Chapter Text
As Jean stares down the barrel of a gun, he realizes with startling clarity that the only emotion he feels is relief.
He should probably be terrified. Fearful. Nervous about making one wrong move and getting his brains blown out. That’d be the normal reaction, right? How the average human might respond to such an imminent threat?
Jean hasn’t felt anything close to normal since he was fourteen years old.
No — it’s a relief to know that his suffering will be over soon. He definitely deserves such a brutal execution, and, if he’s being completely honest with himself, he’s so fucking exhausted that the eternal oblivion of death does have a certain appeal.
At least Elodie will be alright. All of his savings will go to her, and she’s already applied to colleges. Surely one of them will see her brilliance and give her a path forward. Her last year of high school will be rough with Jean dead and unable to take care of her, but even with those poor odds she’ll still have a better shot than he ever did.
Shit. Shot. Probably not the best analogy to use, given the whole gun-in-his-face situation.
Part of Jean doesn’t want to die. He’s spent the last decade fighting a losing battle against survival, though, and it appears that the clock has finally run out.
Jean knows better than to believe in something that sounds too good to be true, but when you’re as desperate as he is, sometimes the very possibility of financial security outweighs any and all potential alarm bells.
“It’s an easy job,” Zane, his coworker at the shop, says. Pretending to ignore him, Jean stares pointedly at the popped hood of the Nissan Altima in their garage. He’s simultaneously impressed and disgruntled at the fact that the car has almost half a million miles on the odometer and still miraculously runs.
Maybe if he focuses hard enough on the car, Zane will leave him alone.
“The guy’s family is in the Senate or something, but they’re on one of those richest-people-ever lists,” Zane continues, ignoring Jean’s quiet French curse when he does. “All you have to do is babysit the spoiled brat until his family coughs up the ransom.”
With a resigned sigh, Jean sets to replacing the car’s spark plugs. His arthritic, grease-stained hands aren’t quite cooperating today, which is annoying. Not as annoying as Zane, though. The other man doesn’t even bother to help, of course — Zane’s worldview is transactional, and Jean has very few things to offer him.
He’s also absolutely oblivious to Jean’s mounting irritation, because he doesn’t stop talking. “And I already spoke with Riko. He’s willing to let this be your initiation, especially since the Ravens have been looking for someone of your… stature for a while.”
It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not the first time someone has asked Jean to join their gang. “I’m not interested in being muscle for your little club,” he says when it becomes clear Zane is waiting for a response.
Jean looks up from the engine to see Zane sneering at him. “Oh, don’t act all holier-than-thou about a little bit of crime. You’re not better than us, Moreau. I’ve seen you turning tricks on the corner of Broadway.”
Jean’s face flushes against his will. He wants to deny it, to claim that Zane must’ve mistaken him with some other 6-foot-4 male prostitute that just so happens to bear a startling resemblance to him, but he hesitates a beat too long for any accompanying protest to sound legitimate. “What I do in my spare time is none of your concern,” he grits out through clenched teeth.
“I’m just saying. You do this for Riko and you’re in. You wouldn’t have to whore yourself out anymore — he has no interest in sluts. But it’d be good money, and I know you need it. Might as well use your body to intimidate someone rather than fuck ‘em, yeah?”
Zane’s words, while shitty and blunt, are also unfortunately rather true. Jean is in need of money, especially now that Elodie is college-bound and there’s no fucking way he can afford her tuition without some supplemental income.
It’s a double-edged sword that she’s so bright; he couldn’t bear the thought of her staggering potential being extinguished just because her brother lacked the work ethic to make enough money to pay her way through higher education. Any time that Jean spends reflecting on how impossible the task seems is time that he should be working, whether that’s at the auto shop or on the streets.
“Who’s the target?” he asks wearily. The exhaustion from working daily shifts at the shop and fucking his way through most nights is definitely catching up with him. It’s a moment of weakness, he knows, to imagine that joining the Ravens will actually give him a security blanket, but he can’t deny that the offer is enticing. It might be worth it if he can squirrel away a few hundred dollars here and there in case they face another untimely emergency like Jean’s appendicitis about a year ago.
