Chapter 11 #2
Finally, he asks, “What do you want to do?”
Vesper doesn’t answer right away. Eventually, she looks at Eden. I watch Eden hold her gaze then give the smallest nod, silently telling Vesper to ignore her gut, and honor the sanctity between siblings.
When Vesper addresses Sylvie again, her tone has changed. “I’m sorry. I made Erin two promises.”
Sylvie goes very still.
“One I kept.” Vesper’s eyes move to Cricket, and something heavy and mournful crosses her expression. “One I broke. For ten years I’ve carried that guilt.” Her gaze slides back to Sylvie. “And now, it seems, I have a chance to make it right.”
Sylvie’s eyes have returned to gleaming emeralds.
Clear as crystal, with hurt behind them.
“Erin?” The name comes out of her strange and searching.
She turns to Cricket, then back to Vesper.
I watch her try to make the puzzle pieces fit, thrown in a way I’ve never seen her thrown. “What did you promise my mother?”
Cricket, quick and smooth, with a hand landing on her sister’s arm, heads it off.
“I’ll tell you,” she says gently. “Soon. I promise. But not tonight. It’s not a story for tonight.
” She squeezes. “Okay? Trust me. There’s a lot, and you deserve to know the truth about our father, but not in front of an audience.
” Her gaze circles the table then, and her voice sharpens back to a blade.
“See? She has just as many questions as the rest of you. More, probably. She just watched her own sister come back from the dead too, in case anyone forgot. So maybe cool it with the accusations.” A beat. “Fucking vultures, all of you.”
And that’s when I stand up.
The chair scrapes back loud in the quiet. Every head turns to me, confused. I’ve been a statue this whole time, and now I’m on my feet.
Vesper’s brow lifts. “Sit down, Callen. Family meeting.”
“Eden’s right. Is this really the night for this?” It comes out steadier than I feel. “There’s nothing we’re going to learn tonight that we can’t learn tomorrow, with everyone rested and nobody bleeding. Give them the night.” I finally make myself glance at Vesper.
Cricket seizes my support instantly. “Yes. God, yes, thank you, Callen. Some fucking common sense. I’m taking Saoirse home. Tonight. This is done.” She’s already standing, already pulling her sister up with her.
Vesper studies me for a long moment, and I have the uncomfortable certainty that she sees more than I want her to. But she nods, once. “Morning,” she agrees.
I don’t wait to hear the rest.
I walk out, and I let the door slam behind me.
It’s the loudest thing I’ve done all night.
SYLVIE
THE DOOR BANGS shut behind Callen, and the whole room flinches at the sound of it.
Linc lets out a low breath and shakes his head.
“Huh. Odd.” He looks at me. Some of the ice has gone out of him, replaced by something more tired and more honest. “Normally he’s a puppy dog, that one.
Softest guy in the building. I’ve never seen him storm out of anything.
” He rubs the back of his neck. “Look, Sylvie. I’m sorry.
I’m not trying to be an ass. I really am not.
But my family is the most important thing in the world to me.
Every person at this table.” He nods toward Cricket, who’s still got one hand wrapped around my arm like I might vanish.
“Even stabby over here. Especially stabby over here. I’d burn the world down for these people, and when something dangerous I can’t explain walks through the door, I—”
“You get protective,” I finish for him.
“Yeah.” He almost smiles. “That.”
“I understand it,” I say, and I mean it, which surprises me. “Better than you’d think. No harm done. Except to Callen, apparently.”
Vesper’s already moving on, gathering her things, the meeting adjourned by Callen’s exit whether she likes it or not. “He’ll be fine,” she says, not to me exactly, to the room. “He’s been sensitive lately. A personal upheaval. He’ll come around by morning.”
I know the smart play, the professional play, is to let him walk, to let the wall go up, to take the out he just handed me and disappear into the night with my sister and figure out the rest when we’re done running.
But I’m already on my feet.
“I’ll just let him know I come in peace,” I say, wriggling free of Fiona’s death grip, moving for the door. “Let me clear the air. Give me two minutes.” Pleading with my big sister takes me back to our childhood. Me begging. Her being a mother to me even when we were both in single digits.
“Sylvie—” Vesper warns.
