The Long Way Home (Corps Security #6)(11)
It wasn’t just my brother.
When I saw the rest of my family, my five brothers who life had given me through our time in the Marines—their wives and girlfriends—it killed whatever was actually left inside me.
At least, that’s what I thought before I had to watch my own funeral from the black windows of the SUV waiting to take me away from the life I had loved. The life I would never return to, not if I cared about what happened to the people I “died” to protect.
It wasn’t seeing the men who had become my brothers not moving, staring at the casket they thought held me that killed the biggest part left of me. I knew they would hold themselves tight like that, but I didn’t expect them to work so hard to keep their shit together. Not even the rifles going off got a single blink from them. I knew what type of effort they were putting into their grief. It hurt knowing they were in pain I essentially caused but knew was unavoidable.
It wasn’t seeing the girls crying for me that did it either, though it made me want to rush out of the car and be the man they knew me to be. The one that would rather get their laughter than their tears. No, that man died that day with each tear they cried for me.
What it was, though, was my sweetest friend.
I almost didn’t recognize him dressed in a perfectly pressed and tailored black suit. Dress shoes shiny from a fresh polish moving through the marked graveyard with a precision that shouldn’t shock me from him. Not once did he look away from the casket. He was there for one thing only, and it was clear in each determined step that he took. It was the buzzed hair that gave me pause. Gone was the flamboyant man who got as much pleasure in teasing me as I did in acting like I hated it. Gone was the man who couldn’t ever be brought down from the high of life he was riding. I had never, not once in the years I’d known him, seen that stoic look on his face. His mocha skin etched in stone, he remain focused on the box I wasn’t in.
He didn’t stay long, but it was long enough that a mark on my soul would forever be an inch deep and never heal … constantly reopening. He left what he needed to with the moments he bowed his head and then turned and walked the way he had come. But I didn’t need anything more to know that my “death” would mark him just as deeply.
With a deep sigh that I feel in my gut, I turn from the brilliant water over the harbor and turn into my condo. So different from the life I left behind, the one that I live as a ghost here in Boston. The bottle of bourbon goes back to my mouth, and I take another heavy pull, my eyes already trained on the object I want across the room, center shelf, with nothing else sharing the wooden surface.
The ribbon isn’t bright anymore. It’s tarnished and dirt soaked, just like me. The glass doesn’t shine like it did the day it was pulled from its packaging. It wouldn’t, seeing that I find myself right in front of it almost like clockwork each week. But inside, each one of the flecks of gold glitter still shines just as bright as they did over two decades ago.
I take another pull from the bottle and manipulate the glass in my hand, watching those pieces of glitter dance inside their space, and smile. It’s a twisted as fuck smile. One made of grief but also the love and happiness that this jar represents. I’m sure I look like a monster every time from the lack of smiling over the years.
Goddamn Sway.
Goddamn Sway and his fucking glitter.
And goddamn me for taking a life sentence worse than death.
But thank fucking God for this jar—my only connection to the life I had—because without it, I would have killed myself a long time ago. After all, what’s the point of continuing to live when you’re already a dead man?
I place the jar back on the shelf where that part of me belongs and force myself away from it. It takes another five healthy swallows before I’m able to tuck Zeke Cooper back where he belongs, in the ground six feet under. The whole walk through my condo to the office I have in the back of my space gives me time to get my shit together. To forget the ghosts of the past and focus on the reality of my present.
I boot my computer up and place the bottle on the desk, looking over my notes on the next man my team was in charge of killing. The next piece of shit the world would be better without. There’s a reason they wanted me “dead.” There’s a reason I could be wiped clean from the earth and start over a million miles away, completely untraceable. There wasn’t a person out there better to lead this team from the shadows than me. And after approaching me for years, it was a perfect storm when the shit stains of the earth were pushing in on their target—my family—and me getting shot. They didn’t waste a second pushing through the recovery room, having already stood like sentries when I was in surgery, I’m told, to explain the situation. They needed me, and if they didn’t have me, they couldn’t guarantee they could keep those important to me alive. Fewer than ten people in the government know about the men I work for. The nation’s boogeyman killers, that’s what we are. All three men who work with me are “dead,” the same as I am.
What better man to hunt the vile creatures of this earth than a man who’s already dead, after all.
With that sick thought, I grab the bottle and continue to drink while I plan the best way to murder this next son of a bitch.
Life wouldn’t be too bad if only everything that made my very alive heart beat didn’t hurt as painfully as it did—especially knowing that it would never be any different for an alive dead man.