“Sat in the bottom of that desk drawer for ’bout a decade,” he agreed.
“Suse told us the alarm code to his apartment. Goin’ with some brothers tonight to see what we find.”
“What exactly are you hopin’ to find? And if you find it, what the hell are you gonna do with it? You’re not a cop, King. You find somethin’, it won’t be admissible in court.”
“No, but Lion’s been talking to Internal Affairs in Vancouver. They got an eye on Harold now, and if they get an anonymous tip-off, they might act on it.”
He looked skeptical, but I couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t much to hang our fuckin’ hopes on.
“Careful, boy. Don’t need you in ’ere with me, not when you got a weddin’ comin’ soon.”
“Cress and I were thinkin’ we’d postpone that,” I admitted.
“Like fuck you will.” He scowled, leanin’ forward so his nose was near pressed to the glass. “You listen to me, King. Why do ya think I married Lou while she was almost dyin’ in a hospital bed? ’Cause life proves to us again and again it’s too fuckin’ short and we can’t account for shit that might happen to us. You love that woman the way you do, the way I love mine, like you’ll die you don’t have her in your sight, under your touch, then you fuckin’ marry her like you planned. Don’t punish yourself just ’cause I’m being punished in ’ere. The time for your sacrifice will come one day, though, fuck me, I hope it doesn’t, and when it does, you want people to stop livin’ just ’cause you got dealt a shit hand? Solidarity like that means shit. Don’t need you to suffer ’cause I suffer. Need you to live and love ’cause I don’t got the means. You hear me?”
Fuck, if I didn’t. “Yeah, I get you. Thing you don’t get is, won’t be much of a celebration without you there with us.”
Walker fussed in his sleep and smoothed a hand over his tiny, downy head. Loved the weight of him in my arms, loved his namesake, and loved knowin’ if anyone could live up to hype of my lost Mute, it’d be my baby brother.
“Look at you with him,” Zeus croaked, then cleared his throat of emotion. “Ready to be a husband and a dad, King. Don’t take that away from yourself and don’t take it away from me. You think there’s anythin’ more rewardin’ for a father than seein’ his kids happy? I gotta be in here? That’s what’ll keep me goin’, knowin’ your livin’ free and livin’ good.”
“Wish I’d done like I wanted and dragged us all down the mountain to get married the day I proposed in city hall,” I grumbled.
He laughed again, just a hard exclamation of sound. “Fuck, take after your father, boy. But do it now and do it well, wanna hear all about it if I’m still in ’ere when it happens.”
“White suggested against gettin’ the trial moved up. Said we only have evidence against us right now, and they’d move you farther away to a proper prison if they found you guilty. Harder to overturn a sentence from a jury than pre-trial incarceration.”
“Yeah,” he said, as if it wasn’t whacked he was in there in the first place. “You know what it’s like, Ford Mountain Correctional is basically a holiday.”
I bit my lip against sayin’ shit because I did know. I’d been kept there briefly in my senior year of high school after Warren, a high school teacher who was now dead, had planted drugs in my locker. In my opinion, Ford Mountain was not a fuckin’ vacation.
Z must’ve read the tension in my face because he leaned forward again, hooked my eyes on the silver bait in his gaze, and spoke serious, “Day you met Cressida Irons, you came home with fuckin’ stars in your eyes and you remember what you told me?”
Of course, I remembered. It was the day I found myself just as much as the day I found Cress. Man didn’t forget anythin’ about a day like that.
“Told you I’d met my woman.”
“Yeah. Told me point blank you’d met your woman and when I asked what the fuck you meant, you said you’d dreamed of a woman all your life and didn’t know ’er face until you saw her ’cross Mac’s parking lot.”
I swallowed thickly, rememberin’ it all.
There wasn’t a moment that I fell in love, the tumbling sensation that turns the stomach and has you grasping at thin air to brace yourself against something that will not recede. No, that came later.
At first, there was a loss.
Of breath through my nose and air in my mouth. Of the metronome beat of my pulse and the strength in my spine.
It was disorientating for only long enough to shock me like icy water, and then everything returned to normal.