Chapter 25
Jace
It was the most overwhelming wedding I’d ever been to.
Not that I’d been to many, but still, I could categorically say I was completely lost.
Mostly because I had no hope in hell of remembering any of the names of the people I was introduced to, let alone their relationship to one another.
By the time Mav had explained that Eli’s younger brother, Tristan, was in a relationship with Brennan and Memphis, and that even though Brennan and Tristan had been raised as if they were cousins, they really weren’t, I’d stopped trying to make any sense of it.
Mav must have seen me zoning out, because he’d handed me off to the care of Matty Hawkins, the son of one of my teammates.
Matty had taken over the introductions, which had actually been easier to follow than Mav’s, but he’d gotten sidetracked by a conversation about Captain America, Thor, and Hawkeye.
There’d also been mention of Spiderman, but when his two little friends had arrived, one wearing Spiderman pajamas and the other carrying a Spiderman doll, I’d given up again.
Matty had mentioned something about flashcards and the next family dinner, then he’d ditched me for his buddies.
I’d lost Caleb to his best man duties. He and Brennan, who I did remember from the shooting at Eli’s apartment two years earlier, were both standing for Eli, while Ronan and a man named Mace were standing as best men for Mav.
I’d managed to hang on to Willa until Caleb’s stepmother had arrived, at which point she’d promptly stolen away the little girl she’d started referring to as her granddaughter on the very first day she’d met the infant, and I’d been left on my own again.
I’d gotten glimpses of Willa being passed around now and then, but I’d resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t be getting her back any time soon and I’d found myself a seat.
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.
Caleb had also started making some decisions about his life beyond therapy.
He’d already begun the process of getting his GED with the hopes that he could go back to college to study computers.
He was particularly interested in web design.
It wasn’t something he’d ever given a lot of thought to as a career, but one afternoon when he’d been visiting Aleks at the flower shop with Willa, he’d helped the woman who owned the shop fix a problem with her webpage.
She’d gone on to ask him if he could redesign it, and while he considered the changes he’d done mediocre – a sentiment not shared by the grateful shop owner or Aleks – it had stirred an interest in him to learn more about the business of designing websites.
It fed both his creative side and his intellectual side.
As Eli’s brother Tristan began playing a small piano, the wedding guests got settled into the pews as the minister took his place at the front of the aisle.
Dozens and dozens of strings of white lights strung across the ceiling lit up the dim interior of the church.
When Tristan switched to the typical wedding march song, everyone shifted in their seats to watch the procession .
I felt my heart expand at the sight of Caleb walking next to Brennan.
My man looked amazing in his tuxedo, but I also couldn’t wait to get him out of it tonight when we got home.
Caleb flashed me a smile as he passed, then he put his fingers out.
I was sitting along the aisle, so I lifted my fingers to trail along his and I felt the familiar jolt of electricity that went through my arm and straight to my balls.
But along with it came the rightness of it all.
I knew this would be us someday – we’d have a big wedding like this one so that all the people who’d accepted us so willingly into their family could celebrate with us.
But the honeymoon? I already knew what we’d do for that.
I’d just have to see if Dalton would lend me his boat again.
Up next down the aisle were several little girls in dresses throwing flowers all over the place.
After that came Eli. He was flanked by his father, Dom, and his mother.
I automatically scanned the crowd to see where Willa was and was pleased to see that Aleks had her.
He was standing near the doorway leading to the back rooms. He was pointing Caleb out to Willa and Caleb sent the little girl a discreet wave.
I had no doubt our daughter recognized him.