He’s still fielding calls from collections about those medical bills.
Maybe it’ll just be some unsuspecting kid, and Jean won’t have to work very hard at all. Maybe he’ll be able to stop fucking drowning; it'd be nice to finally start treading some water, actually take in a genuine lungful of air, for once.
“Jeremy Knox,” Zane replies. He finally makes himself useful, grabbing the worn plugs that Jean removes and tossing them for disposal. “Twenty-five year old nepo baby. He’s only a handful of inches shorter than you, but looks like he’s never thrown a real punch in his entire life. I can’t imagine he’d give a big guy like you any trouble, especially not since you’ll be armed.”
Oh. For some reason, when Zane had mentioned spoiled brat, Jean had thought he’d be an actual kid. Holding an adult hostage is different than threatening a child. “I’m not actually going to hurt him at all, though?”
“Nah,” Zane says. “I mean, if you have to rough him up to keep him docile, that’s fine. But the ransom will involve delivering him whole and hale back into his beloved family’s arms.”
This is the first red flag, Jean will think later. He knows from personal experience that your parents bringing you into the world doesn’t automatically mean they give a shit about what happens to you after that.
But in the moment, he nods; after all, Zane’s sales pitch has piqued his interest. “And if I do this, what happens?”
“You'll be one of us and get a cut of the ransom money. As long as you don’t fuck it up, Riko will know he can trust you and might let you in on future jobs.”
It's tempting, though Jean doubts it will be that easy or clean-cut. Criminals usually get greedy and ambitious all-too-fast, which is why he tends to shy away from anything that sounds even remotely organized. It’s far easier to be on his own. Yeah, he'll have no allies if the cops do arrest him, but until then, he gets to pocket every cent he earns.
It also means he’s not beholden to anyone else. Jean hasn’t even met the leader of the Ravens — Zane’s his only point of contact. There are a lot of unknown variables here, and Jean knows the right move is to be more cautious, not less. He fled France with Elodie in tow to avoid a life of subservience, and has no intention of being under anyone’s thumb like that ever again.
He knows better, and yet Jean still asks, “How much?”
Zane flashes him a victorious grin, looking like a shark scenting blood in the water. “Ten grand for you if all goes well.”
Fuck. Fuck. That's rent money for four months. That could be an entire semester of Elodie's tuition. That's a new bike to replace the hunk of junk Jean has been repairing more often than he actually gets to ride it as of late.
If Jean joins the Ravens and paydays look like that, he might not ever need to rent a shitty, disgusting motel room again.
“Fine,” he says, swallowing against the sudden nausea roiling through him. “What's the plan?”
Los Angeles is a greedy, voracious beast with a gaping maw that is never truly satiated. It demands more, ever more, from its inhabitants until they are wrung dry, and still Jean gives it his all until there’s nothing of him left to offer up.
There had been few options for a fourteen-year-old and his baby sister arriving at LAX from the first international flight available that would take them far, far away from Marseille. For eight years, he’s been scraping together just enough to provide for himself and his sister — needless to say, he’s not unused to the concept of breaking the law. He doesn't have the kind of moral code that would preclude him from stealing painkillers from the local drug store or breaking into someone's house to find some jewelry to pawn. He’d just hoped, naively, that getting a legitimate job as a mechanic would allow him to commit fewer felonies. His current boss is a decent guy, at least, an older man named Rhemann that lets him work on his motorcycle in the shop for free after hours.
It’s a better deal than some of the previous mechanics he’s worked for, too, especially since he doesn’t have to blow anyone to keep his hours steady or work so hard his fingers are too stiff to function by the end of each day.
It’s still not enough.
It will never be enough.
Ten thousand bucks isn’t life-changing money, but it’ll be a start. It’ll give Jean a little more time, some wiggle room, to figure out what the fuck he’s going to do next. And if the leader of the Ravens is serious about Jean’s recruitment, about offering him regular jobs, then he really can’t afford to screw this one up.
He keeps hearing Zane’s words in the back of his head, too. If it’s true and Riko’s gang won’t require him to sell himself, then it might even be good.
