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“You okay, boss?” Jimmy says, sitting opposite me.
“Painkillers are a joke,” I tell him, “but I’ll be good. Just need a couple of weeks.”
Jimmy nods. “I don’t doubt it, but I meant… about Kai and Kayla. Are you really good with that?”
I look at him closely. “Earlier, you said you were happy for them.”
“I am,” he replies. “Kai deserves some joy in his life, and so does Kayla, especially after your dad passed, but I have to be sure you mean it for the club’s sake. There’s going to be no fallout over this?”
I get it. Jimmy’s on the older side. He doesn’t want any more war.
“I meant it,” I say passionately. “Imeanit. When Kayla first told me, sure, I was shocked. It was like a punch in the gut, but that was before she told meexactlyhow she felt. That was before her eyes started to water when she talked about the children she and Kai want to have together.”
Jimmy sighs, finally letting a smile spread across his face. “Your nieces and nephews will have Kai as their dad—your best friend. That’s something special in my book. That’s a bond most men will never experience.”
“You’re right,” I reply, the same broad smile on my face. As I think of the future and all the laughter and love, it’s enough to force a lot of the physical pain to drift away. “As far as wanting the best for Kayla, who will look after her better? Who will protect her more fiercely than him? Who will fight harder if anybody ever tried to hurt her or their family?”
“Nobody,” Jimmy says with a sense of certainty. “Kai’s always had that animal in him, that darkness, but lately, he seems different.”
“He could still bring that darkness out,” I say.
“He’ll always have that, but now he has another side to him, too. It’s like yin and yang, you know? Kai and Kay? Looking at them, they’re like two halves of a whole.”
I smile even wider, with even more happiness. “You’re right, Jimmy. I couldn’t say this before in front of the others. It’d make me look weak. You know what the life is like. The truth is, the more I think about it, the more certain I am they were made for each other.”
“There was a time you would’ve been called crazy for that.”
“You’re right, and if somebody brought up this sort of business in a bar, hell, I’d probably think the same. A brother shouldn’t let his best friend take his sister, but it’s Kai. It’s just different. He’s a good person. Somehow, he is. He shouldn’t be. You’ve seen that look in his eyes.”
Jimmy takes out a cigarette. “Got that dog in him.”
“Always has,” I reply, “and now, if anybody ever tries to hurt Kay…”
Jimmy grins. “They’ll get bitten. Real bad.”
“Exactly.”
I head into my office when I hear the cell phone ringing. There’s a photo of me and Kai and Dad on my desk, me and Kai grinning on the fishing boat, Dad staring stoically, like always. It’s Kay.
“Afternoon, my lovely sister,” I say, trying to hide the pain in my voice. That speech took way too much out of me.
“I wanted to let you know that Kai says he’s planned another trip,” she says. “So we’ll be gone for a couple of days.”
I have to make a new effort now not to let her knowIknow anything. “Oh, right?”
“Why don’t you sound surprised, huh, Ryan?”
Her voice is full of suspicion. It’s the fun sort of suspicion she used to get as a kid when she and Mom would run around the house doing one of theirinvestigations. Kayla went through a detective phase, which she doesn’t even remember, but I do. She’d have that big grin expanded in her magnifying glass.
“I am,” I tell her.
“Hmm… something tells me you already knew.”
Of course, I already knew. Kai’s a good man. He asked me if he could propose to my baby sister. He was sitting beside my hospital bed, wringing his hands, looking at the floor. Then, once he’d said the words, he looked up. Like Jimmy said, he’s a demon, a dog to everybody else, but I see the boy when I look at him.“We’ll be brothers, Ryan,”he said.
“Is that why you’re doing this?”I asked.
“No. Hell no. I’d marry her no matter who her family was, but I’m not going to complain. Family.”
