Chapter 9 Kane
The light through the high window goes from black to grey while she sleeps. I've been tracking the shift for the better part of two hours, the only thing I can do without waking her.
She's against my left side with her cheek on my shoulder and one knee thrown over my thigh. I've been counting her breaths. They come in fours, a held beat at the end of every set. I don't think she knows she does it.
Last night I gave her something I haven't given anyone in eight years.
Not the sex. The face I keep under everything else.
She looked at me in the lamp on the nightstand and I let her.
She put her hand on my jaw. Every wall I'd built in those years came down at once.
I'm sitting in the rubble of them now, and I don't know what I am without them.
At six the mechanical click in the kitchen clock travels through two walls, and she stirs.
"Morning. How long have you been awake?"
"A while."
She lifts her head, looks at me, settles back into my side. Her hand finds my ribs and stays. She's going to drift. I won't let her.
"Callie... I need to talk to you... about Danny." I keep my voice in the flat tone I've been holding it in since she walked through my door nine days ago. "All of it. The real one."
The arm across my chest tightens for half a second, then relaxes.
"Okay."
"Don't say anything until I'm done. Ok?"
She nods against my shoulder.
***
I keep my eyes on the ceiling. I won't watch her face for this. I've never said it out loud and I won't see her hear it.
"Eight years ago Colonel Elias Thorne signed an operation order for four of us. Our team. What he told us we'd find wasn't what we found. Thorne had the real picture. He sent us in with the false one."
She doesn't move.
"Four men went in. Three came out."
She takes a breath in against my arm and holds it.
"Danny died with his back to a stone wall in a courtyard the size of this bedroom. My hands were over a wound nothing was going to hold. I had forty minutes with him. He understood before I did that no one was coming for us."
I have to stop before I can make myself say the rest.
"His last five words were Keep an eye on her."
After a moment her held breath comes out slow.
"For years I thought it was just a bad operation. Thorne had made a mistake and we'd taken the hit for it. In war it happens. I folded it up and kept walking. I didn't have the full story yet."
I let my breath out, and she takes the pause for permission.
"When did you find out the truth," she asks.
"Five years ago. I got hold of documents on a chain of decisions Thorne had taken before the mission. He hadn't miscalculated. He'd known what was on that ground and signed the order. I quit the service that same day."
She lies still against me. I keep my eyes on the ceiling and let her do whatever counting she's doing.
"Five years, Kane."
"Yeah."
"Danny died eight years ago."
The numbers stand between us, and eight years now feel like an eternity.
She sits up.
***
She gets off the bed, pulls my shirt on from where it fell last night, and crosses to the door. I can't take my eyes off her until she's out of sight down the hall. After a moment I hear the drawer of her dresser open and close. She comes back with an envelope in her hand.
She doesn't put it in mine. She lays it on the duvet between my hip and her side of the bed, then she sits, knees folded under her. The softness has gone out of her.
"He gave this to me the last time he came home on leave. Three weeks before he died. He told me: If you ever meet Kane Maddox, this goes to him. I've carried it for eight years."
"I know it exists." I push myself up to sitting against the headboard. "I've known since before I called you."
Her face moves a fraction.
"Is that why you called."
"Part of why."
I pick up the envelope. The paper has softened at the corners from being moved between bags and drawers. Danny's writing on the front is exactly what I remember, my name in block letters, the rest in his slanted hand. My hands are trembling. I open it.
Two sheets folded into thirds. The first is dense with dates, names, and markers I know.
Three of the numbers in the second column have been on Killian's wall for two years.
I sit with it for half a beat. Danny had been working his own trail on Thorne, and he hadn't told me.
He'd put what he had into this envelope before the mission and given it to his fourteen-year-old sister with no explanation.
She carried it for eight years, and now it's in mine.
I unfold the second sheet.
Kane, brother.
If you're reading this I didn't make it back. That means you did. Don't carry that. I went in knowing this could happen. That part is on me, not on you.
The first sheet is what I've put together on Thorne.
It isn't enough to take him down by itself.
He covers his tracks, and I haven't had the time to put my hands on the piece that would.