Apparently Jeremy Knox frequents this particular coffee shop multiple times a week. Jean has no idea why, given their mediocre, overpriced drinks, but he still waits nervously for his mark to arrive and stares at the cup of tea he’d ordered and hasn’t touched once. A medical mask and dark, generic sunglasses cover Jean's features, and he has careful instructions not to let Jeremy see him without a mask on, so it’s kind of stupid that he ordered anything at all. Jean’s also fairly certain that Riko won’t do anything as ridiculous as to reimburse him the $4.73 it cost.
At least it's a decent cover. Still, he’s not going to mess this job up, and so the mask stays intact; after all, it wouldn’t do for his target to memorize the face of the person abducting him.
Knox arrives about half an hour after Jean sits down in one of the uncomfortable chairs by the door, right on schedule. Jean is too broad for the wooden furniture to be anything but cramped, but he forces his body to relax against the stiff chair so he doesn’t look suspicious.
He knows what Jeremy looks like, thanks to his short stint at a modelling career, but the man is even more stunning in person. His blond hair is tousled and curls attractively at his forehead and the nape of his neck, brown roots just barely starting to show. The tight shirt he’s wearing distracts Jean from his mission for a brief moment as he's nearly overcome with the urge to see if those muscles would be as strong beneath his fingertips as they look. Even though Jeremy is shorter than him, he looks fit. Under different circumstances — in a different life — he might’ve approached him with entirely separate intentions.
He stops the thought in its tracks. This isn't the time for unrealistic daydreams, and anyway, Jeremy Knox is so far out of his league that there is no universe under which the other man would look twice at him.
Jeremy walks in alone, which is a good sign. Jean didn’t really have a back-up plan for what he'd do if Jeremy arrived with company, but he surreptitiously watches as Knox orders. The other man smiles broadly at the tired-looking barista behind the counter, and the genuine grin lights up his face and makes him look about five years younger. He puts a bill in their tip jar and moves toward the counter to wait for his order after finishing up, which is another good sign. He’s not sitting down, so he probably isn’t planning on staying for long. He doesn't do anything suspicious, slipping his phone out and typing something on it.
He hasn't looked at Jean once. Everything is going according to plan, so far.
Jean rubs the thumb of one hand over the knuckles of his other in a nervous gesture. There’s a very fine tremor along his fingers at what he’s about to do, but he’s not stupid, either. He knows well enough that, if he backs out now, the best-case scenario is the Ravens beat the shit out of him.
The worst-case scenario is something Jean can’t even contemplate. Zane knows he has a sister.
When Knox picks up his order and turns to leave, Jean stands, abandoning his own drink. He falls in step behind Knox, shooting a cautious glance around the rest of the shop before slipping the gun tucked into his waistband out and keeping it concealed beneath his loose hoodie.
“Look straight ahead,” Jean murmurs, pressing the gun hard into Knox’s back. “Keep moving. I don't want to hurt you, so follow along and you’ll walk away without injury.”
Jean isn’t sure what to expect when Knox registers the words, but for some reason, the man doesn’t even stiffen or flinch as he processes the cold metal threat against his spine.
“Oh,” he says, the singular word sounding far more surprised than scared. “Alright. Well this is a far more interesting activity than what I had planned for today. Can I keep my drink, at least?”
Needless to say, his reaction is — weird. Discomfiting.
But he does continue moving forward, so Jean says, “I don’t care. Keep it if you want.” Maybe he’ll be a little more compliant if he’s got some caffeine. His behavior is fucking bizarre, though. Who worries about a drink while at gunpoint?
As they exit the coffee shop, Knox disobeys Jean’s directive. He cranes his neck around to look back, and Jean’s stomach drops at the thought of Jeremy seeing his face, even though logically he knows it’s almost completely covered up. Knox doesn’t even seem to be looking at Jean, though — he tips his head to the side and flashes a smile to someone behind Jean.
“Do not talk to anyone,” he hisses. He has no idea what that wordless exchange meant, or who Jeremy might have been looking at, but he feels his grip slip on the gun, hands clammy and sweaty, as he wonders if this is it. If a single glance and wordless exchange has already ruined everything.
(This is the second red flag.)
