Chapter Twenty-Four
Cade
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I drove straight from her newsroom to Voss's office, which tells you everything you need to know about who I was that night.
I'd just said the cruelest thing I've ever said to the only person who'd ever loved the kid instead of the wall, and I drove from the wreckage of that straight to the man who'd handed me the gun, because the wall, once it's all the way up, has a gravity.
It pulls you toward whoever built it. My father, Voss—they're the same magnet wearing different faces, and I'd been falling toward it my whole life, and I fell toward it again that night because falling was the only thing I knew how to do under pressure.
You go home. Even when home is the thing that hurt you. Especially then.
Voss was waiting. He always waited. He had a way of making you feel like he'd cleared his whole evening for you, like you were the most important thing in his world, and the hand was already coming up toward the back of my neck before I'd cleared the door.
"There he is." Warm. The billboard voice. "I was worried about you, son. After what she's planning to do to you. Sit down. Sit."
I sat. The kid was so far away I couldn't hear him anymore. There was just the wall and the warm hand and the part of me that had always, always, since I was small, leaned into it.
"Here's where we are," Voss said, settling behind the desk, the folder of photographs squared neatly on the corner of it like a closing argument he hadn't needed to make yet.
"She's going to publish. Brooks gave a statement from his hospital bed—did you know that?
Your boy turned on the family, after everything this program did for him.
And that trainer, Tanner, he's talking too, the ungrateful little—anyway.
It's happening, Cade, with or without you.
The dam's gone." He spread his hands, sorrowful, reasonable, a man grieving a thing he was in the middle of causing.
"So the only question left is which side of it you're standing on when it breaks.
And I want you on the right side. I've always wanted that for you.
You're like a son to me. You know that."
You're like a son to me. The four most expensive words in my life. I'd have done anything for them once. Part of me, the part my father built, still would, even then, even knowing.
"Here's what protecting the people you love actually looks like," Voss went on, gentle, deadly, leaning in.
"You make a statement. Tonight. Before she publishes.
You say you were close to this reporter—you don't have to say how close—and that in your honest judgment, having spent time around her, she's a young woman who lost her objectivity.
Who got personally involved. Who's got an agenda, who can't be trusted to tell this thing straight.
" He let it sit. "You don't have to call her a liar.
You don't have to say one ugly word. You just have to put a little question mark on her, and coming from you—the most respected guy on this team, the one who never says anything, the one nobody can call a liar—that question mark lands.
It puts a crack in everything she prints.
And here's the part that's for you, son, the part I want you to really hear: the second you do that, those photos go in the shredder.
Tonight. She never gets called the girl who slept with a player.
You save her. You take the hit to her credibility yourself instead of letting the world take the hit to her name.
That's the trade. That's the only way left to protect her.
And you keep your draft, and your back stays our little secret, and everybody goes home, and in five years this is a story nobody remembers. "
It was perfect. I have to give it to him, even now, even after everything.
It was the most perfect trap ever built for me specifically, because it didn't ask me to hurt her.
It asked me to protect her. By discrediting her.
By being the wall one last time. By taking a hit for her that happened to be the exact hit that would kill the one thing she'd built her whole self around.
It dressed cowardice up as sacrifice and handed it to a man who'd been trained since birth to confuse the two.
And God help me—I considered it. For one long minute in that warm office, with the hand having found the back of my neck and the photos squared on the desk and my father's voice and Voss's son, I sat there and I genuinely considered standing up in front of the world and calling Sloane Pierce compromised to save her from being called something worse.
That's the black moment. Not the cruel thing I'd already said in the newsroom. This. The minute I sat in Voss's office and considered it. The minute the wall almost won for good, with my whole face nodding along.
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What stopped me wasn't courage. I want to be honest about that, because I've had a lot of people since then try to hand me a heroic version of this night, and I won't take it.
What stopped me was a single word.
Voss said it without even thinking, the way you say a thing you've stopped hearing yourself say: Your boy turned on the family.
Your boy. Theo. In a hospital bed. With a rod in his leg and a draft that didn't exist anymore and a body that had finally, after years of swallowing it, screamed loud enough for the world to hear—and this man, this man with his warm hand on the back of my neck, had just called Theo turning on the family.
As if the family hadn't broken Theo's leg.
As if loyalty meant a boy with a destroyed future owed his silence to the men who destroyed it.
And something in me that had been bending for twenty-two years finally, quietly, did not break—the opposite of break—it set.
The way a bone sets. Hard and permanent and load-bearing in a new direction.
Because I'd spent my whole life believing the wall protected the people I loved, and here was the man I'd built the wall to please, asking me to use it one last time to call my brother a traitor and the woman I loved a liar, and to call that protection.
Jaxon's voice came back to me, from the steps, the coffee going cold. You're not the wall. You're the keystone. The day you talk, the room falls with you, not on you.
I stood up.
"No," I said.
Voss's face didn't change. He'd heard no before; he had moves for no. "Sit down, son. Think about what you're—"
"Don't call me that." It came out quiet.
The tunnel voice. But aimed, for the first time in my entire life, at the right man.
"I'm not your son. You don't get a son. You get players, and you use them up, and when they break you call it a tough break and you pay the bill and you call it generosity.
You've had your hand on the back of my neck for four years and I let you, because I thought that's what love felt like, because the only other man who ever touched me there was my father, and you're exactly the same.
You both found the thing I was starving for and you both charged me my silence for it.
" I picked up the folder off his desk. The photographs.
Me and her, in every safe place we'd ever had.
I held them, and I watched his eyes follow them, and I understood I'd just taken something.
"You're going to shred these whether I make your statement or not.
Because if you ever release them, I will stand in front of every camera in this state and tell them everything—the reports, the meetings, Reyes, Mercer, Weller, the afternoons, the office with the door that's always closed, all of it, with my name and my face on it.
And I'm the one guy you can't call a liar.
You know that. That's why you needed me to do your dirty work on her.
Because the day I talk, it's over. You knew it before I did. "
I walked to his door. My hands were shaking. My back was screaming. I had never felt more terrified or more like a person in my whole life, and the two turned out to be the same feeling.
"I already did the worst thing," I said, with my hand on the door.
"An hour ago. I said something to her so cruel I don't know if she'll ever forgive me, and you didn't even have to make me.
I did that one all by myself, because you trained me well, you and my dad.
You built a real good wall." I looked back at him.
"But I'm done being your last brick. Make your own statement, if you want one so bad.
It won't have my name on it. Nothing of yours ever will again. "
I left. I drove to her apartment. I had it all loaded—the apology, the truth, I left Voss's office, I took the photos, I told him no, I'm going to go on the record beside Theo and Jaxon and all of them, I'm so sorry, I was the wall, I let them turn the best night of my life into a weapon, please, please—
—and her windows were dark, and her car was gone, and when I called it went straight to voicemail, and I stood in her empty parking lot at midnight, in the bad spot, the far one, where I'd watched her walk three weeks ago, and I understood that I'd had my chance to choose her at four o'clock and I'd called her Voss instead, and that my brave no in that office, true as it was, had come one cruel sentence too late.
The story published at 6 a.m.
I read it on my phone in that same parking lot, where I'd sat all night like a dog waiting for a door, and it was everything she was, and I wasn't in it anywhere.
Not one word. She'd protected me even while I was calling her a liar, even while I was holding the match.
And that's when I understood exactly what I'd thrown away, and exactly how much groveling it was going to take, and that I deserved every inch of it, and that I'd spend as long as it took.
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