“Yes.”
“While I lived with you?”
“Before.” Jonah didn’t like talking about the past. He didn’t like talking about anything that had come before Cas, really, but he was making an active effort not to be a dick and do something that’d make Cas run before he was fully healed and they had a handle on the bounty situation. If there was more motivating him than that, Jonah wasn’t ready to look it square in the face yet.
“How’d you get away?”
Jonah exhaled a sigh. “I didn’t. I got dumped. They thought I was dead. Or dying. Didn’t matter much to them by then.”
“How the fuck haven’t you ever told me this story before?” Cas narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
“Because it’s not exactly pleasant to remember.” Jonah had been judicious in what he’d shared of his past with Cas back when he was living with him. Now, he couldn’t pinpoint why exactly he’d done that. He’d trusted Cas even then, and he’d never thought of him as delicate. Maybe he’d just had grander ideas about keeping the boy from becoming too jaded. Turned out the joke was on him in that regard.
“Oh.” Cas peered closely at him. “Is that where you got those scars all over your back and sides?”
“Some of them. The rest was internal shit.”
“Internal shit like…”
Jonah fixed Cas with another look. “Internal shit like I only have one kidney and part of my spleen.”
“Jesus, really?” Cas went wide-eyed and then barrelled on. “But maybe it’s a good thing that you knew what you knew—which I already know you won’t tell me, so I’m not even going to ask—because then you had something to tell them.”
“Cas, I didn’twantto live. They would’ve killed me quicker if I hadn’t broken.” It’d been a rookie mistake thinking he could outsmart his captors, feed out information in small bursts while he tried to get the lay of the land, see where he could gain the upper hand.
But there hadn’t been an upper hand to gain. They had all the power. It’d taken him three agonizing days to figure that out and stop talking, and by then, it was too late. The wait for death had been endless, the pain enormous. And on the eleventh or fourteenth of seventeenth—whatever the fuck day it had been—when the interrogator’s steel-toed boot connected so hard with his gut that he understood what was finally happening, all Jonah felt was relief that it’d be over soon.
Cas was still staring at him, a studious, forlorn expression on his face.That.That expression right there was why Jonah had been reluctant to tell him.
Cas blinked it away with a shake of his head to focus on his laptop again. He’d always had boyish features: the wild, ink-dark hair, and the pouty, reddish lips that were all bunched now, like the equivalent of a brow furrow. But there was something about him now that went beyond the physical markers of aging. It was in his aura—if Jonah had believed in auras. Experience, world-weariness. Something along those lines.
Jonah had been stupid to think he could save Cas from it. He understood that now. “What’s the real reason you left?”
Cas jerked his head toward Jonah, eyes flaring. “I left you a note.”
“I read it.” He still had it locked in a metal box with birth certificates and IDs, the only thing among them that was real. And the one thing he wished wasn’t. He’d read it over and over at first, like it was some encrypted code that would rearrange itself into a different prophecy if only he stared at it long enough. “You told me not to look for you. Not to contact you.”
Cas laughed derisively. “And what, it wasn’t enough that I wanted to strike out on my own, figure out my own shit? Sorry, did you want to be in control of the timing on that, too? Expect me to—”
“It didn’t read as someone golly-gee gung-ho about striking out on their own into the great unknown,” Jonah snapped, surprising himself with the force of the words. “It read like you were angry at me. I want to know why you were angry. I want to know what I did.” That had been the part that had kept him up at night, that had him pulling out the note and rereading it over and over until there were smudges on it from his thumbs. “What you said the other night, that it was never for me to choose? You were right.”
Cas stared at Jonah, a growing incredulity in his expression that shifted to expectancy when Jonah didn’t say anything else. “That’s it?”
“Yeah.” Jonah shrugged. “And if that’s what made you leave, I guess I can understand that.”
Cas started to say something else, then pressed his lips together, nostrils flaring. “It’s okay. I was…maybe I was being dumb about some other things, too, I don’t know. But it’s done now.”
“Is it?” Jonah glanced down at his watch, and Cas followed his gaze.
“Yeah. It’s done.” He ticked his chin toward the gun. “Almost time, huh?”
Jonah nodded, though he didn’t think the conversation was over, not by a longshot. Cas was holding something back. His stomach still turned inside out when he thought about the one time he’d gone to the side of the couch to find all his stuff gone. The terse note that had been on the kitchen counter. The fruitless attempts he’d made, at first, to try to track him down and Red’s quiet but firm admonishments that he should stop—not because Cas couldn’t be found, but because he didn’t want to be. It was the only time they’d ever gotten into a genuine argument.
Jonah swiveled around and got into position, mind racing. He took a few deep breaths to quiet it as he stared down the scope, but his heart kept hammering regardless.
One minute before the meeting time, a black SUV began crawling down the alleyway. Not his target because of the direction. Jonah tried not to pay attention to the plates, which were probably changed frequently anyway.
The SUV stopped a few yards from the restaurant’s back door and idled. A few moments later, a town car came down the alleyway from the opposite direction. That would be his target. He rested his finger lightly on the gun’s trigger.