I don’t stop. I ignore the weight of the room, ignore Vesper’s protest, ignore my sister’s questioning look, and I push through the door into the hallway after him.
He’s already halfway down it, long strides eating the distance, shoulders set like he’s carrying something too heavy to put down. The corridor’s dim, low light, the compound gone quiet around us.
“Callen.”
He doesn’t stop.
I catch up and get my hand around his wrist. He goes still under my fingers, but he doesn’t turn for a second.
When he finally does, his face is shut. Locked down.
He glares at me and says nothing at all, and it’s so much worse than anger.
Anger I could work with. This is a door closing. A wall being built.
“Stop,” I say. “Please. Just—stop.”
“You lied to me.” His voice is flat and low. “After I asked you not to. That night, at my place…I asked you for the truth. No games. And you looked me in the eye and gave me a car and a sob story and let me—” He cuts himself off. Swallows hard. “You lied.”
“About what, exactly?” It comes out sharper than I want, because I’m scared but I don’t know of what.
Of ruining my mission? Or of tearing this fragile thing we stitched between us?
“Yes. Fiona, or Cricket as you guys call her, is my sister. I didn’t know she’d be here tonight, Callen.
I didn’t know she was alive. We’ve been on one real date.
Was I supposed to dump the entirety of my childhood trauma on you?
Yes, I’m a killer. Just like you. Just like every single person in the room we just walked out of.
But I’m also here because I stole a car, and I am on the run, and all of these things can be true at the same time.
” I’m pleading now and I hate myself for it.
“I am just as blindsided as you are. More so. My dead sister just resurrected, walked across a bar, and held me like we haven’t been apart for a decade.
My head is spinning too. So tonight of all nights, please. Do not give me a hard time about this.”
He looks at me for a long moment. My hand still clasped around his wrist.
“Do you understand what PALADIN is to me?”
I half shrug. “A job?”
“Wrong.” He shakes his head slowly. “God, that’s—that’s the whole problem.
You’re the type of woman who sees a family and registers a job instead.
” He exhales. “They’re not my coworkers.
They’re not just my friends. They’re my everything now.
The only thing I’ve got left, after…everything.
Those people are the reason I’m still standing.
” Something crosses his face, and he shakes his head like he’s trying to clear a bad memory out of it.
“Which means, I guess, in a strange way…” He almost laughs, but it’s hollow.
Amusement at a sick irony. “That makes you my family now too.”
“Callen—”
“I’ll get used to it.” He says it more to himself than to me. “I will. We’re okay. I’ve just had too many surprises. Way too many, in too few weeks. I need some time to get my feet under me. That’s all.” He straightens. Pulls his wrist gently out of my hand.
And then he does the worst possible thing I could think of.
He holds his hand out. To shake mine.
“Welcome home. Or welcome back. Whatever this is.” It’s so formal. A man greeting a colleague. “It’s good to have you with us.”
I stare at his outreached hand like it’s a slap to the face.
“A handshake?” My voice cracks and I let it. “You’re offering me a handshake? After what we did the other night? After you held my hand in public two days ago like it meant something—”
“As of right now, that officially didn’t happen.” Callen’s tone goes cold, final, that now-closed door bolting shut.
The hallway tilts and I try to keep my balance.
“So that’s it? That’s it for us? Over before we started?”
“We were inconvenient before.” He lets his unshaken hand drop back to his side.
“A bad idea I kept making anyway. But now you’re Cricket’s sister.
That changes everything which means whatever this was…
it’s not inconvenient anymore. It’s impossible.
” He nods, like he’s confirming it for himself.
“So. Yeah. That’s it for us. Over before we started. ”
He turns to go, but after taking two steps, he stops and looks back at me over his shoulder. I hate this look—soft and unbearably sad, like he’s the monster for once.
“Goodnight, Saoirse.” It’s my real name, in his mouth, for the very first time, and it physically hurts. “And for the record, that’s a beautiful name. It suits you a lot better than all the other ones.”
He walks off down the dim hall, and the dark shadows swallow him.
I’m left standing alone in the middle of the corridor in a red dress that suddenly feels like a costume, with my sister alive one room behind me and the only man who’s ever wiped me clean walking away in front, and I realize I have absolutely no idea, for the first time in my life, which way to go.