The Innocent (A 'Finder' Fanfiction)

Shadow of Pluto - 10 - Alex

"What the fuck!", Alex exclaimed and almost hit the brakes of the Aston Martin sharply. There was an unfamiliar car parked between all those convertibles and vans and limousines which Maxim never used and therefore allowed him to drive. But this one did not belong here. The license plate and sticker on the rear window marked it as belonging to some car rental.

'Visitors?' What an utterly disturbing idea! Maxim never had any visitors. Ok ... every odd year he would invite come incredibly expensive escort lady, usually from France or Japan or Romania. But they would be picked up with his biggest limousine by his best Chauffeur. And he always made sure he was alone at home at those times, save for a small handful of staff that was excellent at making it seem like they were not really there at all.

At the entrance to the parking lot, which was hid beyond the gardens by a row of plane trees, Alex stopped the car and stared at the Mercedes parked there in the midst of all those other vehicles he knew well. It was certainly an expensive rent, therein he was sure. But who? And why?

The solution hit him rather quickly: Ryuichi had called on someone. Backup, probably. Maybe that guy Kirishima, with whom he had been on the phone. But was that likely, he began to think? From all he knew, Asami's firsthand man was very busy currently to keep his master's businesses from falling apart, while Alex was – by way of middlemen and middlemiddlemen and middlemiddlemiddlemen – secretly pulling all the straws to make sure it would slip from his hands, no matter how hard he tried.

But who then?

He felt annoyance creeping in. For half a day he had been gone, and what did he get from it? All his support, all his encouragement and help: had it been for nothing? It was not that he cared about the man appreciating his efforts, no! The problem was, if Ryuichi did not rely on him and him alone, if he did not trust and turn to him with whatever thought stuck his head, then he was by far less easy to control.

Until now, it had worked out so well! Alex had stepped in there, met the man, gained his trust, had been welcomed to accompany him, had been there in the man's very first seconds of figuring out that there might be a problem with Akihito – and if that was not a bonding experience, then Alex did not know what was! He had been the one to suggest coming here, had been nothing but helping and supportive and would have been until he saw the other crumble and fall apart finally, while he lost both the boy he loved and the life and freedom he had built for himself.

Yet now?

Alex felt like he should earnestly hit something or someone. But he did never allow futile emotions like that to get into his way. With a gentle foot, he let the convertible speed on and parked a minute later, next to the unknown rental car.

Taking the provisions with him, for which he had gone for half a day, he walked over to the house, amiably greeting the security guard who hid in the garden nearly as well as if he had never been born. Then he entered the mansion. It was silent inside and already quite dark as dusk had set in outside.

For some moments, he listened whether he would hear something and was rewarded with a faint "leave me alone!" from far away up the large, staircase.

'Ah!', he thought. 'So little Arata is still bad-tempered.'

It reminded him of something: Placing his cargo onto a wardrobe, he fished out his mobile phone. There had been several messages today always alarming him with the same beep he only used for one contact ... and whenever he got time to look up what had been sent to him, he only found the notice 'message deleted'.

Maybe it had been full moon, he found himself wondering, and therefore everyone was suddenly behaving oddly. 'Roro', was the name of the contact. Yet, his brother hardly ever wrote to him ... today however he had sent him six messages all in all, and then he had deleted them, leaving his twin with nothing but the information that whatever had once been sent to him was now lost in the space between Warsaw and Dubrovnik.