Chapter 31 #5
Ferguson spoke behind him. “Always Faithful, Always Forward.” Ferguson’s voice roughened. “You forgot the first part a long fucking time ago.”
The MPs led him out, and silence followed. Nobody moved for several seconds after the footsteps disappeared down the corridor. Tyrone had expected relief, but instead, grief rolled through the room so heavily he could almost fucking taste it.
Nobody had captured an HVT today. Nobody had eliminated a threat and come home ready to celebrate.
They had discovered that one of the men who had stood among them, led them, and shared their losses had been responsible for creating the one that had stunned a nation and destroyed most of their lives.
Ferguson sat heavily on the nearest bench. “Fuck.” He rubbed both hands over his face. “On my fucking retirement day.”
A few strained laughs broke around the room. Exactly the sort of laugh men made when the alternative was something none of them were prepared to do in public.
Tyrone walked over and sat beside Ferguson. For a while, neither spoke.
Then Ferguson looked toward Dwight’s cage. “Electrolytes.”
Tyrone’s throat closed. “Fucking asshole.”
“Yeah.”
Ferguson’s mouth trembled, and Tyrone stared at the floor because sometimes a man gave his brother privacy without walking away.
“I believed him,” Ferguson said eventually.
“I know.”
“After Dwight died. Every fucking thing Sullivan told us about what happened, I believed him.”
“So did I.”
Ferg looked at him. “Did you?”
“For a while.”
“What changed?”
“A tiny kid I helped pull out of a trafficking ring in France, traced my tattoo with her fingers, and told me her daddy had a magic bird just like that.”
Ferguson’s eyebrows widened. “His daughter?”
“Kelsey.”
Ferguson stared at him for a long moment, and Tyrone watched the realization work its way across his face.
Ferg had known Dwight before Glenna and Kelsey ever existed, had stood in this room with him, deployed with him, bitched at him, and celebrated with him, yet Dwight had managed to keep an entire fucking family hidden from men who would have crossed continents if he’d ever called and said he needed them.
“Jesus Christ,” Ferguson breathed. “He had a daughter.” His gaze drifted back toward the empty cage. “That secretive son of a bitch had a little girl and never told us.”
“She was three when he died, and six when I met her.” Tyrone swallowed against the pressure building in his throat.
“She barely remembers him, Ferg. Glenna kept him alive for her with pictures and stories, but Kelsey didn’t know what the bird meant.
She only knew her daddy had one, and then she saw mine.
” He looked down at the Raider insignia inked into his skin, remembering those tiny fingers following its shape and the impossible moment when a dead man’s life had collided with his own.
“That’s when I knew there was something about Dwight none of us had known. I just didn’t know how fucking much.”
Ferguson leaned forward, forearms braced against his thighs, and for several seconds his attention stayed fixed on the cage across from them.
“I would’ve helped them.” The words came quietly, without any of the command that had once carried through this room. “If I’d known about Glenna and the kid after we lost him, I would’ve fucking helped them.”
Tyrone nodded because that was the part Sullivan had stolen from all of them too. Not only Dwight, but the chance to close ranks around the people he’d left behind.
Ferguson glanced toward the other Raiders still lingering around the room. “Every man in here would’ve.”
“I know.” Tyrone knew something else now too, something he hadn’t understood when he’d first stood inside Dwight’s cage waiting for Sullivan to walk through the door.
Glenna and Kelsey had spent years believing they were alone because nobody had known they existed, while the men who would have come running had spent those same years believing Dwight had left nobody behind.
Sullivan had taken advantage of that silence, but he didn’t own it anymore.
“They’ve got people now,” Tyrone said, and when Ferguson looked at him, he didn’t need to explain who those people were. “They’ve got my brothers in La Spezia. They’ve got me.”
Ferguson’s gaze held his for another second before something almost like a smile broke through the grief on his face. “Yeah, Zorro. I reckon they fucking do.”
Tyrone looked across at Dwight’s cage one last time and could almost see him sitting there again with those goddamn peanut M&M’s, laughing at his own bullshit while men around him threatened to shove the entire bag up his ass.
For years, this room had been one more place Tyrone carried Dwight’s death.
Today, for the first time, he could remember the life instead.
He pushed himself to his feet and held out a hand to Ferguson. “Come on, old man. Pretty sure somebody owes you a retirement party.”
Ferguson caught his hand and let Tyrone haul him upright. “After this shit, somebody owes me the whole fucking bar.”