This Side of the Grave (Night Huntress, #5)(76)

“Don’t you dare,” Tate breathed, coming closer until we were nose to nose. “Don’t you dare stand there and pretend you’re the only one losing a family member here. I grew up passed from foster home to foster home until I turned eighteen and joined the army. Spent the next five years trying to forget everything that happened before enlisting. Then Don took me under his wing when I was twenty-three. First f*cking person to ever truly give a shit about me, to look up my birthday and send me a card. To remember that on the holidays, I’d be alone unless he stopped by pretending to talk about work. All this was before you ever met him.” Tate’s voice thickened with emotion. “I’d kill or die for that man, don’t you ever think I wouldn’t.”

“Then why are you letting him just die?” I demanded, the last word cracking with the grief frothing inside me.

“Oh, Cat.” Tate sighed, his entire body drooping as though something inside him had magically deflated. “Because it’s not my choice. It’s Don’s, and he made it. I don’t like it, I don’t agree with it, but I sure as hell have to respect it.”

And so do you hung heavy in the air, even if he didn’t say it. I glanced down the hall toward my uncle’s room, hearing the beeps from the EKG machine that weren’t the steady rhythm they should be.

“I’m going to ride your mother until she learns that she can’t ignore orders again, but, Cat . . .” Tate raised his hand as if he were going to touch me, then dropped it. “Despite the fact that she shouldn’t have done it, I’m glad you got here in time,” he finished, looking away with a shine in his own gaze.

My anger deflated with the same abruptness with which his posture had slumped. It would be easier to hold on to it, I knew. Easier to whip myself into a rage over this and every other thing Tate had ever done to piss me off, but that would only be trying to camouflage my grief over losing someone I loved. Tate loved Don, too, I knew that. Knew it even as I flung the “boss” comment at him before. Aside from me, Tate was probably hurting the most right now, but he was handling his pain the way he always had—by being a good soldier.

And I was handling my pain the way I always had—running from it with denial and anger. Of the two of us, I had the least amount of room to throw stones over coping mechanisms.

Slowly, I reached up, brushing my hand across Tate’s cheek and feeling the light stubble that said he hadn’t shaved today; very unlike his military regimented, impeccable grooming habits.

“Don loves you, too,” I whispered.

Then I walked away, leaving Tate to go into my uncle’s room.





Chapter Thirty--one

I knew how critical Don’s condition was. Understood that, if not for my mother’s intervention earlier, he’d already be dead now. But somehow, I hadn’t truly accepted that he was dying until I walked into his room and the final shreds of my denial were ripped away from me.

It wasn’t the bluish paleness of Don’s features as he lay, eyes closed, on the bed. Not the hospital gown he’d previously refused to wear, the EKG machine that showed his shockingly low blood pressure, or the heavy scent of what I now knew was cancer. It wasn’t even his erratic heartbeats that drove home the reality that this would be the last time I would ever see my uncle. No, it was the rolling tray pushed into the corner of the room—naked of a phone, laptop, or any files—that tore through my heart with all the pain of a thousand silver blades.

You just talked to him a few days ago! a voice screamed inside me. How could it come to this so fast?

I shoved back the sob that threatened to break free and went over to his bedside, very softly running my hand over his arm. I was afraid to disturb him by letting him know I was here, and afraid not to. He was hooked up to an EKG, but aside from the tubes in his nose, he breathed on his own in small, shallow puffs that didn’t give him enough oxygen, judging from his pallor.

I sat there in silence for half an hour, watching him, thinking back to the first time I met Don, all the way to the last time I saw him before now. We had both good and bad history between us, but the mistakes of the past faded underneath my belief that Don had always tried to do what he thought was right. That hadn’t always made him a good uncle, but it made him what we all were—flawed people who tried to do their best under rough circumstances. I had no grudges over our past. Only gratitude that he’d been in my life at all, and a wish that he didn’t have to leave it now.

“Cat.” The faintest smile ghosted across Don’s mouth as he woke up and saw me next to his bed. “Didn’t think I’d get to see you again.”

I took in a deep breath. It was that or I’d lose the fragile hold over my emotions that kept me from breaking into uncontrollable tears.

“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t, except I hear you’re having obedience problems with your new recruit,” I said, managing a smile even though it felt like my face would splinter.

Don let out a small, pained laugh. “Turns out your mother obeys orders just as well as you did.”

His wry comment served to underscore our history, intensifying my grief at the thought of losing him. The only emotion my father and I shared for each other was mutual loathing, but Don had found his way into my heart even before I knew I was related to him.

“You know what they say about the acorn and the tree,” I replied. Then my composure cracked and a few tears slipped out despite my best effort to hold them back.