Page 2 of Falcon’s Forever

"Hey," I say, and my voice comes out wrong, it’s cracked in a way it never cracks during a raid. "Hey, I've got you. You're safe."

She flinches at my hand before it even touches her arm, and something in my chest tears clean down the middle at that, at the fact that a hand reaching for her means something other than help in whatever world she's been living in. I pull back and let her turn toward the light on her own.

And that’s when the world stops.

Five years disappears in half a second. Five years of a closet with her clothes still in it because I couldn't make myself clear it out. Five years of telling brothers I was fine when Cara's name came up, of drinking until fine stopped needing to be a lie I told out loud. Five years of hating a woman I now understand never left me at all.

"Cara," I say, and it isn't a question, because I'd know her in the dark at the bottom of the ocean.

Her eyes find mine. Recognition floods in behind the fear, and something else behind that, something that might be shame, might be disbelief, might be five years of a story she's been telling herself about why nobody came.

"You weren't supposed to see me like this," she whispers.

The sentence breaks something in me that I don't think finishes breaking for a long time after. Because that's what she's carrying, after everything, after five years I can't undo and won't ever be able to make sense of, she's worried about what I think of her, as if any of this could ever be about that.

"I've got you now," I tell her, and my voice isn't steady anymore and I don't try to make it be. "You're coming home."

She doesn't move toward me. Doesn't reach for me the way some buried, desperate part of me wants her to. She just watches me with eyes that don't fully believe I'm real yet, and I understand, even through the rage building somewhere under my ribs, rage at whoever did this, rage at myself for five years of not looking hard enough, that belief is going to take longer than one warehouse floor to rebuild.

I carry her out myself. I don't let anyone else near her, not because I don't trust my brothers, but because some primal, wrecked part of me needs to be the one whose arms she's in when she finally leaves this place behind, even if she doesn't want them to be.

She's stiff the whole way to the truck. Flinches at the sound of engines starting. She goes quiet which I know has nothing to do with peace.

I don't know yet what the next five months are going to cost either of us. I don't know about the note that wasn't hers, about the fabricated footage that made me stop looking after three months when I should have kept going, about all the ways I'm going to fail her again before I learn how not to.

I only know one thing, standing in that yard with her too-light weight in my arms and the whole world narrowed down to the fact that she's breathing.

I'm never letting her out of my sight again.

I have absolutely no idea yet how wrong that promise is going to turn out to be, or how long it's going to take both of us to learn that love isn't the same thing as never letting go.

Chapter 1

Falcon

Iwake up angry. That's the norm these days.

Not because someone's decided seven in the morning is an acceptable hour to murder Metallica two rooms down, though whoever's doing it is skating close to losing speaker privileges. It’s not the stale whiskey either, sitting behind my teeth like punishment. I'm angry because for three seconds after I open my eyes, I forget. My brain gives me three seconds of peace where the world is exactly the way it's been for five years. Cara is gone, I failed her, and I've already learned how to live with the hole she left.

Then I hear a woman's laugh somewhere down the hall. It isn't hers, but it's enough to drag me back.

Cara is alive. She's twenty yards away, give or take, depending which room she's in at the women's house.

After five years of believing she walked away from me, after five years of hating her because hating her hurt less than admitting I still loved her, she's sleeping inside my compound. I sit up and plant my feet on the floor, rubbing both hands over my face. Knowing she's alive should have fixed something, that's what people would expect. You get the miracle. The woman you loved isn't dead. She didn't leave because she stopped loving you. Every year you spent wondering what you did wrong was built on a lie.

You're supposed to be grateful. I am. I'm also so fucking furious I don't know where to put it.

I'm angry at Castellano, at every man who touched her, and angriest at myself for not finding her sooner. I’m angry at the universe for handing her back while leaving five years of wreckage between us that I've no idea how to cross. Mostly I'm angry because there's no target left. Castellano's dead. Kane died the same year, one more body pulled out of the wreckage the night the Reapers came apart. The operation's been gutted. Cara's safe, and I still wake up every morning feeling like I failed her anyway.

My cut hangs over the back of the chair. Vice President. Two words stitched into leather that used to mean something. Lately every time I look at them, I wonder if I'm still the man who earned them.

I get up, pull on jeans and a black thermal, tuck my gun into the back of my jeans, then reach for the cut. The leather feels heavy on my shoulders the way it always has. I feel steadier the second it's on. The patch doesn't care how badly I slept. The club doesn't care that my head's fucked, and the men who depend on me shouldn't have to care either.

Outside my door, the clubhouse is already awake. The smell of bacon hits me before I reach the stairs, which means Harrier's cooking. Nobody appointed him clubhouse chef, mostly because he'd tell us all to fuck off if we tried, but somewhere along the way he decided the rest of us couldn't be trusted to survive on burned toast and gas-station coffee.

Carrot, a prospect, comes tearing around the corner at the bottom of the stairs with a laundry basket stacked high enough to blind him. He nearly walks straight into me, catches himself, and half the towels slide onto the floor. I grab one before it lands in something I don't want to identify.

"Shit. Sorry, Falcon." I’m sure I can see him shaking.