Page 23 of Callum

“Consigliere?”

“Stop calling me that.”

“If you insist, sir.” I can hear the laughter in his voice, but I still feel like an asshole. Theo is one of my oldest friends, and I’m treating him like shit because I’m what? Anxious. I finally put a word to the feeling swirling in my gut. I have so much anxiety flooding my veins I’m damn near vibrating out of my skin.

“Forgive me, sir, but don’t you have somewhere you need to be?”

“Yes,” I huff, shrugging on my suit jacket as I look for anything else to slow my progress out the door. “Get those to her when she’s done. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

I’m almost to the front door when a massive hand snaps out to stop me, and Theo’s earnest gaze finds mine. “Have you talked to Matthew lately?”

“Not in a few weeks. Why?”

“You might give him a call. It’s nearly Thanksgiving, after all.”

Twenty years of knowing Theo make reading between those lines easy. I should have thought of that this morning, but I’d been…distracted. “I’ll call on my way over.”

I’m out the door before I hear the quiet, “Thank you, Consigliere”. I can understand his hesitation over asking me to do this. Sometimes, relying on someone else to deliver bad news on your behalf is nice.

Sometimes it’s a real bitch.

—

“Callum MacAlister,” Grady’s booming voice cracks through the phone, drowning out the telltale signs of a party happening around him. It only takes a moment for the background noise to muffle, as if he’s closed a door between himself and the raucous celebration. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Your brother just reminded me that I was overdue to call you.” Flipping on the turn signal, I slow my blacked-out Range Rover to a stop at the light. “But I don’t have much time, so I’ll get right to it. It’s probably not a great idea for you to come home for Thanksgiving this year.”

“Do I want to know why?”

We’ve been friends for long enough that he knows I’ll tell him anything, but there are some things he’s better off not knowing. No one outside the MacAlister Brothers knows as much about the Underworld as Matthew Grady, not even Theo.

Not for the first time, I wonder how different my life would have been if Grady hadn’t found me in that park. He was already half-giant at just ten years old, and he loomed over me in that ditch, those freakishly clear blue eyes carefully assessing my injuries. “Is that your blood?” That was his first and only question, and he didn’t judge me when I told him it wasn’t.

He didn’t judge me when I told him whose blood it was and what I had done.

Some part of me thinks that Grady knew, even then, that I was putting him in danger by telling him, but he let me do it anyway. He sat in that ditch with me, using a towel from his bat bag to wipe another man’s blood from my skin, and he listened to me sob.

He’s been my best friend ever since, and I would lay down my life to protect him. It took every favor I had to keep him out of the Underworld, but I will never regret getting Matthew Grady out of Forest Falls.

“Rosalind is stirring up trouble.”

He doesn’t respond at first, and I can just imagine the questions spinning through his mind. “Trouble for you, or trouble in the Underworld?”

“Both” is the most honest answer I can give him, and he takes it for what it is.

“Are you guys safe?”

There’s no answer that won’t make him worry more, so I tell him just as much as I can. “We’re safe for now.”

“Alright,” Grady sighs, and I hear a soft thump on his end of the call as if he’s just dropped his head back, that thick skull thudding off the wall.

Taking a right onto the main strip of downtown Forest Falls, I try to think of anything I can say to ease his worry, but I come up empty. I’m out of time when the peeling wood siding of Peaks comes into view. Pulling into a spot on the far end of the street, I catch sight of Grant’s motorcycle.

Fuck.

“I have to go, Grady, but we’ll talk again soon. Okay?”

“Yeah, man. Talk to you soon.”

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