The Griffin Marshal's Heart (U.S. Marshal Shifters 4)

“It was, but...”

He had never told anybody the full story of his last few days with Phil. He’d started to tell his lawyer, but the guy had cut him off and warned him not to say anything that could make him look worse than he already did. Stories about arguing with the murder victim definitely qualified.

If he told Gretchen, there was a chance he would look over at her and see her trust in him, which he valued more than anything else, vanish right before his eyes.

For a second the words stuck in his throat.

He couldn’t stand the thought of her turning away from him.

But if he didn’t tell her the truth, he wouldn’t deserve her trust, and he knew it. He had to be worthy of her even if it killed him.

“I don’t know if this makes sense or not, but I didn’t grieve him as much as I would have wanted to. I wish we’d been closer. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye. Phil wasn’t even really talking to me when...”

Gretchen was right. What grief he’d had was still unresolved and messy. He had to choke down a lot of tangled feelings to keep going.

“When he died,” he finished.

She didn’t stiffen up or lean away from him. Her voice was still warm when she said, “What happened?”

“We were getting a new witness settled in. I’ll never see her again, I know that—they must have moved her all the way across the country after I got arrested, and that’s for the best. She was a good person, and she deserved to be far, far away from whoever was selling off my witnesses like cattle. I hope she’s okay. She was a single mom with two kids, one a colicky baby and the other just old enough to understand what was going on and hate that he’d never see his friends again. She was exhausted and frazzled, so I figured it would be good if she didn’t have to worry about anything for a few days except getting her family settled in. I asked her what groceries I could pick up for her—pantry staples, you know, and what the kids might like as a special treat. She was so relieved, she almost started crying.”

Gretchen squeezed his arm. There was a little bit of dampness on her eyelashes, Cooper noticed, like she was ready to cry too. “I knew it,” she said, almost to herself. “I knew that’s the kind of guy you were. What could Phil possibly object to about that?”

“I messed up our schedule. We were supposed to go out for drinks to wind down. He said I was a bleeding heart, that I didn’t care enough about the team, that I didn’t want to fit in. He said he’d just about had it with trying to help me. I’d never seen him so angry.”

She was quiet for a second and then said, “I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead...”

“No, I know,” Cooper said. “I feel bad saying it now, because of everything that happened. And even with all of that, he was the closest thing I had to a friend back then. But he could be kind of a dick sometimes. He was impatient, and if things weren’t going the way he wanted them to, he’d get pretty angry about it. Like, literally hot under the collar—you could see his neck turn bright red.”

Cooper had sometimes even been able to see Phil’s bright crimson dragonmarks flare up. For some reason, the sight had always made his griffin uneasy.

“I hope he kept that under control around civilians,” Gretchen said.

“He did. Always. But when he got you alone, he’d let you have it—just like he let me have it that night.” He exhaled. “I just assumed there’d be time to patch things up with him, so I didn’t worry about it too much. I was wrong, though. That was one of the last times we saw each other.”

“None of that’s on you,” Gretchen said quietly. “He shouldn’t have gotten upset about you trying to do the right thing. You were just trying to look out for your witness. I wouldn’t have cared about patching things up with him at all, not after that.”

Cooper didn’t know what to say. He could see why she wouldn’t have cared... but she had Martin, an upstanding, laidback, funny, and fundamentally good chief who’d handpicked her as his successor. She had a team that she knew would worry about her.

He’d had Phil, and that was it. No one else on the team had ever even really tried to get to know him. Monroe had just ignored him, and Roger had just given him platitudes about how he should go along to get along and how there was no I in team.

“It wasn’t all bad.” He needed to avoid too much self-pity. “Phil was... self-centered, but he was funny, too, and he poured a lot of energy into trying to get me to fit in with the rest of the team. They’d all worked together for years, and I was the first new face they’d seen in a while. Phil was the only one who was really enthusiastic about me. I think that’s why he got so mad when he thought I didn’t appreciate it—he was making an effort to bring me into their little circle, and I wasn’t going along.”

His memories of Phil had, for so long, been painful, and it was nice to finally have the chance to talk them out with someone who understood. Gretchen wouldn’t judge him, no matter what he said.

Finally, it felt like he’d exorcised the last of Phil’s ghost. He’d let him go now. Everything that their partnership had been—good, bad, and otherwise—was behind him, and he could close the book on it.

“What about everyone else?” Gretchen said. “They didn’t reach out to you at all?”

“Not much. There was Roger, our chief, and a guy named Monroe. If Phil ran hot, Monroe ran—runs, I guess, he’s still there as far as I know—cold. And Roger’s a hard person to understand once you get past the surface. He...” He didn’t know how to explain what was up with Roger without getting into the truth about shifters, and Gretchen had already dealt with enough today without finding out about all of that. “He’s a little weird,” he finished weakly.

He couldn’t think of a human equivalent for Roger. Those people who wanted to have surgeries to give themselves cat ears or make themselves look like Barbie or Ken dolls?

Gretchen didn’t push him on it, thankfully. “And Monroe?”

“Hard to read. He kept to himself a lot.”

The most he’d ever heard Monroe say at once, probably, was Monroe tearing into the legend that basilisk shifters could kill people by looking at them. That’s just a kid’s story, Monroe had said irritably. Our powers work like a scalpel, not like a sledgehammer. But he’d never elaborated more than that, which meant that the most Cooper had heard him say at once still