Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
CALEB
You’re Bruiser’s father.
Three words. Four syllables. The kind of sentence that requires a lot of hyperventilating and probably a lot of sitting down after you hear it.
Instead it lands in a shower at 5 AM. And then a gunshot erases the next seven seconds of my life.
The weeks of training I did at Isaak’s self-defense classes kick in. My hand finds Harper’s shoulder to pull her down and then I cover her with my weight as we hit the wet tile. I shove the shower door open and drag her out.
Syllables come out of my mouth: “Stay low!”
My mind, meanwhile, is about thirty feet behind all of that, still standing in the steam, still trying to process three words that have rewritten every year since I was eighteen.
You’re Bruiser’s father.
My brain keeps trying to run the numbers backward. He must be closer to nine and a half then. Because ten years ago, when she left me, she had to be already—
When she disappeared and I spent six months trying to track down every lead I had for her and getting nothing back, she was already—
Another shot explodes in the silence. Glass shatters somewhere in the house. A window?
Focus, Graham.
Harper’s already moving before I can stop her, crawling for the bedroom door in nothing but wet skin and the specific determination of a mother who has just heard a gun go off when she doesn’t have eyes on her child.
I watch her go with my heart in my throat, and for exactly half a second I’m frozen—not by fear, not by tactical assessment—but by the thought that arrives without permission:
That’s his mother.
And he’s my son.
I have a son.
Holy shit, I have a son and there are people somewhere outside with weapons and I’m standing here naked at 5 AM having barely slept, the foundational structure of the last ten years of my life taken apart and reassembled around a fact I didn’t know.
And approximately fifteen seconds from now, I need to be competent enough to get all three of us out of this house alive.
I grab my phone off the nightstand. My hands shake even more as it unlocks and I punch Isaak’s number.
“Isaac.” I keep my voice flat while I yank on sweatpants. “We’re getting hit. What’s out there?”
His answer is clipped and operational, clearly already on top of the situation:
“There’s a sniper, northwest rooftop. It’s thirty seconds to Dmitri’s vehicle in the alley.”
I grab a shirt and shorts, barely managing to shove my limbs through the appropriate holes by the time I get to the bedroom doorway.
Harper’s wearing a robe, crouched in the opposite hallway entrance across the dark living room. She’s got a scared-looking Bruiser pressed against her chest with an arm around his shoulders.
She’s barefoot and her wet hair is plastered to her face.
She looks at me across the expanse of the living room and I think: she’s known he was my son for days and didn’t tell me.
She was locked in a closet for most of that.
Fuck. I shake the thought out of my head and whisper across the space what Isaak told me over the phone.
“Which way is the alley?” she hisses back.
But before I can answer, another round of gunshots has us all flinching back into our respective hallways.
I count without meaning to. One, two, three, four. The tiles on the kitchen floor. One, two, three, four. The seconds between shots. One, two—
It doesn’t hold. The pattern keeps slipping, numbers scattering before I can pin them down.
My brain is running two programs at once and they’re incompatible.
I can feel it the way I used to feel it at eighteen when Mom got sick again and I was trying to hold everything together with arithmetic and rules—that specific grinding sensation of a mind that has hit the limit of what control can actually accomplish.
“When I say run,” I tell Harper, and my voice comes out steady, which surprises me. “Go straight through the back door and to the left. Don’t stop. Dmitri’s in the alley.”
She nods once. Sharp. She doesn’t waste a single movement when the stakes are this high. I’ve noticed the way all her softness goes somewhere interior when she needs to move fast.
Nine years, something in my head says while the rest of me is calculating angles. She’s been doing this alone for nine years.
“NOW.”
It’s six strides across the living room. I reach them at their hallway and scoop Bruiser out of Harper’s arms in one motion because I have to do something with my hands and because he is—He is—
He’s so small.
I knew that intellectually. I’ve watched him all day.
