baz's attention next, shifting restlesslessly as if he would be pacing if the space allowed. Compared to Jasper, Cheng was not casual at all.
"You're a really terrible guest, Jasper," Baz said, leaning back against the door.
The gun eased over to point in Baz's direction. At least it wasn't settled on Diego. It was Baz's fault Diego was caught in the web, anyway. The guilt gnawed at him fiercely, corroding him from the inside out while Diego wouldn't even look at him.
"This is your thief?" Cheng asked. His incredulity shouldn't have stung the way it did, not when there were worse sensations to take into account. Still, did he really look that incapable?
"Was," Jasper said, then to Baz, "we won't be needing your services anymore, Mr. Barret"
"Oh no, I'm getting fired," Baz deadpanned.
Of all the people in the room, Cheng looked the most put off by the declaration. "Sébastien Barret? How did you find him?"
Jasper's aim dropped as his hand relaxed, his focus shifting from possibly shooting Baz to paying closer attention to what Cheng had to say. "He broke into a pawn shop in the south end. Our system. He got in through a roof vent."
Cheng blinked at him and Jasper's bravado shrank under scrutiny.
"You convince me to let you hire a thief and you hire a student from my sister's university. You idiot," Cheng said, "
Both Baz and Jasper blinked blankly, but Jasper's gaze fell to Baz instead of Cheng. Clearly student didn't factor into Jasper's image of Baz. He shouldn't have felt so smug, not considering the circumstances.
"It's a large university," Jasper replied defensively.
"Oh, it certainly is, but Ferrero only picks one student from the history faculty a year for scholarship funds and you managed to find one of them," Cheng seethed, "the one I helped him select. He traces right back to me."
Cheng remembered him. Not only did Cheng remember him, but he remembered him as a student worth investing in. It was flattering in a small way, but it would've been more flattering if Jasper wasn't poised to shoot Baz in the foot.
Jasper re-committed, remembering his role as threatening man-in-charge and evening his aim with Baz's chest. Did Jasper have it in him to pull the trigger? It wasn't a theory Baz was keen on testing, but Jasper wavered, his gaze flicking from Cheng to Baz.
He didn't know. By sheer dumb luck, Jasper stumbled upon him. The stars aligned and instead of magic, Baz got a gun pointed at him.
"How was I supposed to know?" Jasper replied.
"I assumed from vetting process was more thorough than essentially drawing a name out of a hat," Cheng replied. His accent only emphasized the condescension, "and the name you drew is directly connects him to me."
Jasper wet his lips, buying time for a response. All Baz could do in the meantime was remain perfectly still. Diego still wouldn't look at him and honest, Baz couldn't blame him.
"It's still your words against his," Jasper said.
"Yes, now it is. Now he knows me. You know why that is, Jasper?" Cheng paused, but didn't wait for an answer, "because I don't trust you to settle this matter yourself."
"I have leverage," Jasper insisted. He exaggerated his point, the gun in his hand momentarily finding its way back to Diego. There was that factor, among others. Baz could not argue that, and evidently, neither could Cheng. It was that or Cheng simply accepted that there was no taking back the decisions everyone in the room had already made. There was no taking back the gun, the burglaries, the pawn shop break in.
"That's a very polite term for blackmail and extortion," Baz said. Jasper's aim straightened again. Maybe it wasn't best not to strengthen Jasper's resolve to shoot him. Baz held his hands up weakly.
"Oh, I have more than that," Jasper taunted. Baz's brow furrowed, but Jasper's smug smile only grew wider.
There was something in that vagueness... Baz assumed he was caught. He assumed stealth failed him on Cheng's property. If that was the case, why beat around the bush? Why not just come out with it and declare he lost, they won?
"What are you talking about?" Baz asked. He didn't dare hope. His gaze flicked to Diego who finally raised his head to shake his head almost imperceptibly. How much did Cheng and Jasper dare say in front of Diego? They had plenty of time to chat between the unsettling phone call and Baz's arrival. What had Diego heard? How had they threatened Diego?
Jasper's smug smile spoke volumes. "We won't be needing your services any longer, but I can't have you running around Temperance knowing too much."
That explained why Cheng was there. Jasper didn't realize that Baz already knew Cheng was the beneficiary behind the crimes. Jasper would never give Baz enough credit to even entertain the idea that Baz could figure that out.
So... the only reason they would risk revealing that fact to him had to be that they were going to get rid of him. The gun was one option, but the other, of course, was the closet full of stolen items.
They didn't know Baz redistributed the evidence. That wasn't why they were there.
"I just need to know where Rei is," Jasper said.
That was it.
"I don't know where she is right now," Baz answered, truthfully. He could make an educated guess, but that was all.
"Well, that's her carry-on bag, so I suggest you rethink your position," Cheng replied dryly, gesturing toward the pull-out couch, unmade and obvious.
"I haven't seen her since this morning," Baz replied. Also true.
Something vibrated somewhere and it was Cheng who moved quickest for the source, retrieving his phone from a pocket. Everyone in the room waited for his reaction. His dark eyebrows furrowed.
"Gwen has Rei. Somehow, despite you outsourcing your task, she has managed to do what you couldn't," Cheng replied.
