Before long, they arrived at the apartment that served as Amabile-provided safe house and Ro’s current residence. After entering, Upsilon simply sat on the sofa in the living room and watched only Ro, who was bustling around the kitchen.

“Don’t just sit there like a statue. At least watch TV or something.”

“No. I’m fine.”

“I’m saying that because it feels like your gaze might bore a hole through my back. You can go into the room too, or at least look around the place. Well, not that there’s much to see.”

While preparing the ingredients he had bought at the supermarket for the steak, Ro finally suggested a house tour in response to that burdensome gaze. At his words, Upsilon slowly stood up and began scanning the living room. He had expected him not to refuse, but when he moved as if he had been waiting for the suggestion, Ro snorted softly and tore open the packaging around the steak.

As Upsilon looked around the living room, he soon peeked into the rooms whose doors were open from outside. The first one he saw was an empty room with nothing in it, and the second looked like a bedroom, with a large bed placed in the center. A bed much too large to be used by Ro alone.

The bed was neatly made with one blanket spread over it, but the strange thing was that there were two more blankets on top of it. So there were three blankets out in the open.

“……”

Upsilon’s gaze moved to Ro’s back as he busily cooked. In other words, he had assumed Ro lived alone because Ro had suddenly invited him here, but could there have been a roommate after all? There was no rule that an agent living in an Amabile safe house had to live there alone.

If Robert approved, he knew a spouse, child, or lover could live there together. He had even heard that some agents hid the fact that they were Amabile agents from their families and stayed in safe houses with them, disguised as ordinary businessmen or office workers.

There was no guarantee that one of them was not Ro, but… if he lived with someone, there was no sign of anyone else’s life inside the house, nothing that would make one think several people lived there, Ro included. Perhaps, like himself, someone had recently visited this place. Maybe they had stayed one night.

Then Ro suddenly turned his head sharply, and their eyes met. He missed the timing to look away, so he simply stared back, and Ro pointed to the uncooked steak meat and asked,

“How would you like your steak done?”

“Anything is fine.”

“That’s not a proper answer. Want to try eating charred soot?”

“…Medium.”

Only then did Ro nod and turn back to his cooking. Upsilon looked again toward the bedroom. The door was open, and since the owner had allowed him to go in, there would be no problem with stepping inside for a moment.

He slowly walked into Ro’s bedroom. Since Ro was a beta without pheromones, there was no scent at all in the room, even though it was a bedroom. It was completely odorless. Just as Ro had said, there was almost nothing inside the bedroom that he had not already seen from outside the room. The only other thing was a small table beside the bed, and on it sat a plastic container that was presumably full of medicine.

“Sleeping pills?”

Lifting the container and checking its contents, Upsilon slightly frowned. Seeing that the bottle was half empty, it looked like medicine someone was actually taking. And the owner of the medicine was probably Ro. It looked like an ordinary sleeping pill that one could be prescribed for daily use, but did Ro really have insomnia severe enough to need medication?

Amabile’s missions were day and night alike, so it was common for agents’ sleep patterns to get messed up, but did it get bad enough to require sleeping pills rather than just sleep aids?

He remembered that a few days ago, after finishing a mission connected to Roello, when he asked Ro what he would do during his three-day vacation, Ro had said he would sleep under a blanket. At the time, Upsilon had thought he was just answering carelessly because he didn’t want to answer or was too lazy to bother, but maybe it had been true. Upsilon put the medicine bottle back where it had been and left the bedroom.

“Not much to see, right?”

Noticing Upsilon coming out of the bedroom, Ro asked with a small laugh. Upsilon glanced at the room he had just come from, then looked back at Ro.

“Do you have insomnia?”

“Insomnia? Ah, you saw the bottle. Yeah. It comes with the job.”

“To the point that regular vacation time after each mission doesn’t solve it? If it’s that bad, you should try applying for a long vacation.”

At Upsilon’s words, Ro gave one shrug and answered while cutting something.

“It’s not the kind of problem that can be solved by something like that. For now, I just think of it as an occupational disease.”

“Seems longstanding.”

“Pretty much… yeah. So my dream for the future is to be a bear hibernating through winter.”

It sounded like the dream of someone who could not sleep properly.

“It’s hard to sleep without medicine, but it’s not serious enough to worry about. It does make night missions easier, though.”

Who would describe that as easier? It would mean the fatigue just kept piling up. Upsilon was about to ask whether Ro was receiving ongoing treatment, but stopped himself. If he was prescribed sleeping pills, he would be going to the hospital anyway, and he was probably already trying all sorts of things to fix it himself, and still was.

“Then are all those blankets yours too?”

“That’s right. It seems like I can sleep a little better only when I’m buried under that much softness. I don’t know whether it actually works or it’s just the placebo effect, though.”

Using three blankets alone was unusual, but it seemed like his way of trying to sleep anyway. Having learned an unexpected piece of information about Ro in an unexpected place, Upsilon watched Ro’s back busily moving in the kitchen before returning to the sofa in the living room.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can help with.”

“No, nothing. It’ll be boring, but wait a little longer.”

Whether his bragging that he would guarantee the taste of the steak he cooked was not just talk, as time passed the house began to fill with the appetizing smell of steak grilling. Just as Amabile knew Ro’s specialty was honey traps, and his actual personality had a sly side, cooking suited him surprisingly well too. He probably had made meals like this to lure targets over to his side before?

“Hm, good. It’s done. Let’s eat.”

Ro had said he had invited Upsilon into his private space because he had something to discuss about the mission ahead. Upsilon had thought the steak was just an excuse for a meal, but seeing Ro who cared even about plating, like a Michelin chef making a work of art rather than food, he could not shake the feeling that this was unexpected.

The large steak on the clean white plate was cooked just right and looked delicious, with roasted asparagus and smooth mashed potatoes on the side. It did not seem like the work of someone doing it only once or twice.

“I thought you were just trying to get a meal out of the way.”

“That was the idea, yes. A meal and nothing more. Might as well make it meat. Since it didn’t take several hours to prepare, this counts as a perfectly fine meal.”

What he called “nothing more” looked to anyone like it was filled with care. Upsilon sat in the chair at the table and looked at Ro as if he were strange, prompting him to sit opposite and ask, as if he could read his thoughts,

“Why, were you moved by my blazing artistic passion?”

“It does seem a little overdone. That’s the kind of plating you’d expect when inviting a lover.”

“Really? Then today, you’re my lover.”

Upsilon, who had just picked up his knife and fork to cut the steak, paused and looked up. There was a strange silence between the two of them as their eyes met. Upsilon, who had already felt something odd about Ro’s attitude since inviting him over to grill steak, looked back at him without flinching. With a faint smile on his lips, the gray eyes Upsilon had fallen into in an instant five years ago were fixed on him.

“I don’t know what kind of joke you’re trying to make now.”

Upsilon lowered his gaze first and began cutting the steak, but Ro’s eyes remained on him. Just a few days ago, Ro had disliked and been bothered by the idea of even having lunch with him. If Robert had not chosen the two of them together as the agents to accompany the gallery meeting with the Duke of Ashford, they would not have been sitting face-to-face eating hamburgers the day before either.

Why was the man who had casually left Upsilon on the street without a word, saying he had to go meet Roello’s secretary, Shelly, suddenly turning a whole new leaf and acting friendly now? Especially by inviting him into his own home.

With mixed feelings, Upsilon cut the steak and put a piece in his mouth. He admitted it. Ro had every right to be confident. The medium-rare steak, cooked exactly to the doneness Upsilon had asked for, was tender and full of juice.