Chapter 31
Tyrone sat behind the wheel for another thirty seconds after killing the engine, staring through the windshield at a place he hadn’t expected to see again, with a phone in one hand and the weight of too many years sitting squarely between his shoulders.
He could have told himself he was checking the time or giving the men already gathering inside another minute before he walked through the door, but there wasn’t much point lying to himself when he was about to spend the next hour finding out how many lies Sullivan could tell before the truth buried him.
He opened the message thread with Gunnar first.
Zorro: Going in.
The reply came before Tyrone could close the screen.
Grizzly: Copy. Call when you’re clear.
That was Grizzly. No questions Tyrone had already answered, no last-minute warning to keep his shit together, and no offer to get on a plane because Gunnar knew he would have asked if he needed him.
His team had done their part. Remi had dug through years of financial records, communications, and digital breadcrumbs until Sullivan’s secrets weren’t secrets anymore, and Gunnar had made sure every piece of evidence went where it needed to go.
What happened inside was for Tyrone and for Dwight.
He backed out of the thread and opened Glenna’s.
For a moment, he stared at her name. Leaving her at the hotel that morning had gone against every instinct he’d developed since she’d walked into his life.
Although bringing her here would have been a mistake.
They’d taken all the precautions they could, which was why she was at the hotel under guard from a McKinley contact and not here for the ceremony with him.
Sullivan knew who Glenna was. He knew exactly what she meant to Dwight, and he wasn’t prepared to risk the son of a bitch seeing her beside him and realizing something had changed before he was ready to show his hand.
More importantly, Glenna had spent enough of the last few weeks surrounded by lawyers, operators, cops, kidnappers, traffickers, dead bodies, and men digging through the worst parts of her life.
She did not need to spend today standing in a room full of Raiders while Tyrone ripped open something that belonged to both of their pasts.
Unfortunately, telling Glenna to stay at the hotel and relax would have gone about as well as telling Chaos not to chase something with fur.
So, he wasn’t afraid to admit that he’d called in the big guns and sent a message to the Four X’s wives the night before and asked if they could come up with something to keep Glenna occupied for the day.
Apparently, asking a group of women with money, imagination, and absolutely no respect for moderation to arrange what he had described as some ‘girl shit’ had been the equivalent of tossing a grenade into an ammunition dump.
The wives had more than risen to the occasion.
By the time Glenna woke that morning, the hotel spa had apparently been expecting her, and appointments had been made for things Tyrone didn’t know existed.
Lunch was included somewhere in the middle, and Jorja had sent enough instructions to make the whole thing sound suspiciously like an operation.
He hadn’t asked what it cost because he enjoyed having functioning kidneys, and Gunnar’s only contribution when Tyrone mentioned it had been to tell him he was a fucking idiot if he thought any of their wives would let Glenna pay for a damn thing.
Zorro: Hope you’re enjoying your girl shit day.
Three dots appeared almost immediately.
Glenna: It’s called a spa day, you uncultured swine.
Only she could have dragged a smile to his lips today, and he wasn’t one bit mad about it.
Zorro: Same shit.
Glenna: I currently have hot stones on my back, and someone is bringing me champagne. You’re dead to me.
There she is.
Something tight inside his chest eased.
Zorro: Sounds terrible.
Glenna: I’m suffering bravely.
Zorro: Proud of you.
This time the dots took longer to appear.
Glenna: You okay?
Of course, she understood how hard this day was for him.
He rubbed his thumb along the edge of his phone.
He hadn’t lied to her about where he was going.
She knew Ferguson’s retirement was today and knew he intended to attend.
What she didn’t know was that Remi’s evidence was sitting in a folder on the passenger seat or that Sullivan was expected to be there.
He wasn’t keeping it from her forever. He just needed to keep her safe while his took the asshole who ruined her life apart inch by inch.
Zorro: Yeah, Glens. Enjoy your day. I’ll see you later.
The reply came a few seconds later.
Glenna: You better.
Then another message appeared.
Glenna: Love you, Ty.
Tyrone almost stopped breathing as he read it twice.
