A shock.
Ashock.
That word didn't even come close.
Shock was finding out your target had backup. Shock was a mission going sideways.
This?
This was a detonation.
Because I'd spent fifteen years believing he was gone. Dead, maybe. Or worse—alive somewhere, living a life that didn't include us. Living a life where seven sons and a wife who loved him weren't enough to make him stay.
I'd buried him.
Not literally. But in every way that mattered.
I'd grieved. I'd raged. I'd gone numb.
And then I'd moved on.
Or I thought I had.
But standing here now, looking at him—alive, breathing,here—I realized I hadn't moved on at all.
I'd just locked it down. Shoved it into a box and buried it so deep I'd convinced myself it didn't exist anymore.
And now the box was open.
And I couldn't breathe.
My chest tightened. My vision blurred at the edges. My hands started to shake.
I'd never had a panic attack before.
Well.
Maybe I had.
When I was a kid. When he first disappeared. When I'd cried myself to sleep every night for a year, clinging to my mother like she was the only thing keeping me tethered to the world.
When I'd been terrified to go to school because if I left, she might disappear, too.
That small child was still inside me.
Buried. Hidden. Locked away behind years of training and violence and cold, hard control.
But he was there.
And he wasscreaming.
"Micah," my father said gently, taking another step forward. "I know you have questions?—"
"Don't," I choked out.
"Let me explain?—"
"No."
