Page 99 of Nothing Special X: The Last Stand

He could call in an anonymous tip. Try to reach Xander’s manager or agent. But how could he do that without sounding like some unstable fan?

River stared at his phone until the screen dimmed.

He didn’t know how he was going to do it, but he had to get close enough to Xander Vale to warn him.

Syn

Four days was a long time to sit in another man’s house pretending the rest of the world wasn’t still moving.

Syn hadn’t left Ro and Johnson’s place once.

Not to work, the shop, the corner store for food, nowhere.

He’d sat in the same spot on Ro’s front porch, since eight this morning, the swing barely moving beneath him.

He wasn’t rocking to relax, or doing any of the things people did when they sat outside in a quiet suburban neighborhood at the end of the day.

He was just existing there, elbows on his knees, fingers clasped loosely, staring past the manicured lawns and clean sidewalks.

Syn had been hurt before. He’d been shot, stabbed, stitched up, dog-tired from long shifts. He knew physical pain and exhaustion. He knew rage, guilt, fear, and frustration.

But he didn’t know this.

Loss.

The loss of Furi’s long hair sliding between his fingers, of hearing his laugh at the end of the night, his taste. The loss of his warmth, the void in the empty space beside him when he slept.

He missed him so badly it hurt everywhere.

And that pissed him off, because missing Furi didn’t cancel out what had happened. Loving him didn’t make the lie okay. Wanting to go home didn’t negate the contract his partner signed without talking to him first.

But underneath all the anger, another voice started whispering.

You should’ve handled your responsibilities, and he wouldn’t’ve had to do it.

That damn voice didn’t care that he’d worked himself to the bone, or that he’d taken every shift, delivery order, and humiliation that came with it. He’d tried so hard, God, he’d tried—to keep a roof over their heads, the shop running, food in the house, the bills paid.

He’d failed.

Look how bad you let it get before Furi had to jump in and save you?

Syn pressed his palms against his closed lids.

His skin felt rough. He hadn’t shaved, slept or eaten much of anything Ro put in front of him, hadn’t said much either.

Ro stopped trying to fill the silence by the second day.

Johnson gave him space in the way quiet men did. He’d left plates wrapped in foil on the kitchen counter, bottles of water near the porch, a clean towel in the guest bathroom each night, and the TV remote on the couch just in case he got tired of the nothing.

He sat on the porch from sunup to sundown, watching the neighborhood.

He knew the woman across the street watered her porch plants at six-thirty every evening. The retired man two houses down walked his terrier at seven-fifteen in the morning, went to play golf for roughly three hours, then came home and walked his dog at five forty-five.

A teenage girl with purple braids got dropped off after cheer practice at four-twenty, always slamming the car door before her mother could finish yelling something after her.

The mailman came by at noonish and cursed each time someone blocked their driveway with their car and he had to get out to put the mail in the box.

The couple on the corner argued every afternoon in their garage, because the husband took too long to stop working on his seventy-six Chevy and come inside for dinner before it got cold.