But holding him is different. The actual weight of him and how his arms go around my neck without thinking, like something in him has already decided I’m safe to hold on—the animal reality of this small person clinging to me in the dark while someone is trying to kill us—
One, two, three, four, fi—
The numbers keep scattering. But my feet are moving, so fuck it. I sprint toward the back of the house while shots explode behind us.
Harper shoves the back door open. Apparently Dmitri gave up on waiting in the alley, because the Hummer is crashing through the backyard fence, pulling up in front of the door right as more gunshots ring out against the huge car’s frame.
I pull the front and back passenger doors open, setting Bruiser down in the back as Dimitri shifts the big car into park.
“I don’t know how they found you, but they sent half the fucking MC,” Dimitri shouts. “I’m gonna stay back to draw fire. Go, go!”
He army crawls out of the front seat and Harper’s immediately leaping up to take his place as he starts firing rounds back into the darkness.
Harper lands in the driver’s seat without missing a beat, looking over her shoulder to get eyes on her son. She was born for chaos. It’s not just ten years with Z that made her like this—she was the same on the first day I met her. She’s always been someone who can assess a situation at velocity.
“Get in!” she shouts.
I fold myself into the back seat with my son against my chest.
My son, holy shit.
Dmitri fires back down toward the alley. Harper stomps the gas pedal before his second burst, and we lurch forward across the back lawn, bursting through the back fence and onto a little suburban road in an explosion of purple sage bushes on the other side.
I keep my arm around Bruiser as Harper guns the engine. Three motorcycles appear at the far end of the street.
“Get him down,” Harper says.
I look at the nine-year-old in my arms. He’s crying—quiet, controlled tears that wreck me, like he’s already learned not to make too much noise when things go wrong.
“Hey.” I get my face level with his as the car bumps and veers back and forth wildly all over the road. “Listen to me, okay? There’s going to be some loud stuff for a little while. I need you to get down in the floorboards and stay down no matter what. Can you do that?”
Bruiser looks up at me with big eyes that ping back and forth, like he’s checking whether I’m worth trusting.
Something in my chest cracks.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Good. You’re doing so good.” I maneuver him into the footwell and pull the ballistic blanket over him Dimitri stocked in the backseat. I feel Bruiser’s small hand close around my wrist. He holds on, and I let him.
One, two, three, four. One-two-three-four-
The patterns keep refusing to hold. I know therapists have told me numbers can’t actually affect change, but somewhere deep down nothing could convince me otherwise.
Now, though, as this small human trusts me so completely, I get it, I think. What every parent probably understands at some point.
It’s always an illusion that anything’s ever under control.
We think if we can manage the small things, the steps, and the silverware alignment and the locks flipped in sequence, then maybe the big things will stay within bounds too.
But it’s all absolutely fucking useless when a tiny body, most vulnerable to a bullet, is folded into a floorboard under a ballistic blanket with their hand gripping your wrist like you’re the magic rabbit’s foot.
I lean down. “Just keep breathing. I’ve got you. You hear me, buddy? I’ve got you.”
“Are these bad guys like my dad?” comes his voice, so small.
There are a thousand things I could say. Later. When we’re safe. When I’ve processed the bomb that just went off in the shower and have figured out what I feel about the fact that he’s called that asshole Z his father every day of his life instead of—
“We’ll talk about everything when we get where we’re going,” I say. “Right now I just need you to stay down.”
He finally lets go of my wrist just as Harper takes a corner hard enough to make the tires screech. I straighten up and look through the narrow back window to track the motorcycles. There are three still on us.
I run the math with the part of my brain that isn’t actively dissolving—there were four bikes originally.
We’ve lost one, but there are still three on us.
There’s ten rounds in the Glock Isaak’s man put in the glove box, which Harper grabs and hands to me.
Not divisible by three without a remainder, and the remainder is the problem, the remainder is always the problem—
“CALEB.” Harper’s voice cuts through everything like a signal breaking static. “I need you here. With me. With him.”
I look up and meet her eyes in the rearview mirror.
There’s fear in her face and something else alongside it—something that looks like absolute certainty that I can do this, which is a faith I have not fully earned and certainly don’t deserve. But I can’t afford to disappoint her right now. So I won’t.