“Sorry, sorry,” Knox says lightly. “Where are we heading, mister — oh, shoot, I don’t know your name.”
It is the most transparent prying for information that he’s ever encountered. Does he think Jean is a complete idiot?
No matter. He planned for this. “If you must call me something, you can use Yves.” There isn’t a single document on American soil that connects Jean to his full name.
“Okay, Yves, where are we going?”
Something hot and tight wraps around Jean’s heart. Oh. He hadn’t — when he’d thought of the fake name, Jean hadn’t quite anticipated how much it would ache to hear it from someone else’s lips. Elodie hasn’t called him that since they were both children.
He bites the inside of his cheek hard until he can taste blood. Then he says, as they walk, “To the parking lot. I don’t trust that your vehicle isn’t being tracked, so we’re taking mine.”
Knox hums thoughtfully, obediently heading in that direction. “Oh, that’s smart. Mine definitely has a GPS tracker.”
Who is this guy, to admit something so quickly?
“You’re not very good at this,” Jean can’t help but say.
“What?” Knox asks, sounding outraged. “I’ll have you know that I am being an excellent victim here. Which one’s your car?”
Jean feels dizzy with disbelief. It doesn’t make sense how this is simultaneously going so well and so terribly; he has to wrest the situation back under control before Knox starts to think he isn't deathly serious about this abduction. He stops at a beat-up Toyota. Zane had lent it to him for today, and all Jean knows is that the VIN was filed off and the plates were swapped prior to the keys being handed off to him.
“Take out your phone,” Jean says sternly, hoping Knox can’t detect the anxious tightness in his throat as he speaks. “Place it under one of the tires. You’ll be driving, and again, to remind you, I have no intention of harming you if you comply. Your obedience will make things easier on us both.”
“Yes, sir,” Knox chirps. He fishes his phone out of his back pocket and bends over to put it on the ground. Jean would like to believe he’s a better man than to ogle the tight ass of the guy he’s kidnapping, but.
At least he isn’t delusional about denying it. Jeremy Knox is sinfully hot, and he’s got a decent amount of muscle packed onto his frame. He is shorter than Jean is, but still sturdy and well-built, like he spends hours a day at the gym.
Jean’s extremely-professional appraisal of his target means he registers almost immediately that Zane’s intel is shit, which doesn’t give him much faith in the Ravens. As they climb in the car, Jean keeps the gun trained on Jeremy as he hands him the keys and instructs him to start the vehicle. When he grips the steering wheel at 10-and-2 like a fucking sixteen-year-old learning to drive for the first time, Jean sees the silvered scars cross-hatching across Knox’s knuckles.
Jeremy Knox has definitely thrown a punch before.
(How many red flags will Jean notice after it's already too late to change things?)
For better or for worse, though, he doesn’t seem too inclined to throw one right now.
Knox does flinch lightly when the car rolls over his expensive smartphone, which Jean is glad to see. It means he’s at least normal enough to be upset when his material belongings are destroyed. Jean keeps the gun trained on Knox as he drives, following Jean’s directions easily enough. He navigates them through the route he’d memorized the night before to the abandoned address that Zane had sent him.
It’s a now-defunct garage that Jean actually did an interview at a few years back. They’d rejected his application because he didn’t have any real certifications, only job experience, and apparently not having any professional schooling meant he wasn’t good enough for their shop.
Their loss, he muses. Clearly no one is running any official business out of this place anymore.
“Alright, Knox. Turn the car off and get out nice and slow for me.” Jesus Christ, Jean thinks as he hears himself speak. Could he sound anymore like a stereotypical villain in an action film?
“Please call me Jeremy, Yves. I feel like we’re on a first-name basis now.” The way Knox — Jeremy, he supposes — says his name does weird things to Jean’s head. He should’ve come up with something stupid and unrelated to his own identity, but it’s too fucking late to walk it back now.
“Okay, Jeremy,” he says with a wince, realizing too late that his accent is slightly more detectable as he says Jeremy’s name. At least his face is still covered and Jeremy can’t see his reaction. After almost a full decade into living on the West Coast, he’s pretty much reduced the French lilt to nothing, but there are regrettably still moments where he hasn’t filed it down enough to be entirely imperceptible.
