“By the way, Eli is getting married in two weeks.Beforethe trial. Because he’s done trying to find closure too. He’s done putting his life on hold for you. It won’t be a small wedding, either. He and Mav are going to let the world know how much they love each other… they aren’t going to slink off and hide because a handful of people believed your lies. They’re even looking into having a baby. They’re going to live their lives. We all are.” I stood up and leaned down, hands pressed to the table. There was barely a foot separating us and I repeated the words that I’d believed for so very long.
“No one will ever love you like I do, my sweet boy.” I held his gaze and said, “You’re right, they won’t. They’re going to do it so much better.”
With that, I turned to go.
“Caleb!”
I ignored his hoarse shout.
And the next one.
And every one that followed me out the door. I ignored the pounding on the door behind me and the shouts and muffled orders of the guard that was still in the room. The guard next to me didn’t say anything until we reached the waiting area.
“Good luck to you, Mr. Cortano,” he said.
“It’s Galvez-Christenson,” I said, figuring Eli and Jace wouldn’t mind me borrowing their names going forward. Caleb Cortano didn’t exist anymore.
As I made my way toward the parking lot where I knew Mav would be waiting for me, I smiled at how everything around meseemed different. Brighter, louder. It would definitely take some getting used to.
As I reached the final locked gate that guards had to let me through to get to the parking lot, I felt my mouth pull into a smile at the sight of the man waiting for me on the other side. He looked like he could spit nails, but the second I stepped through the gate and walked into his arms, he closed them around me and took in a deep breath.
“You okay?” Jace asked.
“You have no idea,” I said as I tipped my head back to look at him.
“Found another piece, huh?”
I shook my head. “More like got rid of one.”
He kissed me again. I knew there was a lot he probably wanted to say to me, and I sure as hell had a lot I wanted to tell him, but when I said, “Jace, let’s go get our daughter and go home,” he simply nodded and took my hand in his and led me to the car.
Chapter 25
Jace
It wasthe most overwhelming wedding I’d ever been to.
Not that I’d been to many, but still, I could categorically say I was completely lost.
Mostly because I had no hope in hell of remembering any of the names of the people I was introduced to, let alone their relationship to one another. By the time Mav had explained that Eli’s younger brother, Tristan, was in a relationship with Brennan and Memphis, and that even though Brennan and Tristan had been raised as if they were cousins, they really weren’t, I’d stopped trying to make any sense of it. Mav must have seen me zoning out, because he’d handed me off to the care of Matty Hawkins, the son of one of my teammates. Matty had taken over the introductions, which had actually been easier to follow than Mav’s, but he’d gotten sidetracked by a conversation about Captain America, Thor, and Hawkeye. There’d also been mention of Spiderman, but when his two little friends had arrived, one wearing Spiderman pajamas and the other carrying a Spiderman doll, I’d given up again. Matty had mentioned something about flashcards and the next family dinner, then he’d ditched me for his buddies.
I’d lost Caleb to his best man duties. He and Brennan, who Ididremember from the shooting at Eli’s apartment two years earlier, were both standing for Eli, while Ronan and a man named Mace were standing as best men for Mav. I’d managed to hang on to Willa until Caleb’s stepmother had arrived, at which point she’d promptly stolen away the little girl she’d started referring to as her granddaughter on the very first day she’d met the infant, and I’d been left on my own again. I’d gotten glimpses of Willa being passed around now and then, but I’d resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t be getting her back any time soon and I’d found myself a seat.
The wedding was being held in a church on the outskirts of downtown Seattle in a surprisingly run-down neighborhood. I’d heard that the church was actually run by a pastor who was friends with one of my other teammates, Phoenix, and his husband Levi. The chapel was small, but everyone squeezed in, and those who couldn’t find seats stood along the sides. There were flowers everywhere, courtesy of Aleks, who apparently worked for a florist. The young man was in attendance, but I’d gotten the impression that the large crowd made him nervous, so he’d spent most of his time in the back rooms, which had become a staging area of sorts. I’d seen Caleb disappear into the room several times, and it warmed my heart to know he was checking on his new friend.
The weeks before the wedding had brought about some profound changes in all our lives, the biggest being what had happened to Jack Cortano just two days after Caleb had visited him.
There was no explanation for it, but somehow there’d been a mix-up at the prison and Jack had been put into the general population. He’d been dead within a matter of hours. His body had been discovered in the showers. He’d been stabbed repeatedly with several homemade shivs. The prison had launched an investigation, but they’d yet to determine which inmates had killed him or how the mix-up had happened in the first place.
I’d been certain Ronan had somehow had a hand in the whole thing, but he’d assured me that he hadn’t. We hadn’t gotten any answers until a few days later when a guard from the prison had shown up at Mav and Eli’s house on the mainland. Since Jack’s death had meant the danger to Caleb was gone, we’d returned toMav and Eli’s home so it would be easier to finalize the plans for the wedding. The guard, a man named Phelps, had brought Caleb his phone back, which he’d left behind when he’d visited his father.
Caleb hadn’t been home, but I’d used the opportunity to ask Phelps about the murder. He’d merely shrugged his shoulders and made an offhand remark about mistakes happening and inmates sometimes ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d then asked me to wish Mr. Galvez-Christenson well and he’d walked away. I’d mentioned the visit to Caleb, but I hadn’t voiced my suspicions that the guard had somehow been involved in the “mistake” that had led to Jack’s death. Caleb hadn’t reacted much to the news of his father’s murder. I’d been worried that he hadn’t really processed it at first, but as the days had passed and he’d continued to act as relaxed as he’d been since the day he’d gone to the prison, I’d started to accept that Caleb had accomplished what he’d set out to do.
He’d said goodbye to that piece of his life and he didn’t want or need it back.
Despite an exhaustive search, we were no closer to determining Rush’s true identity. What wehaddiscovered was a single call between the Jennings’ house and the office of Jack’s lawyer. It wasn’t definitive proof that Jack had hired the men to kill Caleb, but the fact that Jennings had called Jack the morning Caleb had held him at gunpoint was pretty telling. And since the coroner investigating Jennings’ suicide had ruled the man’s death as such, we were at a dead end. Declan had planted the seed with the Bethesda police to investigate the death as a possible homicide, but they hadn’t found any definitive proof of foul play.
To be safe, Caleb was still being accompanied by myself or one of Ronan’s men at all times, but I’d finally agreed this morning to end the twenty-four-hour protection because Caleb needed a sense of normalcy that he hadn’t ever really had.
