Page 20 of Crown of Ash

"You don't cancel them out." Dray finally drank. "You stop pretending they were ever supposed to be separate. The badge protects some people. This protects the ones the badge can't reach. I got tired of only having one of those tools in my hand when the job needed both."

Andre didn't say anything for a long moment. He was thinking about the life he had walked away from because he couldn't see a world where he could be a good, ethical man who served the law… and also one who took it into his own hands. Those two things had always been antithetical. Except now, he saw men he respected… protecting what the law either could or would not. People they loved being targeted by monsters.

For the first time since he'd pinned his detective's badge on at twenty-six, Andre let himself imagine what his hands would feel like without it. Not empty. Just his own.

"I don't know what I'm going to do yet," Andre said.

"Nobody ever does, right up until they do it." Dray raised his glass an inch, not quite a toast. "Welcome to the part where you stop pretending too. I'm not going to pretend I'm wholly a good man, Jefferson. I'm not. But I try. I love this city and I got tired of the systems of power ignoring those who weren't meant to be a part of it. This is a working class, blue collar town. It deserves better. So, we become better… by becoming something else. Something that works from the darkness. But, darkness works, when law fails. I'm interested in results that keep families together and get justice for those who don't have a six figure income."

Cass came back alone, jacket still buttoned, not a hair out of place, and that alone told Andre more than the forty minutes had. A man who'd just talked someone back from hunting a killer himself didn't usually look like he'd spent the time reading a contract.

"He's not going anywhere tonight," Cass said. "Tomorrow I can't promise you."

"What changed his mind?" Andre asked, before he could decide whether it was his place to ask.

"Nothing changed his mind. He still wants to know who's fucking with him… us." Cass reached past them for the bottle on the bar and poured himself a glass without asking. "He agreed to let me be the one who gets it first."

Dray huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "That's not the same as calm."

"I never said calm." Cass drank half the glass in one go. "I said tonight. Our little kitten has claws, and whomever decided to get his back up… is going to learn that the hard way. This is a safe place for Jaz and that fuck took that from him. We're going to make sure he gets it back."

Andre stood, legs steadier now than they'd been an hour ago, with nothing left worth saying to either of them.

"I should go," he said instead.

Cass studied him the same unhurried way he had in the hallway, winter-water eyes doing their slow accounting. "You're going back to a badge that can't touch any of this."

"For now."

"For now," Cass repeated, like he was filing it away for later. He didn't smile, but the corner of his mouth eased half a degree. "Dray was right to bring you here."

Dray walked him back out through the underground garage, neither of them saying much. Andre didn't move once he was alone in his car with the engine running. He just sat with it: a buried file, a man who carried two lives on one chain, a name said out loud that never should have left this building, and underneath all of it, the first real thought he'd let himself have in ten years about putting the badge down.

He didn't start the car for a long time.

Chapter 13

The call came in at 6:47, and Marcus knew before he answered that whatever it was, it wasn't going to be small. He was in the middle of dinner, a plate of cold chicken and rice Jack had left here at the safehouse for him he'd been picking at for twenty minutes, and the phone buzzed against the table where it sat face-down next to the salt shaker. Nobody on this line called during dinner unless the alternative was worse. He turned the phone over without looking at the screen, already reaching for his jacket.

"Marcus." Jack's voice, and wrong in a way that took Marcus a full second to place. Too fast, the words clipped off at the edges. Too flat, like he'd sanded all the tone out of it before it left his mouth. Gunfire in the background, close, three shots in quick succession, a pause, then two more. Glass breaking somewhere off to the left of the phone, then the flat smack of a round hitting sheet metal. The shots didn't sound like they were aimed at the phone, but they might as well have been; Marcus could hear Jack breathing through his nose between them, short and hard. "We're pinned. Delray, the lot behind the laundromat. Somebody's got eyes on the exit."

"Elijah?"

"He's hit. Arm, I think, maybe shoulder, he's still talking so it's not the worst of it." A fourth shot. Jack's breathing changed, sharper. "I can't get an angle back without leaving the car and I'm not doing that with Eli here."

Marcus was already moving, the phone a cold weight against his ear, his other hand finding the keys on the hook by the door before his mind had even registered the decision. The worn ridges of the car key bit into his palm. "Stay low," he said, his voice dropping into the flat, operational calm that came over him in these moments. "Talk to me. How many shooters?"

"Two, maybe three." Jack's words were tight, breathless. "One's mobile, working around to our left. I can hear him moving past the dumpsters."

"I'm calling it in. Ambulance and backup both." Marcus was already thumbing through his contacts, his eyes on the door, calculating routes. "Stay on with me."

He pulled up the crew's location grid one-handed, thumb finding the contact list, and for one full second it hovered over Andre's name before he caught it and corrected, hitting Trip's instead. Not now. Not for this. Trip could get bodies there in four minutes; Andre couldn't, and calling him wouldn't have done anything except prove to himself that his first instinct in a crisis still wasn't the crew, six years of discipline notwithstanding.

Trip picked up on the first ring.

"Delray, behind the laundromat on Second. Jack and Elijah are pinned, Elijah's hit. I need bodies there now."

"Moving." The single word came through the line, sharp and clean as a rifle bolt. No questions, no hesitation. That kind of immediate certainty was exactly why Marcus had put Trip on the list in the first place. He’d be forever grateful for the former DEA agent’s addition to their little band of vigilantes.