Jean hates guns and feels dirty as he keeps the weapon trained on Jeremy as they leave the car. They’re unwieldy and terrifying and he loathes turning the weapon on another person, but he still feigns nonchalance as he walks Jeremy toward the already-unlocked door. Once inside, he spares a glance around the abandoned garage, though it looks as bereft of equipment and vehicles as it does of any other living souls.
There are two chairs, both facing each other, and a long coil of rope sitting on one.
“Did your people do any research about me before setting all of this up?” Jeremy asks curiously as he looks around the garage, too.
The smart thing to do is ignore him. His job is to make sure Jeremy stays well-behaved and contained while Riko and Zane negotiate the terms of his ransom and release, not exchange idle chit chat.
“I could be working alone,” he says anyway, gesturing with the gun for Jeremy to take a seat. He does easily enough before offering the rope up to Jean, which makes his stomach squirm with something.
“Mmm, no. I don’t think so.” It’s unsettling how confident Jeremy sounds of this fact.
Jean distracts himself by tying him securely to the chair. Finally, he gives into curiosity: “Why should I have researched you?”
“Oh, you know. Just trying to figure out why we’re here.” Jeremy wiggles around in the chair, clearly trying to get comfortable. “You would’ve killed me already if you were an assassin, and you’ve mentioned not wanting to hurt me… Yves, have you kidnapped me?”
He says it playfully, like they’re only a game, but this is Jean’s life — it’s not something to make light of. His hands clench into tight fists, nails biting into the meat of his palms as he reins in his temper. “Yes,” Jean replies shortly. “Now shut up. Sit tight and you’ll be out of here in no time.”
Jeremy frowns. “I’m not historically good at the shutting up thing. Oh, darn, I just realized I left my coffee in the car. Could I convince you to go grab it?”
Jean frowns right back. “I am not an idiot, Knox,” he says. “I won’t let you out of my sight for even a moment.”
“Jeremy,” he pouts again. “Say it with me: Yes, Jeremy, I will go get your coffee.”
This is the weirdest kidnapping Jean has ever participated in. Given the fact that he’s only been involved in two, he might not be an expert, but even Elodie hadn’t acted this bizarrely when he’d shoved her unceremoniously on a plane after stealing their passports from their parents' safe.
“We’re done with this conversation,” he says. Then he sits down on the chair sitting across from Jeremy, scowling at him before taking out out his burner phone to text Zane that he’s fulfilled his part of the job.
“Nooo, tall, dark and handsome,” Jeremy complains. “Don’t I deserve to know the plan? I seem to be a pretty important part of it.”
Then he turns glistening brown eyes on Jean. Oh, hell, he’s even pouting. This is ridiculous.
“Your family,” he says, finally. “Once we’ve—” fuck, he’s just confirmed there are other people involved “—ah, once I get in contact with your parents, things will go nice and smooth. Now smile for the camera.”
Jeremy sticks his tongue out for his proof-of-life photo. He kind of wants to strangle Jeremy for it. He kind of wants to bite playfully at it, which —
No. No more.
Who the fuck is Jeremy Knox, he wonders again. Jean had mentally prepared himself for a variety of possibilities: his target offering a struggle, or bursting into anxious tears, or being so frightened of him that he didn’t even speak. Instead, he gets… this. Whatever this is.
“I like you, Yves,” Jeremy says, which is a positively mad thing to say to him. (Red flag number four, right? Whoever said hindsight was 20/20 should have instead said it was a bitch.) Jean decides abruptly that Jeremy must be clinically insane, because nobody is supposed to like the person who’s abducted them. “But I do wish you’d done a little more legwork before setting all of this up. I thought it was public knowledge that my family and I are estranged.”
What.
“What."
“Oh, yeah,” he continues, oblivious to the mental breakdown Jean’s on the verge of having over this revelation. Zane hadn’t said a single fucking word about Jeremy’s family dynamics, which is a pretty important detail to miss given the fact that there might not be a fucking ransom at all. “I’m really sorry to tell you this, but I don’t think they’re going to pay very much for me.”
Jean's going to throw up. Then he's going to kill Zane.