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“Hisfatherwanted that. His brothers were just pawns in the shitty game that destroyed these men.”
“Why are you on their side?” I push up from my chair and circle my desk to look at her with new eyes. “Just this morning, you stood in that bar and condemned New York.”
“I’m not on the side of New York,” she exhales. “And I’m still pretty pissed about Felix’s general existence. But I’ve been seeing this shrink the last—”
“What?” The world doesn’t make sense. Nothing is how it should be. “You said you can’t afford a shrink, so you’d deal with your trauma by bottling it up like the rest of us.”
Finally, she laughs for real, so the humor touches her eyes. “I tried bottling,” she admits with a snicker. “I swear, I did. But then you got mad at me for not being my normal, happy self anymore. I couldn’t keep the lid on my bottle without exploding, so I talked to my brother about it all, and—”
“Wait.” I stop a few feet from my desk and feel the blood leave my face. “You told your brother about the Malones?”
She snorts. “No, I told my brother I was having big feelings and needed help, so he hooked me up with this shrink who really knows her stuff.”
“And you told theshrinkabout the Malones?”
Her smile is blinding and beautiful, the complete opposite of any feeling I’m experiencing right now. “No. I told her I can’t sleep well because I have flashbacks to unpleasant memories. I told her I have feelings for someone who can’t reciprocate. I told her the person I love isn’t a bad person, but they’re simply not available to me.”
“Aubree…” The fight leaves my body the way air releases from a balloon. “You still love him so much.”
“Feelings I’m able to handle, now that the lid isn’t blowing off my metaphorical bottle,” she murmurs. “I’m not saying I’m okay with anything that’s happening right now. And if Tim goes to New York, he’ll break my heart just when I’ve started to put it back together again. But even a blind woman can see those brothers are one. Archer was sixteen when he was hurt. Cato was a baby. Felix and Micah and Tim were… what, eighteen, nineteen, twenty? Sure, that makes them legal adults, but just because they had their eighteenth birthday doesn’t mean a magical switch flicked over in their brains and suddenly, they were able to make perfect decisions.”
“Archer did,” I grit out. “Archer chose this new life for himself, and apart from Cato, he was the youngest of them all.”
“So he took that first step,” she concedes. “That’s great. He opened the door for the others—the same door Tim stepped through. But what about their father?” She slides off my desk and clasps her hands together. “He almost killed Archer. And Tim leaving;Tim, the freakin’ heir and namesake, would have enraged him. So what kind of pressure was Felix facing from their father after that? Micah? Cato was a toddler, so if the other two left, they would’ve had to leave the baby behind.”
“Aubree…” I groan. “Just stop.”
“I’m just saying, maybe Archer was the bravest for leaving first. And Tim second. But every time someone walked, the danger for those left behind would have grown larger. And with Cato being the age he was, wehaveto consider that Micah and Felix were brave too… for staying.”
“Ya know what? I said I didn’t want to talk about this.”
Swinging toward my office door, I push through and make my way into the main desk area, where the rest of my team sits to deal with their paperwork. Aubree was supposed to sit there too, but on my first day, before I arrived to take the helm of the George Stanley, she pushed her two-hundred-pound wooden desk across the ninth floor and parked it outside my office.
She hasn’t left since.
“I’d like a status report on every case we have on deck,” I announce to the group who mill around.
Behind me, of course, Aubree follows and takes up my flank.
“Our media relations and general assistant, Seraphina Lewis, is taking some personal time, which means if any of you has to go to the press, or you think it’s a good idea to publish your findings—anywhere, with anyone—run it by me first. If you need anything that Ms. Lewis would typically do for you, run it by me first.”
At his desk, Doctor James Kirk—not of theStar Trekfandom—raises his hand and waits like a good little schoolboy for me to nod.
“Is she available by phone or email? Because I have thi—”
“No. Don’t call her. Don’t email her, or she’ll be tempted to work. Whatever it is, come to me, and we’ll figure it out together.”
I look to Doctor Flynn, a woman not a hell of a lot older than me. She’s solid in her work, consistent and smart. Divorced a couple of times.
Perhaps something we’ll have in common, if Archer doesn’t straighten himself out.
Oh, the things I tell myself to get through.
“Update, Doctor Flynn?”
“Uh… sure.” She holds a stack of files in her arms but doesn’t refer to them. “I have three cases running concurrently. Unconnected. One was an unattended death, elderly woman, discovered by her daughter. Seems to be cut and dry, natural causes. I’ll write my final report once the lab sends back tox and stomach contents. My next case seems to have been a snatch and grab gone bad. Vic fell, hit their head. Deceased. Third case seems a little more sinister, which is the reason the lab is backed up for everyone else.”
Sheepish, she glances around when my team groans. “Sorry, guys. I sent a busload of samples down yesterday morning, so they’re working through those as fast as they can. Also,” she hugs her files to her chest and looks back to me. “We’re working through the paper files you had in your office from the Holly Wade case. Archives are scanning them into the system and liaising with the local police department. However, this was something Seraphina was also involved in, so I’m not sure if we should just pause now until she gets back.”