“I’m here,” I say, and put my hand on my son through the blanket. “I’ve got him. Just drive.”
She does.
We move through the next twelve minutes as a unit. She didn’t exactly have time to plug her phone into the GPS, so she drives and I direct her with the heavy weight of a Glock in one hand and my other hand on Bruiser over the blanket, anchoring me every time the numbers scatter.
One bike goes down at Harper’s next sharp swerve—she clips it so precisely it barely registers as an act of violence—it’s more just physics applied with intent.
When the next bike comes close and clips off several more rounds that crack into the bulletproof windows, I can’t help flinching. Jesus, this has got to be terrifying for the kid.
I lift the Glock. I’ve only ever fired guns off at Domhnall’s fancy club, but it’s going to have to be good enough.
When the MC guy is reloading, I roll down the window and Harper keeps the car steady enough for me to get a couple of shots off. I’m not sure if I hit them or just their motorcycle, but after unloading half the magazine, one of the bike’s engines explodes.
I hit the button to roll the window back up as the other guy gets hit by shrapnel and his bike veers off the road.
At the last second, the fourth bike reappears, right on our bumper.
Harper stomps on the brakes, using three tons of German engineering as a battering ram. The bike crumples on our rear like a recycling can.
Fuck, Harper’s absolutely the most badass woman I have ever witnessed in real life.
Then there’s just silence, and our ragged breathing, and Bruiser’s crying from under the blanket—quieter now, exhausted sounding.
“Is he okay?” Harper’s voice shakes for the first time. “Is Bruiser okay?”
I lift the blanket. Bruiser blinks up at me with wet eyes, like he’s trying very hard to be composed.
“You did so good,” I tell him, and mean it with everything I have. “You were so brave.”
“Can I call you Cabe?” he asks, voice thick. “You’re a badass and that’s a badass nickname.”
My heart breaks and reassembles itself in the same moment.
“Yeah,” I manage. “Yeah, you can call me Cabe.”
He holds out his little fist. I bump it because something in me knows that’s what this requires, and he almost smiles and pulls the blanket back over his head to keep lying down.
I straighten up and look at Harper in the mirror.
Silent tears are running down her face while she drives with white-knuckled hands. I can’t stop watching her—this beautiful woman who crawled across a dark house for her son while gunfire exploded all around and then drove through a firefight without flinching—
So, okay.
I don’t have all the explanations yet. I don’t know what she was waiting for, or what the last week might have cost her. I still don’t know how I’m supposed to feel right now.
What I know is this: I have been looking for the missing piece of my life for ten years.
I have been running a club that exists to give other people the control and pleasure I can’t find anywhere.
I know that counting steps and checking locks and building power structures out of precise little rules are a fool’s way of controlling a too-chaotic world.
I reach forward and squeeze Harper’s shoulder. She looks at me in the mirror.
“Next left,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can offer that’s useful right now. I continue reading Isaac’s text and giving her the directions that will get us to a real safe house.
We merge onto the highway going north.
I stare at the road unspooling in front of us, headlights cutting through the early morning dark.
I have a son curled up asleep under a ballistic blanket in the footwell beside me.
The woman I’ve loved since I was a teenager is driving us and our son north back toward Dallas with dried tears on her face and white knuckles on the wheel.
And I have no idea what any of this means yet.
I have no idea what I’m allowed to feel or what I’m supposed to say or whether the thing building in my chest right now is joy, rage, grief, or something so large it doesn’t have a name yet.
I can’t find the patterns. And the question I didn’t get to ask is sitting in the middle of the car like a fifth passenger, taking up all the air.
Why didn’t you tell me as soon as you realized I was his father? Were you going to run again, without ever letting me know?
Harper doesn’t look at me in the mirror again. She watches the road with her jaw set and her eyes straight ahead, and neither of us says a word.
Bruiser shifts under the blanket and makes a small sound in his sleep that is the most devastating thing I have heard in my entire life.
I put my hand back on him to be a comforting pressure.
Then stare back at the road ahead.