But he's caught on that I'm watching. This next operation is his answer to it.
I knew what it was the moment the briefing hit my desk: a setup he wrote to make sure I don't come back.
I'm going anyway, because if I refuse he'll find another route to the same end, and at least going gives you the proof.
If I come back, we keep digging. If I don't, you're reading this, and the fact that he sent me into his own trap is the last piece you need.
Men in our work don't get long lives, brother. We both signed for that the day we put the uniform on. I don't get to pick the day or the room. Only what it buys. This one buys Thorne, and that's a trade I'll take with both hands.
That part is for the soldier in you. You'll know what to do.
Now, this part is for the man. My sister Callie has Grandma for now, but Grandma isn't young, and sooner or later Callie is going to be on her own. She's stronger than she looks, but also softer than she lets on, and she's going to need someone in her corner.
Go to her. Tell her about me. The good parts, the stupid parts, the parts she missed because I was overseas.
Let her know me through you. Let her know you too, the real one, not the version you'll be tempted to hand her.
She can take it. She's my sister, and she reads people on the same instinct I do.
Take care of her, brother. Not because you owe me, but because she's worth it. And because if I'd had a choice, I'd have picked you.
I love you both. Go live.
D.
I fold both sheets together and slide them back into the envelope. I keep my eyes on it for a beat longer than I have to.
Callie is on her side of the bed. Her arms are around her knees.
"Good news or bad," she says, quiet.
"Both."
"Tell me."
"The first sheet is what Danny had been putting together on Thorne before he died. He'd been working it alone. Combined with what Jaxson, Killian, and the rest of us have been building for years, it'll take that piece of shit down for good."
"And the second."
I set the envelope on the nightstand.
"Personal. He asked me to be there for you. Tell you about him. Let you know me."
She doesn't reach for the letter or ask to see it. She looks at the envelope on the nightstand for a long beat, then back at me.
"You didn't come. He asked you to be there, in writing, and you weren't."
"No."
"And before this letter, you had his last words yourself. Keep an eye on her. You heard him say it. Letter or no letter, you could have come."
"Yes."
"You were alive in the world and you let me be alone in it."
"Yes."
The light through the window has gone from grey to pale blue. The day is happening whether we let it or not. Her chin lifts a fraction.
"This is not enough, Kane. After everything that's been said in this bed this morning, you owe me full honesty. There's a piece you're still holding. Give it to me."
"There isn't another operative reason."
"I didn't ask operative. I asked why you didn't come. Why I had to be alone."
I swing my feet off the bed and put them on the floor on my side. My back is to her. I keep my elbows on my knees and my eyes on the floorboards.
"It started at your grandmother's house. In the weeks after Danny was buried, I drove out there. I told her I wanted to be in your life because Danny had asked me to be."
Behind me the bed creaks. She's shifted forward.
"She wouldn't have it. She said you'd lost enough to the Army already, and she told me to stay out of your life. I gave her my word."
A long beat.
"She did that," Callie says, soft.
"Yeah."
"She never told me."
"She wouldn't have."
I don't want to stop now that I've started.
"I gave my word without a fight. What ten years of service had left on me wasn't fit to bring near you, and your grandmother told me out loud what I'd been telling myself on the drive to her door. She gave me permission to stay back. I was already there in my own head."
I let out a breath.
"Years went by. Every spring I'd think about breaking my word to her and coming to find you anyhow. But I couldn't ever build myself into a man I wanted to put at your kitchen table. I tried. I never finished him."
"When I had the picture on Thorne five years ago, the silence picked up a new reason on top of the old one.
If you'd started turning over rocks, asking the wrong people the wrong questions, you'd have ended up in front of him.
I wasn't going to put you there. Keeping you out of his sights was the one thing I could do for you without my own poison on it.
That part was operative. The rest was me lying to myself. "
"Then your grandmother died. The promise didn't end with her, but there was nobody left to know if I broke it.
I could have come but I didn't. Every year I waited past her funeral, walking up your path got harder to picture, not easier.
I tried to draft a letter to you more than once.
I never got past your name on the page."
"You were afraid," she says.
"Yes."
"Of me."