Ex cleared his throat.
“Damn, that’s fuckin’ deep as hell, babe,” Scar said. “Do me.”
Gage pressed his forehead to his husband’s and whispered, “You’re the easiest to find. My heart leans toward you…and I simply follow.”
“That’s some serious, insightful-ass shit right there,” Corvo said.
Gage turned toward the lead handler and sniffed.
“Corvo, for the love of everything holy, can you puhleeze find a cologne that wasn’t bottled a century ago. Stop using freakin’ Old Spice!” he yelled.
The guys cracked up, and it was just the kind of humor they needed to bring the mood back up to crazy.
“Time to eat,” Mirage called out twenty minutes later.
Gage let Scar lead him to the large dinner table.
After they all sat, he offered to say grace to bless the table, and no one objected.
As the many dishes began to circulate, he felt something else in his spirit.
Home.
“Guys!” He started right in, already laughing. “You won’t believe what I walked in on when I went to my doctor’s office.”
White Ravens
Scar
The Browns’ quarters looked like the aftermath of a Thanksgiving holiday party.
They’d consumed the kind of meal that required several eight-hour gym sessions to recover from.
Most of them had collapsed onto the couches and chairs, watching an action movie blasting on the oversized screen and critiquing every explosion, gun fight, and sparring match.
“No recoil,” Scar snorted. “And how the fuck did he just fire thirty rounds without reloading?”
Zorion tossed some popcorn at the screen. “That’s not how flashbangs work, dumbasses.”
Scar had one arm hooked lazily around Gage, who was folded into his side, warm and heavy. He’d eaten as if he’d been starving for a year. Now he was half asleep with his cheek resting against his chest.
Scar brushed his knuckles languidly along his arm while he continued yelling at the screen.
Mirage and Ex were in the kitchen, clanking dishes, the only task Grace allowed anyone to do, while he sat at the island in the center, with a beer in his hand, directing where everything went.
Ex came back into the living room, drying his hands on a towel. “You ready to go?”
Meridian nodded and stood, before he got to the door his phone buzzed loudly in his pocket.
He pulled it free and read the screen before a serious expression blanketed his face.
He didn’t speak, didn’t blink, as a slow, lethal stillness replaced the casualness that’d been there a second ago.
Meridian looked at Ex in a way that quieted the room.
Scar assumed it was Jo, alerting him of some world catastrophe that required raised hoods and their field teams.
Ex sighed a long exhale. “It’s him, isn’t it?”
