Chapter 5 #3
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, and I finally say the thing that’s been sitting at the bottom of me like a sunken stone.
“My friends may be alive, but my brothers can’t rest. They won’t.
Five men in the ground under headstones with the wrong story carved over them, and I’ve spent a decade doing nothing about it.
Nothing. And I keep asking myself—isn’t that the whole point of this place?
Of PALADIN?” I look up at her. “We’re not scared of justice.
We’re not scared of bulldogs or brass or the biggest guy in the room.
That’s the pitch, right? We’ll take on anyone, anyone, if they’re evil enough to deserve it.
So why does the worst thing that ever happened to me get a pass?
Why is that the one evil I’m allowed to let walk? ”
Vesper is quiet for a long moment. Then, dry as bone: “Callen. To some people, we’re the evil ones.
There are widows out there who’d spit on the name PALADIN.
” She crosses her arms and lets that land, because she never lets me be simple about this.
“So, tell me. But not right now, and not in this chair with a handle of whiskey still bleeding out of your pores. Take some time. Think about what’s right and what’s wrong, actually think, sober.
Not the drunk two-in-the-morning version.
And then come back and tell me what you want to do. And I promise you I’ll listen.”
I nod. I feel about a thousand pounds lighter and a thousand pounds heavier at the same time, which is the usual aftermath of having a morality discussion with Vesper.
“Do you have access to the orders? From Kesara. Ten years back. The deployment orders that put my team on that helo? But the real ones.”
Her eyes sharpen.
When I came back—when I clawed my way back from being a name on a memorial wall—the first thing I did, before I could walk right, was request those orders.
The chain of command that put six men in a single low-signature aircraft over hostile ground with no backup and no extraction plan.
And what came back was wrong. Redacted where it had no business being redacted.
Names blacked out. A mission that officially didn’t happen how I’d lived it.
Somebody had gone in after the fact and sanded the record smooth, and they’d done it fast, which meant they’d been ready…
which meant they’d known. It was a cover-up you could see from space.
The only thing I never cracked was the shape at the center of it: who all that erasing was protecting.
“How deep do you want to dig?” Vesper asks.
“Until we hit the core of the earth. Then, I want to keep digging and plough through to the other side.”
She nods, once, decisive. “I’ll call in some favors.”
It sounds casual, but from Vesper, that’s a blood oath, and we both know it. I feel my chest go tight in a way that has nothing to do with grief for once. “Thank you, friend.”
“You’re welcome.”
I rise. My leg’s stiff from the chair and from the old break that never sets quite right in the cold, and I roll the ache out of my shoulder on the way up. I make it two steps toward the door before she stops me.
“You reek, by the way,” she reminds me, and the ice is back in her voice but there’s something warm running underneath it now, a current. “Did you drink an entire handle by yourself, or should I be worried?”
I stop with my hand on the doorframe. I could lie. I’m a bad liar to her specifically, so there’s no point.
“Not exactly by myself.” I feel the back of my neck go hot.
The smile that breaks across Vesper’s face is enormous. Merciless and it is, God help me, genuinely happy for me, which is somehow worse.
“Did you use a condom?” she asks, echoing Lance perfectly, savoring my embarrassment.
“Or do I need to neuter you myself? You know the family rules, Callen. No ghosts leaving footprints.” She lets it hang for exactly one beat too long, and then, because she’s Vesper and she never lets you leave a room without the thing you actually need: “Because like it or not, you’re family. One of us. Don’t you ever forget it.”
I know relief when I feel it, a warm blanket of reassurance. I didn’t know I wanted the validation until I got it. Yeah, I can work with that. It feels good…belonging.
Having a family.
“Roger that, boss.”
Then I get out before she can see the emotion on my face.
The hall outside her office is dim and quiet, the compound settling into its afternoon rhythm, and I stand in it for a second with my hand still on the door I’ve just closed.
I walk back toward my quarters guided down the quiet hallway by the dim overhead lights, my leg complaining, the whiskey finally starting to make me pay with a wave of nausea and a brewing headache.
And my intrusive thoughts begin to attack.
I think it might be possible to have two families.
To belong to the living, to Vesper, Lance and Cricket, Linc and Eden, and even Mouse.
To belong to this cold beautiful machine called justice, or vengeance.
Same thing, different packaging. But I also still belong to five men in the ground on the other side of the world, buried under a lie.
The living family, I can hold. They’re right here.
It’s the dead one that won’t let me sleep.
My brothers are restless in their graves. Ten years, and they’re still down there in the wrong story, tags cold, the fifth one I couldn’t reach still out there somewhere in the ash.
Waiting for me to stop taking the easy way out.
Waiting for me to stop being a coward.
They waited a long, long time. And now their time has come.