Page 24 of The Jackal

I'd spent my whole life loving things that came home broken or didn't come home at all. I had finally, finally gotten comfortable being the one who stayed. And one stupid blonde launch across a courtyard had cracked the whole thing wide open and reminded me I was still in there, still wanting, still that girl who jumped before she checked for a net.

"You make it safe, and then you wait," I told Max, trying it on. "You can't hurry a living thing into trusting you."

Max sighed again. The light moved on the wall.

I didn't know if I was the one doing the waiting or the one who needed to be waited on. Maybe both. Maybe that was the whole trouble with men like Cash and dogs like Max and women like me—we were, all of us, standing at our own gates, weight on our toes, watching a door, too scared of the wrong answer to go find out the right one.

But he'd asked me to dinner. And I'd said yes. And for once in my careful, leave-before-you're-left life, I wasn't going to talk myself out of finding out.

I stayed with Max until the light went out of the windows. Then, I went home to get ready, my heart pounding the whole way.

12

CASH

Some days, the world hands you one thing that changes it. That day, Charleston handed me two, and the first one had already driven off down a green tunnel of road with sad eyes and my heart riding shotgun.

The second was waiting for me inside.

I went up the steps and through the big front doors, and a man met me in the entry. Older, straight-backed, in a dark suit pressed to a knife's edge, with the still competence of a person who's spent a long life being exactly where he's needed and nowhere he isn't. A butler, if that word still means anything. He didn't ask my name. He'd been told to expect me, the way everyone in this place seemed to have been told to expect me. I was getting used to being the last man in every room to understand why.

"This way, sir," he said, and turned, and I followed him into the house.

It was the kind of house that swallows sound. Long halls, paintings and portraits, the cool hush of money. We passed a corridor lined floor to ceiling with photographs—men, soldiers, a whole wall of hard-jawed faces I felt that same tug from, the one I'd felt in the courtyard, the name on the tip of a tongue that wouldn't come. The butler didn't slow. I didn't ask. We went on.

He brought me to a set of double doors, opened them, and stood aside.

The room beyond was built for a council of war. A table ran most of its length, dark wood polished to a shine, long enough to seat fifty men and set for none. High windows down one side let in the light. The far end of the room sat in shadow against all that brightness, and there was a man standing down there, his back to me, looking out at the water.

Not Brock.

I'd expected Brock. He'd pointed me at these doors with a wink and a take-your-time, and some part of me had walked in braced for my brother and whatever briefing came with him.

This wasn't Brock. This man was taller in the wrong way, set different through the shoulders, and older—I could read the age in how he stood, the stillness that only comes to a body that's held still for a great many years. He hadn't turned. He stood with his hands clasped behind him and his face to the harbor. Something about the shape of him against that bright window reached the length of the room and laid a hand flat on my chest.

The butler closed the doors behind me. I never heard him go.

I stood there a moment. I'm a man who reads a room before he's fully in it, who has the count and the exits and the threat before his second boot is through the door. For once, I had nothing. No read. No name. Just a shape at a window and a feeling climbing up out of the floor of me that I hadn't felt since I was a boy.

Then, it started to come together. Slow. The way a face rises up out of dark water.

I knew that set of shoulders.

I started walking. Down the length of that endless table, past chair after empty chair, my boots loud on a floor built to carry sound to the head of the room. With every step, the thing in my chest got bigger and surer and harder to breathe around.

He heard me coming. Of course, he did. He let me come the whole way, gave me the distance to arrive at it on my own, which was a mercy and a courtesy and so exactly like him that I knew before he moved.

He turned.

And I was looking at my father.

"I knew you weren't dead," I said. My voice came out rough, not my own. "I knew it. I always knew it."

Byron Dane looked at his son across three feet of light. His eyes were already wet, and he nodded like a man setting down something he'd carried too far and too long.

"I knew I couldn't hide it from you, Cash," he said. "Not from you. Never from you."

And then, I was across the last of the distance and we had hold of each other—two big, hard men who'd spent their whole lives not breaking, breaking.