“You have a brother?”
Cruz nodded. “He’s ten years older than me. He was the team leader. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d discovered that several of the guys on the team had sexually assaulted several village women and girls while on our mission. He’d already started the process of having them court-martialed. They were to be arrested as soon as we got back to the States. Somehow, they found out and came after me. They knew Matias would come looking for me, so they laid in wait for him, then jumped him. But their drunk asses weren’t any match for him. He killed three of them, put three more in the hospital and the rest got away, only to be picked up later by the MPs.”
I must have looked confused because he clarified, “Military Police.”
“What happened to the survivors?”
“Prison for most of them. One of them, the ringleader, managed to get away. Probably had help.”
“And you recovered,” I said.
“Fit as a fiddle,” he said with a smile, though for the first time since I’d met him, it didn’t reach his eyes. He might have recovered physically, but I doubted he’d gotten past the betrayal, because I could see the darkness that lingered in his gaze.
“They betrayed you,” I whispered.
“Yes,” he said simply.
My nerves felt scraped raw by his story. The simple solution would have been to just remain silent, but I couldn’t. It was like what he’d said earlier – what he’d given me was a gift.
One that I wasn’t about to squander.
So, before I knew it, I was giving him another piece of myself when I admitted something only a few people in my life knew. “It happened to my father too, but he didn’t walk away from it.”
Chapter 4
Cruz
I hadn’t toldElliot my story to get him to tell me his, but I liked knowing he trusted me enough to share the truth with me. Yes, I already knew the details, but I had no idea how it had affected him. And while it wasn’t a necessary part of the job I was tasked with, I was done kidding myself.
He wasn’t a job.
I’d known that even before I’d deliberately bumped into him at the benefit. But I hadn’t had the balls to admit it. Of course, admitting it now solved nothing.
“Will you tell me about it?” I asked when Elliot seemed reluctant to continue.
“I never met him,” Elliot said softly. “But I still miss him. That’s crazy, isn’t it?”
Elliot was still holding onto my hand with both of his, so I pulled one up to my lips and brushed a kiss over his knuckles. “Not even a little bit.”
“He was a cop with Seattle PD. Hke and my dad had been together for a few years when they decided to have me.”
“Your dad is the one who started the investment firm you work at?” I asked. “The one you mentioned in your speech tonight?”
Elliot nodded. “Sam. I call him Dad and I call my father Pop. His name was Mac.”
I nodded, urging him to continue.
“Pop and Dad were overjoyed when they found a surrogate. I guess they’d planned to have two kids together. One would be Pop’s biological kid and the other would be Dad’s. Anyway, same-sex marriage wasn’t legal back then, but they’d been together a long time… Pop was older and he told Dad that someday there’d be a time when the world caught up and the second it did, he’d get down on one knee and pop the question. But until that day came, my dad would pester Pop about where not to do it – like on the kiss-cam at a basketball game or something. It was a running joke between them,” Elliot quickly added.
“I bet that’s exactly the kind of place he would have done it,” I said gently.
Elliot laughed. “That’s what Dad would always say.” He dropped his eyes momentarily before saying, “Those were the hardest times, you know? When he’d see or hear something that would remind him of Pop and he’d get caught between wanting to remember and wanting to forget.”
It was my turn to toy with Elliot’s hand in an attempt to soothe him.
“After Pop… after he died, my dad found it.”
“Found what?”
