Page 11 of Angel's Share

“Talk to me, Irish.” Jamie regretted the words as soon as they were out, a mirror of this morning’s entreaty.

Broken now.

Aidan’s answering laugh was harsh, as if scraping over its jagged edges. “Talk about a wake-up call.” He raked a hand through his hair and left it cupped around his nape, head bowed. “How could I think?—”

“Don’t.” Jamie closed the distance between them, his front to Aidan’s back, his hands on his hips. “Don’t connect the two. They’re unrelated. Talk to me about this. About Angel.”

Aidan dropped his hand and lifted his head, resting back on his heels and giving Jamie some of his weight. “After the investigation,” he started, then paused, swallowing hard, as if the past were a lump lodged in his throat. “After all that, Izzy wanted nothing to do with me. Or with Mel. Or with any of us. She packed up Angel and moved down here to where the rest of her family had relocated.”

“Did you try to make contact?”

“Once. Got a blue streak of Spanish curses for the effort. I’d never heard her so angry, and I’d known Izzy since my first day of school in the States. I also knew when she hung up the phone that day that I’d never hear from her again. That was it.” He shook his head and leaned more heavily against Jamie. “I kept tabs on them for a while. Everything seemed fine. After a certain point, it felt like an invasion of their privacy, so I stopped.” He lifted a hand toward the glass, like he wanted to reach through it to his estranged family on the other side. Jamie stopped him short, gently grasping his outstretched hand. Aidan’s fingers clenched around his, hard enough to make Jamie wince. “I did this, Whiskey. I ruined his life.”

“You did no such thing.” Jamie curled their joined hands against Aidan’s chest and wrapped his other arm around his waist, embracing him. “You are not responsible for his father’s choices. Or for his mother’s, or his own.”

“He’s just a kid.”

“Exactly. Which is why the Bureau and LBPD will cut him a deal. You know how this works. They want the higher-ups. Angel’s just a runner, and in this case, the stolen goods were recovered.”

“And you know it’s never that simple.” Aidan tilted his head, temple pressed against Jamie’s cheek. “Nice driving today, by the way.”

“You didn’t seem to enjoy it in the moment.”

“I never enjoy it in the moment.”

Chuckling, Jamie was relieved to feel Aidan do the same, but before he could turn him in his arms and check for a smile, the door behind them opened, and Danny leaned in. “I’ve got Izzy.” He held his phone out to Aidan.

Aidan’s temporary reprieve vanished, all of his earlier tension rushing back in. He straightened out of Jamie’s arms, took the phone from Danny, and stepped to the far corner of the room, phone held to his ear. “Isabella.”

Without the phone on speaker, Aidan was too far away for Jamie to hear more than Isabella’s muffled, rapid-fire Spanish. But Aidan’s words and body language, the way he closed in on himself again, made the mostly one-sided conversation clear enough.

“He’s cooperating,” Aidan told her. Not exactly true, but it was what Angel’s mother needed to hear. “I don’t know when he’ll be released.” Clearly not what she needed to hear, Izzy’s voice escalating in volume. Aidan rushed to clarify. “His public defender is good, but I can have the best defense attorneys in San Francisco here by midafternoon.” He closed his eyes, pain washing over his features. “You wouldn’t have to pay for them, Izzy.” Whatever she said next caused Aidan to slump against the wall, defeat a black cloud crashing down around him. “I’m sorry.”

Jamie made to move, no door in his way to Aidan’s side, but Danny’s hand on his forearm stalled him. “Not yet.”

“Right, okay,” Aidan said after another moment. “I’ll stay with him until you get here.” A streak of lightning bolted through the storm cloud, Aidan’s voice strengthening. “Isabella, I’m not leaving him alone in holding. I’m staying with him until you get here.” She must have conceded to his one demand, Aidan nodding once as he pushed off the wall. “See you soon.”

Danny released his forearm, and Jamie met Aidan halfway across the room, looping an arm around his waist as Aidan handed the phone back to Danny. “I’ll update Mel,” Danny said, then slipped out of the room.

“And I’ll stay here with you,” Jamie told Aidan.

“No, you won’t.”

“Aidan—”

He laid the pads of his fingers over Jamie’s lips, silencing his objections. “You have a game today. You need to go do your job, Whiskey.”

Hand around his wrist, Jamie lowered Aidan’s, then wrapped it in his against his chest. “My job, my life, my top priority is you, Irish. Always.”

“I can’t be the reason you lose today. Not on top of everything else.” The strain in his voice, the tension vibrating through his taut frame, was the last thing Jamie wanted to be the cause of. He had enough sources of stress already.

“Okay,” he said as he stepped closer. “Your call.” He pressed a soft, firm kiss to Aidan’s lips, then rested their foreheads together, waiting for some of the tension to recede again. “But you call me if you need anything. If you need me to count breaths with you, or if you need me to tell you how much I love you. You are always my priority.”

SEVEN

It was closing in on midnight when Angel uttered his first words to Aidan since their standoff in interrogation that morning. “Why am I not in gen pop at LBC?” Lying on a metal bench, he kept his gaze fixed on the ceiling, but seeing as they were the only two people in the holding cell corner of the LA field office, Aidan assumed the question was for him.

He threw a question back at his godson as he continued to air toss the foam Santa toy he’d grabbed off the guardsman’s desk. “There a reason you needed to be in gen pop there?” Someone else he was working for? Had that been the real play? Yes, Angel was his godson, but Aidan was still an agent. And concerned for said godson, whether Angel wanted it or not.

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