The kitchen table in Valentine.
My mother in her sweater.
The biscuit with the dollop of butter on it that she'd cut in half and given me the bigger piece of.
Real childhoods.
I drew one slow breath.
"Mama."
"She knew, son. She volunteered. They all did."
She knew and never told me, I thought.
The boy on the bunk in Valentine sat up just a little straighter, listening. I told him to settle. I'd come back to him later. There was a piece of operational math on the table that needed to be done first, and the boy could wait for the man to do his work.
"Victoria," I said.
"Was on the inside," my father said. "Was kicked out and then found her way back in."
"And Craine?"
"Was hers. Closely. He was one of the inside men she ran in the federal government. We didn't know it. She fed himinformation for years. It built his career. He was perfectly placed to serve. Only now, she’s dead. The handler is gone."
"He outlived her."
"He outlived her."
"And now he wants?—"
"He wants what she wanted." My father said it level. "He wants Dominion Hall. He wants Trueborn. He wants the whole architecture, every brick of it, the men and the program and the protocol that produced them. He's been lying low since she died. And I think we just watched him decide that the moment to make it was now."
"Why now?"
"I don’t think that matters. It just is."
I worked it.
The whole shape of it came up clean. The yacht as a message. The militia framing as a federal pretext. The dark web chatter, ready to deploy in minutes. The Tahoes and the windbreaker and the agent at the hotel and the deputy director on the chaiseI'm sorry to be the one to put that in your head, but you needed to know.The whole thing wasn't an investigation. The investigation was the cover. The thing underneath it was anacquisition.Craine wanted what Victoria had wanted. He wanted to walk into Dominion Hall under the cover of federal authority and walk out with the keys.
He was going to put us through hell to do it.
I let out a long breath.
"All right," I said.
I looked at the men around me. My father. Lucas. Grant. Wyatt. Four men who were, in some configuration of word and blood and chemistry, my family.
"What do we do?"
There was a pause.
Grant cleared his throat. He looked at our father. He looked at Lucas. He looked at me.
"We need to get the rest of our brothers here," he said. "Before he gets to them first."
The corridor went quiet around the sentence.
