12. Chapter 12 #2
Cass's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "That's the only honest answer anyone's given me all night.
" He looked back at Dray. "Get him settled.
I need forty minutes with Jaz before he does something that gets him arrested, or worse.
Then… we're having a little house chat about what we're going to do about this.
No one touches what's ours." There was death in the pale eyes of the man before him, and Andre could not surpress a shiver.
He was glad that quiet rage wasn't directed at him.
Dray took him to the bar on the main floor instead of following Cass, didn't explain why, and Andre didn't ask.
With their(?) person working here, it stood to reason he'd be familiar with the place.
The room was empty except for a bartender polishing glasses that were already clean, pressed velvet walls the color of old wine soaking up what little light the candles on each table gave off.
Mahogany everywhere, wood worn dark and soft from decades of hands passing over it.
"He'll be a while," Dray said, sliding onto a stool. "Cass doesn't rush people down off a ledge. He just stands close enough that they know somebody's there."
Andre sat down next to him, his legs unsteady under him without warning.
"This is real," Andre said. Not a question.
"All of it. The building, the man who just walked away from you, the meyhem he's about to unleash for someone we've loved for less than a year like it's the easiest decision he's ever made.
" Dray signaled the bartender for two glasses of the same amber pour, unasked, like a standing order neither of them needed to place out loud.
"None of it exists on paper anywhere. None of it ever will. "
"And you've been doing this for…?"
"Years. The number doesn't matter." Dray turned his glass a slow circle on the bar top, not drinking it yet. "Badge in the morning. This at night. Nobody in either building knows about the other one, except the people who matter."
Andre thought about a file in a folder in cold storage with his own initials at the bottom of it, and the three years he'd spent pretending it was anything other than him covering for Marcus.
"How do you live like that? Both things true at once, and neither one canceling out the other?"
"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.