Liam did—but right now, all his worry, all his heart, was invested in the thief of hearts at his side.
Liam’s watch buzzed as the bus rattled down the road, and a text from Carl appeared.
Clear.Good job.Alarm never went off.
Liam glanced at Josh again, and his eyes were closed as he seemed to go deep inside himself.Liam had seen him do this on the boat, when his weakness and recovery had seemed overwhelming.He’d close his eyes and find the solid place inside that would keep him tethered to this earth.
He pulled out his phone.Text Danny,he tapped, knowing that Carl would be in the back of a rideshare and wouldn’t have to argue with Josh about this.Tell him Josh needs to visit a doctor in Prague.Carefully, trying not to be obtrusive, he felt Josh’s forehead, and found it hot and dry.Tell him he’s spiking a fever and has had two more nosebleeds.
Fuck.
Yeah.See you in Prague.
Tell the kid he was amazing.
Will do.
And now Liam could see how Josh could boil his life down to “after the job.”The job was done—they had a bus ride, a long train ride, to rest, to plan, to hope, to worry.
To wonder what their lives would be after this big job that would make them all safer in the world.
And suddenly Liam realized how very little his own job meant to him now.For much of the ten years after that first encounter in an alleyway, Danny had fed Liam tips to find the true bad guys Interpol investigated, and with a little steering from Liam, his department had managed to ignore one small-potatoes, mostly altruistic thief.The things Dannyhadstolen—he was especially fond of sparkly things from corrupt crime families, which he would steal on the heels of replacing priceless works of art—had usually been excesses of rampant greed on the part of the original owners.He’d once stolen some oligarch’s second yacht—it had been recovered after being pawned for cash, which, Liam knew because he’d asked Lightfingers himself, had been given to a local homeless shelter, because Danny had been in a mood.
The things Liam had been chasing had been much like the things the rest of the team was chasing now.Guns.Drugs.Human trafficking.That had been good work, he’d thought then.
Now he was on the wrong side of the law but the right side of history, and his team was doing more good in three months than he’d done with government resources in the last five years.
He’d do this for the rest of his life, he thought wretchedly, hand convulsively squeezing Josh’s thigh again as he watched the beauties of Stuttgart pass by before his blind eyes.As long as he could have his thief of hearts beside him.
Prague
MAYBE ITwas because he’d had three parents, but Josh had never wanted one more than the other there for comfort.His mother, warm, maternal, or Felix, strong and masculine, were both great at feeding that place in a child that needed to be reassured and cared for.And Danny, kind, funny, intuitive, had been completely wonderful.Although admittedly during the years he’d been missing from the household, Josh had rather hoped for Danny more than the other two because it meant they could see each other.
This last year, as awful as the cancer had been, had filled up Josh’s reserves of Uncle Danny a little, repaired some of the damage done by missing him.
And the stories—from Liam, from Carl, from Tienne, even obliquely from Danny himself—had given Josh some insight into why Danny had needed to stay away.Josh’s generation was good at telling people they needed to take care of themselves before they could care for others.Danny had been doing that—fixing things in himself that had been damaged even before Julia and then Josh had come along—so when he returned for his family, he could be thisforce, this amazing, kind, avuncular figure of fun and reason and fair play.
And Josh’s Uncle Danny, who in spite of hurting—of screaming inside, Josh could see now—had been there through so much of Josh’s adolescence, even though it meant being in proximity to the one person who had hurt him the most.
So when he opened his eyes in the hospital in Prague, he was not surprised to see Uncle Danny there, the window behind him dark with night.But he was so terribly grateful.
His eyes burned as he let down the guards he’d held in place, the fears he’d held back.Because Liam had been trying so hard to be strong, Josh hadn’t wanted to freak him out more.
“There you are,” Danny said with a smile, his eyes tired.“I’ve been texting your mother.She seems to think you were sleeping late simply to annoy her.”
Josh found he was too tired to smile back.“That’s a lie.She’s been trying to get me to sleep more since I was seven.”
“Yes, but now that you’re grown, she expects more,” Danny rejoined, but the levity was forced, even Josh could see it.Apparently Danny felt it, because his demeanor softened, became less brittlely cheerful.“Or maybe I should say she hopes for more,” he said quietly.“How are you, my boy?And not the ‘I’m fine’ you fed to Liam.He saw through that, by the way—it’s why he stopped asking.”
Josh nodded, barely remembering the ambulance ride from the train to the hospital.Liam had told him they’d arranged for the ambulance to meet them in Prague about midway through the train ride, when “resting” became more like “loss of consciousness.”
The ambulance had been the compromise between taking a cab or Liam demanding they stop the train and administer aidimmediately.
Josh groaned and looked at the now-familiar lines of fluid—a saline drip and the more ominous red blood transfusion—being administered into ports in the back of his hand.
“This again?”he whispered, grateful his head had stopped pounding.Anemia did that, but so did leukemia.
“We don’t know,” Danny said softly.“You could have been right the first time—anemia from overdoing it.You should have seen a doctor in Stuttgart, but Liam said you were being stubborn.”
