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“It’s tomorrow morning. They can get him admitted the day after if they get all the test results in time.”
I nodded. “Tate called them from the car. He had them email the release to your email address. He’ll sign it today.”
We both fell silent, but I knew it wasn’t over. My hunch was confirmed when Ronan said, “So that’s it? I don’t hear from you for two weeks and when you do finally call, it’s to ask me to find a place that will treat a kid with leukemia. What the fuck is going on, Hawke?”
I took my time working the first wrap off, but my intent wasn’t to annoy Ronan, though I’m sure it did. No, I did it because I was trying to gather my courage to admit to this man, to my friend, what I’d done. Shame wasn’t something I felt often, but from the moment I’d held my gun on Tate and his son even after I knew that Tate wasn’t one of the men I’d been looking for, it was all I felt. But even now as it coursed through me, the need for vengeance was still stronger.
“His father and brother killed Revay,” I finally spit out.
“Tate’s?”
I nodded, unwilling to share the fact that they were also Matty’s father and brother. In my mind, Matty was Tate’s son and always would be despite what the DNA said.
“Fuck,” I heard Ronan mutter and I looked up to see him turning away from me so he could begin pacing. It was something he’d done in front of me before, but I knew he’d let very few other people see him like this.
The Ronan I knew was very different from the persona Ronan shared with others and that had always been strangely comforting to me. I’d met Ronan ten years earlier when Revay and I had been wheeled into the ER at Brooke Army Medical Center the night she had been attacked. Although I’d been badly burned, I’d still been conscious and the ER had been in such a state of chaos that no one had noticed when I’d climbed off the gurney I’d been rolled in on and searched out the room Revay had been taken to. A young doctor had been frantically working on her with only a single nurse to help him. He’d spared me only a glance as he’d worked on my wife and he hadn’t tried to make me leave which I wouldn’t have done anyway. I was never sure if he’d let me stay because he’d known it was what I’d needed or because he’d known I wouldn’t have left.
Either way, his eyes had connected with mine for the briefest of moments and then his only focus had been Revay. I hadn’t been able to make sense of any of the words he and another doctor on the other side of the large room had kept yelling to each other, but I had understood exactly what it meant when my wife’s heart monitor had begun screaming and the line on it had gone flat. Everything afterwards had been a blur as the doctor had begun slicing into her body with a scalpel. For all the gruesome things I’d seen and done during my career in the army, I hadn’t been able to bear to watch my wife’s blood pour from her body as the heart monitor reminded me she was already gone, so I’d dropped to the floor and covered my head with my hands and sobbed like a child as I’d tried to come to terms with the fact that my best friend had left me. I’d had no idea how long I’d sat there for, but I’d steeled myself for the words that would confirm my worst fear when I’d felt a hand come to rest gently on my shoulder.
I hadn’t heard the words…I hadn’t heard anything the doctor had said to me. What I had heard was the steady, rhythmic beeping of my wife’s heart monitor and I’d scrambled to my feet to take her burned, bloody hand in mine as she was being moved to another floor. I’d had three days with her after that. Three days to tell her everything I thought I’d have a lifetime to say. And despite the agony my own burns had been causing me, I’d only felt true pain when she’d told me she loved me for the last time, just before a tube was inserted into her throat to help her breathe. Three days and then she was gone.
I hadn’t seen Ronan after that night in the ER, but our paths had crossed again four years later when I’d learned of an attack on Ronan and his lover, Trace, who’d happened to be Seth’s older brother. Ronan and Trace had been ambushed by several soldiers from Trace’s unit while they’d been stationed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Both men had been brutally beaten and then each had been sodomized with a metal pipe. Ronan had survived the attack. Trace hadn’t. My heart had gone out to the surgeon and his dead partner, but it wasn’t until I’d overheard some soldiers bragging about the attack a month later that I’d seen an opportunity to pay Ronan back for what he’d done for me. I hadn’t even felt a speck of guilt when I’d abducted the man who’d been the ringleader of the attack, and I’d had no issue with helping Ronan seek out his own form of justice when the army refused to acknowledge the brutal crime or punish any of the men involved. After that, I’d watched as Ronan took out every last man who’d tortured him and stolen his future away, and a few months later when Ronan had built an underground organization that could do the same thing for other victims, but on a larger scale, I hadn’t hesitated to sign on.
