Shattered (The Protectors 11)

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 to Mav 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 we had discovered 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.

Cutting ties with his father hadn’t been some miracle cure for Caleb, a fact he’d acknowledged himself. The urge to cut still hit him when he got stressed, though he hadn’t acted on it. And he still needed Eli’s and my reassurance on a daily basis that we weren’t going anywhere. He’d started seeing a therapist, though he’d asked Eli if it would be okay if he saw someone different from the woman Eli saw. Caleb knew there would be a day where he’d want to tell Eli the truth about the level of Jack’s obsession with him and the subsequent jealousy Caleb had felt as a result, but he wanted his relationship with Eli to be stronger before he tackled that particular issue. Seeing a different therapist gave Caleb a sense of being able to open up about everything without having to worry that the therapist would judge him out of deference to Eli.

Caleb’s relationship with his stepmother had greatly improved and he often took Willa over there for visits. Mariana had given us both a crash course on the basics of caring for an infant and whenever we did have a burning question about something, we called her or any of the half-dozen people in our immediate circle of friends who knew their way around the ins and outs of babies. Caleb and I were still searching for a place of our own, but we weren’t in any real rush. The proximity to Mav and Eli meant we had help with Willa and it gave Eli and Caleb a chance to reconnect.