7. Fame
CHAPTER 7
FAME
F our Days Later
Everything fuckin’ hurts. I’m not dead. Everything fucking hurts and I’m not dead, and because those two truths are true, I force myself to come fully into consciousness.
Dying is too easy, soldier. Get off your lazy ass and get home. I hear Kon’s voice in my head over the ringing that always seems to herald a concussion.
I take stock of my situation. Legs and arms are all mobile. Mostly. Something’s wrong with my left leg, but if nothing else, the pain lets me know it’s still attached. Fingers are all capable of flexing and seem to obey mental directives. Vision, blurry but present. Every breath turns to puffy white steam clouds when they leave my lips, and I turn my head to see a thick blanket of snow all around me.
To be honest, the cold is probably why I’m not dead. It must have slowed the blood flow enough to keep me from going into shock and bleeding out. Blearily, I register the sound of someone shouting from a distance. My numb fingers scrabble to slap at the side of my head to find where the comms unit has come dislodged. I push it into my ear and blink away the pain hearing from my handler’s frantic shouts.
“Jones! Jones! Do you copy? Jones, do you copy?” Hutchinson’s worry has his voice several octaves higher than I’m used to, adding to the stabbing pain behind my right eye. But not so much the ridiculous code name of Jones doesn’t make me chuckle, but close.
“Target deducted from the count. But, uh, I’m gonna need a pick up.” Luckily, my task for this mission was only to eliminate one of the five targets. Which I did. With extreme prejudice.
Unfortunately, getting him nearly got me got. Apparently. Still not sure exactly what happened during my exit process. I remember drilling a bullet into his skull from a deer blind, an easy one-k meters away from him, securing my Barrett M82, cleaning the blind, and starting the trek to where I’d stashed the snowmobile.
After that? It’s anybody’s guess.
“Roger that, Jones. Help is on the way.” Hutchinson sounds smug, the bastard. If it gets me out of this cold and somewhere to treat the head wound I know I have, he can be as smug as he wants to be.
“Only you, brother,” Konrad crows. New laugh lines crinkle the corners of his eyes. They were never there before he met Blu and Grey, but his shit-eating grin never changes.
“Shut up, asshole,” I gripe back across the secure video connection. It’s an act, mostly.
I would never have expected it, and I’ll deny it with my dying breath, but I miss the guy. I miss all of them, really. Even Jax’s prickish snarkiness and Cameron’s condescending scowl. I thought leaving would feel right and keep me busy enough to ignore the loneliness of watching everyone else around me find love.
It didn’t, though. Konrad and I used to thrive on the gray-hat world of off-books missions, but everything about stepping back into them has felt wrong from the start. Part of me wants to ask him if it felt like that for him after we went home to raise Ace and form the club.
I don’t ask. I know, deep down, nothing changed for him until he found Grey and Blu. Asking would only bring attention to the real reason I regret leaving. The same reason I can’t go home, even though the snowmobile wreck damaged my leg, and the organization I just contracted with has no use for me any longer.
“Seriously, though, who successfully completes a mission only to get wiped out by a falling tree limb during egress? What are the chances? Like, lottery win level of odds.”
Konrad rambles on, laughing at my misfortune in a way stemming from his relief I survived. That’s the thing about being battle buddies and lifelong friends. We can read between the lines. I worried him, and now, he’ll be a dick about it instead of showing his relief. If the roles were reversed, I’d do the same.
“Laugh it up. Go ahead. Show your own prez no respect. You’re lucky I’m four hours away and immobile with this leg.” Two days post surgery and the damn thing’s swelling has finally gone down enough for the Aircast. Still, I’ll be on crutches for months. Likely, a cane for even longer. Maybe, forever. The doctor said I’m lucky I kept the leg, and that’s good enough for me.
Lie. Stop lying to yourself, Shaw. The injury means no more field work, which makes me useless in this line of work. Ergo, I have no excuse when Konrad changes the subject to my coming home.
“The girls miss you, brother. Grey misses you. Shit, I think even Gunner misses the way you glare at him when he tames Ace’s bratty ass in the ways you never could.”
“That’s just because Ace is obsessed with the way the motherfucker daddies him. I never tried being his damn father. That would have been gross,” I argue.
Ace was broken and feral by the time we learned what was going on back home. For a decade, Kon and I had been sending money back, believing it was being used to help care for the guys from the group home. Only to find the home had shut down, Ace was on the verge of being farmed out into foster care, and though Jax was getting out of prison, there was zero chance he’d be able to become the kid’s guardian. Not with his record.
Starting the club and bringing my brothers back home was the right thing to do. The only way we could help the kid. But even after he grew up and worked through some of the shit he’d gone through, there was no reaching all the way inside where the worst of it was. Until he met Gunner. His Papa.
So no, I never tamed him. He needed a Daddy, and that was never, ever going to be me. Someone else needs a Daddy , my unhelpful brain supplies. And you could make her Daddy’s little princess .
“Things settled down for good, now that all that business with Carmen’s people is handled?” Secure line or not, I minimalize the references to the murder and mayhem necessary to knock down the trafficking ring that was operating in Darrow.
“Yup. The king finished securing his kingdom and came by days ago to reclaim his princess, too. You’d have died laughing, man. The look on his face when she strolled down the stairs with that fresh ink on her wrist for the whole world to spot. Linework wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty fuckin’ good for an untrained scratcher.” Konrad casually drops that atom bomb into conversation and continues as if he didn’t just nuke my universe.
“She went with him?” I croak.
“Yeah, I mean, what else was she gonna do? The wedding’s in three weeks. Balakin said her mom’s already in panic mode about all the dress fittings and shit they got to get done.”
Yup. Nuclear explosion of my entire world.