They had danced around the words, come close enough that both of them knew what was between them without putting a label on it, but apparently Glenna had decided a hotel spa somewhere in North Carolina was where subtlety went to die.
A laugh left him as he dropped his head against the seat. “Jesus Christ, woman.”
He typed three words, deleted them, typed them again, and stared at the screen because saying them for the first time in a fucking text message felt wrong enough to offend him on principle.
Zorro: Tell me that tonight.
Her answer came immediately.
Glenna: Chicken.
“Absolutely.” He found a smiley face and texted it to her, then put the phone down before she could do any more damage, picked up the folder, and got out of the truck.
By the time he reached Ferguson’s retirement gathering, Ferg had already been swallowed by men determined to make sure he understood exactly how fucking old they thought he was.
That helped. Tyrone had expected walking back into this part of his life to feel heavier, but the first thing he heard was somebody accusing Ferguson of having served at Tun Tavern, followed by Ferg inviting the man to perform an anatomically ambitious act that suggested impending retirement had done nothing for his vocabulary.
Laughter rolled through the group, and for a while Tyrone allowed himself to be dragged into handshakes, shoulder grips, and the rough affection of men who could go years without seeing each other and resume giving each other shit before anybody bothered asking how life had been.
Some faces had changed more than others.
Hair had grayed or disappeared, old injuries had settled into permanent stiffness, and men he remembered being built like brick shithouses had acquired the small layer of comfort that came from no longer having their physical condition scrutinized for a living.
Others looked irritatingly close to the way Tyrone remembered them, which he intended to hold against the bastards.
Ferguson spotted him through the crowd. “Zorro.”
Tyrone barely had time to brace before Ferg crossed the space and wrapped him in the kind of hug men like them pretended was actually an attempt to crack ribs. “You made it.”
“Told you I would.”
“You’ve told me a lot of shit.”
“Most of it true.”
“Bullshit.”
Tyrone grinned as they separated. “You look old.”
“Fuck you.”
“Retirement agrees with you already.”
“I’m not retired for another two hours.”
“Better get some work done, then.”
Ferguson flipped him off and immediately got dragged away by somebody demanding his attention, leaving Tyrone standing among men who had once known almost every version of him except the one he was now. That thought followed him when the gathering began drifting toward the team room.
The first sight of the cages stopped him harder than he expected.
Different gear occupied them now, different names belonged to the Raiders who would walk in tomorrow, pull on kit, and spin up for whatever mission waited for them, and that was how it was supposed to work.
Teams survived turnover because the mission didn’t give a shit about nostalgia.
His feet carried him where Dwight’s cage had been.
He stopped outside it, looking through the wire at equipment belonging to another Raider, and memories slammed into him of Dwight sitting on the bench fucking with a strap that refused to cooperate.
Dwight stealing food and denying it with crumbs still in his beard.
Dwight geared up and suddenly serious when word came down that it was go-time.
The two of them checked each other’s straps and flaks, because trust didn’t mean assuming your brother had gotten everything right.
It meant making damn sure he had. They had spun up from this room, and they had come home to it.
Some nights they’d returned carrying the electric satisfaction of a clean operation and an HVT captured or permanently removed from their deck of most-wanted cards, the room filling with adrenaline, exhaustion, and enough shit-talking to make anyone outside their world question their sanity.
Other nights there had been blood on their BDUs and empty spaces where men should have been, and nobody celebrated a fucking thing.
This room had held extremes of every emotion known to man, and that was what made it theirs.
Not the cages.
Not the weapons.
The brothers in arms who had each other’s sixes every day of their lives.
He stepped into what had once been Dwight’s space and rested one hand against the wire.
“You always did steal his shit.” Ferguson’s voice came from behind him.
Tyrone looked over his shoulder. “Pretty sure this belongs to somebody else now.”
“Didn’t mean the cage.”
Huh? Does he know about Glenna and Kelsey?
Ferg stepped closer, looked toward the back corner, and the corner of his mouth quirked up. “He used to hide peanut M&M’s back there because you assholes kept eating them.”
Tyrone stared at him. “He told me he stopped buying them.”
“He lied.”
“That motherfucker.”