The Long Way Home (Corps Security #6)(42)
The guys were right to feel fear over what could happen if me being alive got out. I just have to pray that Sway will handle it well and understand why I did what I did.
Because if he doesn’t, not only will I lose what I’m building with Olivia and Riley, but everyone I loved and lost will be in danger.
“Fuck,” I echo, feeling like the weight of the world is on my shoulders.
That’s when I recognize the emotion weighing me down the heaviest. One I haven’t felt since I “died.”
Fear.
“How to Breathe” by Matthew Mayfield
The heavy tick of the clock speeding the seconds closer to two o’clock are heavy in my empty condo. Each tick, each tock. They all sound like gunshots. I stand here, holding the note that Sway had left in one hand hung loosely at my side. A complete contradiction to the tenseness that has solidified my whole body. If it wasn’t for the sound of my breathing, I would think I had truly died. Not even my heartbeat is allowed to race, held captive in the paralyzing fear that has a stranglehold on me.
He never should have been able to find me.
None of them should have ever been able to find me.
I was careful. I moved in a way that each step was planned and each second was calculated. I knew what was coming before I moved. Always. It’s how I’ve stayed alive in my death.
I changed the way I looked in such an extreme way, you would have thought that I had surgery. The only thing that was left from the man I had been was my eyes, which I wore contacts to change the color of, and my smile. Something that I hadn’t done in so long. Still rusty, but each time I gave that to Olivia and Riley, it becomes easier to recall.
If there ever was a man who would be able to spot me just by my gait though, it would be goddamn him.
Sway.
Dilbert Harrison, the third.
Hands down, one of the best men I’ve ever known.
He was one of the first—and only—men who I had encountered in my life that had no qualms about flirting with me. It never bothered me. I thought it was hilarious. That was, when he wasn’t tossing glitter around like a goddamn fairy. Right before I “died,” I asked him about it. All he said was, when he was forced to suppress who he really was, he used art—and glitter—to experience his happiness. He was a gay man, in the Deep South, with two southern Baptist preachers for parents. He was never allowed to be him and as a young kid, glitter gave him that. And his glitter gave me and my brothers that. I’ll never forget the day he painted the sidewalk outside the office park his salon and the office our security firm were in. Not a single person questioned him … much. He was right though, it brought a smile every time I walked over it. He also had a fondness of keeping glitter in his skintight pants and tossing it on us as we walked by. Even though it took weeks to get that shit off, he did what he meant to and cleared any negative moods that we were in.
That’s what compelled me to take the jar all those years ago.
Not only did I desperately need that happiness to carry me through my life as a ghost, but it was my lifeline that tethered me to the life I left behind.
And fuck me, I’ve missed that man.
With a heavy sigh and even heavier steps, I place the note back where I found it. One finger touches the glass of my new mason jar of happiness, and then I turn to walk over to the wet bar. I skip the glass completely and take a long pull from the bottle of Jack. The burn claiming my throat not even registering. My mind too busy spinning on the past. I haven’t let myself think of them often. It hurt too much. But now, with ten minutes before Sway gets here, I’m powerless to do anything but think of them. I can’t help it.
Axel Reid, Greg Cage, John Beckett, and Maddox Locke. All four of the men who had been at my side during our time in the Marines, but also past that when we were doing security. Cage had been in Georgia and the rest of us out in California after we got out. When we moved the firm to Georgia and became Corps Security, that was also when I hit my spiral.
Just as I said earlier to the guys, I remember how reckless I had been back then. The guys were falling in love, having kids, making families, and all the while, I was searching for anything that would make me feel loved. Sure, I had my brother, Asher, but his love for me was different. He protected me his whole life. It killed me when I “died” to know he would feel that deeply in his soul, but it was my turn to protect him. To repay him for all the years he protected me. It was because of my reckless search for something that made me fucking feel that he was in danger anyway. I fucked my way through women, I didn’t give a shit about tossing myself into anything dangerous, and bottom line, I truly had a death wish.
A death, ultimately, I got.
I knew the second I had killed my last mark that I’d fucked up. I killed the right hand of one of the most predominant drug and gun runners in the Southeast. He, the man I killed, was in charge of running flesh for him. The night that I got him, I also saved sixty-three women who were about to be transported. I got on Dominic Murphy’s radar and that’s a place I couldn’t afford to be. Not when I also shut down eight other organized crime operations that same night. There wasn’t a single criminal that didn’t know who I was.
So I did what I had to do.
I died.
And I’ve spent the past two decades and some change hiding from those criminals and my family. I faked my own death, but still lived a dead man’s life. Until Olivia and Riley, I didn’t give a shit when I was going to die for real. I was just going through the motions, ridding the world of the worst kind of evil as I continued to take out the most vile criminals.