But I’ll be ready. I’m ready to go into combat with my brother.
As I looked at Lane, I knew what he was saying was not to look macho or to look detached. And likewise, what I had said was not to sound tough or to make it seem like I belonged.
We both had come a long way since that ugly day when my father died. But we had ultimately circled back to our true selves. It sucked that it had taken so long and had involved so much difficulty along the way, but... well, better late than never.
Lane laid out a few more logistical details, including how we would attack, who would attack where, and what would happen once we got inside. We were expected to treat it like a full-scale invasion; this was not going to be a brute-force attack so much as it was a sweep of a building. Things would get ugly, bloody, and fatal.
But we were ready. I’d almost died, and we all knew anyone could be next. Death did not scare me enough to deter me.
“Any questions?” Lane said at the end.
No one said a word. Not Owen, not my other officers, not any of the Black Reapers members. No one.
We knew what needed to be done.
“Be ready to roll out within fifteen,” Lane said.
The room cleared. I grabbed Lane’s arm and held him back. A couple of other people hung back momentarily, but I didn’t even need to look at them to get across that I needed some privacy.
“What’s up?” Lane said.
There was no debate in my mind. I knew it was time to just “be” with the truth.
“Lane, before we go into this, before we face the possibility of death, I feel like I need to tell you something,” I said. “When I was out, when you came and rescued me, I had... call it a dream for lack of a better word, but it was something so much more than that.”
I proceeded to recount everything in vivid detail, sparing nothing, including how time froze, how it was right at the moment when our father’s house was being attacked, how our father and mother had spoken to me in my head before speaking to my ears, and how the whole place more or less collapsed into a beam of light.
Now that I’d had some distance from it, it did sound like the kind of vision someone would probably need mushrooms or some psychedelic to experience, but, hey, I’d experienced it. I didn’t need to rationalize or apologize for it.
“One of the things I took away from it was that I have known the truth all along, I’ve just been afraid of it,” I said. “As fucked up as it sounds, maybe I am afraid of being loved. Maybe I am afraid of attachment. I don’t know. But while I feel like I know, I still want to ask you something, something that I don’t think we’ve ever discussed.”
“Of course,” Lane said.
“Do you forgive me for Mom dying when she gave birth to me?”
I instantly knew the answer by his expression.
“Yes,” he said. “I was hurt, Cole. I was hurt badly by it. I didn’t know where to turn my blame, so I turned it on you. It was just the stupid action of a stupid kid—”
“Not stupid.”
Lane didn’t look like he knew how to respond to that, so he kept going.
“And I should have forgiven you a long time ago, but it wasn’t really until the past couple of months that I did. I don’t... I don’t know why.”
“Because it was the story you had in your head.”
Lane knew. He knew even if he didn’t say out loud that that was true.
“I’m working on the story in my head. It’s a real fucking bitch. And I’m not here to have a therapy session with you, because we need to fucking kill Lucius right now. But I just wanted to know.”
“I know,” Lane said. “And not that it was your fault, not that it was your fault at all, but if there is any part of me that holds you responsible for Shannon dying—which, again, I will swear up and down here is not your fault, it’s just something I feel I need to say—then I forgive you for that as well.”
That touched me. I bit my lip not because I was on the verge of crying, but because I could begin to feel the early stages of my eyes starting to water.
“And I forgive you for being a massive douche right after.”
Lane laughed and punched me, and just like that, whatever void was left between us had vanished. We were brothers-in-arms not just in the metaphorical sense, but now in the familial sense too.