Jasper scowled, but also paled. Baz wasn't used to seeing Jasper without his authority. In Cheng's presence, Jasper was just a lapdog, scolded for sitting on the furniture. He must have absolutely thrived on directing Baz around without supervision.
Gwen had Rei. Goddammit, Baz had led everyone into a trap. He led Jasper right to Diego so he could point a gun at him and use him as leverage. He pointed Rei right in Gwen's direction, knowing full well that Gwen was waiting for Rei to take the bait. He handed over the upper hand. He kept the company of so few people and he managed to ruin everything for most of them. It was beginning to feel like a talent.
"We're to pick them up at the hospital," Cheng continued, "so let's go."
Finally, Jasper lowered the gun. Baz exhaled. It wasn't a pleasant sensation, watching the barrel shift around as Jasper's concentration wavered, calculating what internal organ or muscle group a bullet might pulverize from the many different angles.
"Bring him," Cheng commanded. "The single benefit of your incompetence is we may have some leverage with which to negotiate."
Great. Baz graduated from being leveraged against to becoming the leverage.
Jasper moved hastily, tucking his gun into his waistband before retrieving a zip tie from his pocket.
"Are you serious?" Baz asked as Jasper grabbed his wrist. "Is it not enough that you could have me arrested at any time?"
The answer was evidently no.
It would be easy enough to wrench free of Jasper's grasp, his fingers long and spindly, but there was the issue of that gun... Baz begrudgingly let Jasper bind his wrists together in front of him, the plastic digging into his skin. There was no getting out of that like he'd gotten out of Rei's knots.
Jasper shoved him out the door, pulling Baz around the arm. The power trip was really beginning to grate on Baz's nerves. Had there been a moment where he was uncooperative? Did the situation really warrant the shoving?
A limo pulled up from around the corner, outrageously out of place in Diego's neighborhood though Jasper and Cheng were wise enough to not leave it sitting right outside Diego's door. Jasper did his absolute best impression of a police officer pushing a convict into a squad car, but the interior was far too lux to continue that impression. The car looked slightly too long from the outside, but the rear interior featured to benches facing each other. Surely they car was better suited to meetings than... what was happening? Did it count as an abduction? Baz was forcibly detained, removed from where he was staying and tossed into a car. It sounded like an abduction.
Cheng and Jasper climbed in opposite Baz, eyes following him for some kind of reaction.
They didn't know about his last break-in. They gave no indication that they did. Baz held onto that thought as the car rolled forward and pulled out onto the street. If they intended to take Baz down as their scapegoat, he would drag them down, too.
"When did you find her?" Jasper asked, eyes smoldering as if it were somehow Baz's fault that Cheng chastised him.
Oh, about the same time he figured out the kidnapping claim was a scam.
"Two days ago," Baz replied.
"And you didn't think to say anything?" Jasper said.
"Well, I thought it was kind of curious that there was a ransom demanded for her when she clearly wasn't kidnapped. I was just trying to reconcile that fact," Baz replied.
Jasper shot him the kind of look that spoke of exactly how much he wanted to shoot Baz in that moment, if he hadn't suddenly become useful again.
A darker thought that Jasper deciding to shoot him slithered into Baz's mind. What if he wasn't worthy leverage at all? What if he wasn't worth whatever they wanted from Rei? Hadn't Rei very flippantly mentioned how she was willed several thousand dollars in assets? Several thousand dollars was a lot of money. Baz hesitated to assign that worth to himself. Yes, she kissed him. Yes, she flattered him. Would that really mean anything when push came to shove?
Cheng's look was more studious than Jasper's. He was not invisible to Cheng, a fact he already demonstrated very clearly by simply remembering his face. Maybe by virtue of knowing a shred of Baz's background, Cheng didn't immediately assume him an idiot. That studious appraisal looked very much like Cheng trying to dissect that comment.
"How did you find her?" Cheng asked the question Jasper had failed to. How did a thief manage to find a woman when her brother couldn't?
"I reverse engineered the photo in her master bedroom," Baz replied, holding Cheng's gaze, though out of the corner of his eye, he caught Jasper's uncensored surprise.
There was no point in mentioning how the thought occurred to him while lying sprawled out on a fire escape looking over a particular bakery.
"Faraday," Cheng said, considering. He looked down, his face almost communicating how obvious that should have been to him, but perhaps that was only Baz projecting.
The car slowed and the silhouette of the hospital was roughly visible through the car's tinted windows. The door swung open and there was Gwen's long legs, appearing before anything else. What could possibly improve the situation quite like introducing Gwen into the mix?
She stepped into the car, sliding in next to Baz. Behind her, Rei followed suit, notably not bound at the wrists.
Her eyes did not dance. Instead, both Rei and Gwen's appeared red-rimmed and puffy. There was only one thing Baz could think of that could make Gwen cry.
Baz's heart ached. There were no happy endings for them at the hospital and Cheng left no time to grieve, no time for Rei to even put space between herself and the hospital.
Baz flinched as Gwen slid a hand up his thigh.
"I don't think you've been completely honest with me," Gwen said, but her tone lacked bravado. Even she wasn't invested in watchin him squirm. Too many other things on her mind.
One last squeeze dug her nails into him before she folded her hands in front of her. The entire time, Baz could not take his eyes off Rei across from him. She hastily brushed a hand against her eyes.
"Now, to negotiate," Cheng said.