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"Well, you gonna invite me in or am I gonna have to stand out here with your deadbushes?"
Axe hesitated, no doubt not wanting to invite his old friend in to see how far he'd fallen in life. Well fuck that shit. It was time Axe Alvarez joined the livingagain.
The men walked back to the front door. For a second, Ryder worried he'd be turned away, but Axe reluctantly pushed through the screen door, holding it open for his oldfriend.
A stale odor saturated the air. It was the perfect scent to accompany the deteriorated-looking occupant and possessions that lived there. Stopping shy of being declared a hovel, the space was appalling. Old wrappers from past carryouts mingled with dirty clothes, heaped wherever the wearer had shed them. A thin sheen of dust covered anything that wasn't used regularly, telling a tale of long-termneglect.
His friend cleared a place to sit in one of the few comfortable looking chairs in the living room. Ryder sat first, with Axe taking a seat in the worn recliner that looked like it doubled as his bed, based on the pillow and blanket in a basket next to theseat.
He scanned the space before locking eyes with his friend and hitting the elephant in the room head on. "I love what you've done with theplace."
"Fuck you." Ryder was satisfied with the spark of anger that leapt into Axe's eyes. It meant there was still something there. A piece of his old friend that he might try to ignite like kindling at abonfire.
Anger was better thanapathy.
"I'd ask how you've been, but Iknow."
"You don't knowshit."
Ryder took a deep breath, exhaling before admitting, "You're right. I couldn't possibly understand what you wentthrough."
As the words left his mouth, the nightmare of Artel Volkov victoriously standing over a naked Khloe flashed before his eyes. It was the closest analogy he could come up with to fathom the pain Axe had lived through in the last three years. Still, he knew the torture wasn't evenclose.
"You mean what I'mgoingthrough," Axe correctedhim.
His Aunt Ginny had warned him in an email that Axe still clung to hope like a life-raft adrift in the ocean. He suspected it was none of his fucking business how Axe chose to handle his grief. Who the hell was he to barge in after all these years and judge hisfriend?
But then he remembered Axe was the closest thing Ryder had had, and would ever have, to a brother. Both had been only children, growing up in the shadows of their powerful fathers. When Axe's father had been killed in an MC deal gone bad, Ryder's own father had taken him in as if he were his own son. The inseparable teenage boys had shared a bedroom like brothers for the two years leading up to Ryder's father's arrest on his seventeenthbirthday.
The teenagers had been placed at a crossroads in their lives at a young age–to follow in their fathers’ footsteps at the helm of the powerful motorcycle crime family they'd grown up in, winding up dead or in jail... or enlist in the Marines and use their pent-up anger as fuel to fight evil in the world. They'd enlisted together, fighting the good fight for four years in Afghanistan and Iraq before Ryder had been recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency and Axe had come home to be a husband andfather.
Now, fourteen years later, Ryder had burned himself and would forever have to look over his shoulder for a boogieman named Volkov, and still, he knew he'd gotten the better end of thedeal.
"Have you gotten any new leads?" he asked, hopeful Axe wasn't just indenial.
His friend polished off the last swig of the warm beer next to him, before pushing to his feet and heading towards the galley kitchen. "I'll get you abeer."
"No thanks. This isn't a socialcall."
Axe stopped, turning to stare back at Ryder. "I should have known. You only stop in when you needsomething."
"That may be true, but it's still good to seeyou."
"Don't try to blow sunshine up my ass. Why the fuck are youhere?"
Ryder was actually nervous. He was in serious need of someone with Axe's technology skills, but having seen his friend, he wasn't entirely sure that part of Axe was still alive andwell.
"I need your help tracking down a stalker. It's a high profile case, and I don't know anyone I can trust here in thestates."
"Bullshit. Call your boss or your handler. They'll fire up the shiny computers inD.C."
"I'm trying to keep this on the down-low, for manyreasons."
"Sucks to beyou."
"Just like that. You aren't even gonna hear the facts. Not gonna open a file or look at apicture?"
"You said it's high profile. I don't do highprofile."
