Page 9 of Angel's Share

“Hands where we can see them!” Matt shouted at the suspect, who must have complied, because Matt holstered his weapon and inched closer. “Where are the goods?”

“Trunk,” came the reply, the voice masculine, but cracking... like a teenager’s?

“Stand clear,” Matt called to the other agents, then to the driver, “Open it.”

The trunk popped open.

Jamie held his breath as Aidan approached the car. He reached into the trunk and removed a briefcase. The tracker icon on the phone’s map moved farther away from the Charger with each step Aidan took back toward their vehicle.

“Tracker says that should be it,” Jamie said as Aidan laid the briefcase on the hood. “Now, will the combo Parsons gave Danny work?”

Aidan spun the dials on the combination lock, and a click later, Aidan heaved a sigh of relief. “We got it.” He closed the case, handed it through the window to Jamie with a small smile, then turned back to Matt and Rick.

And went rigid, every muscle of his back going stiff beneath the tee, vest, and FBI jacket he’d thrown on.

“Irish, what is it?”

No response.

Jamie glanced back out the windshield to where Rick was pulling the driver out of the Charger. Brown hair, light brown skin, lanky limbs, and clothes that were two sizes too big, the kid couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

Aidan wavered on his feet, and Jamie bolted out of the car, orders be damned. Reaching Aidan’s side, he wound an arm around his waist, steadying his worryingly pale husband. Was this about their conversation earlier? The topic of kids had been on their minds, but Aidan had handled juvenile cases before, and while yes, they could shake him up, Jamie had never seen him react like this. “Aidan, talk to me. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I think I have,” he said, voice a thready, pained thing, his autumn gaze trained on the stormy blue one glaring at him from beside the Charger. This wasn’t about kids in general; it was about this kid in particular.

“You know him?” Jamie interpreted Aidan’s silence as a yes. “Who is he?”

Aidan swallowed hard. “My godson, Angel Crane.”

SIX

Two hours and a half dozen “I’m fine” replies later, Jamie stood on one side of the observation glass, his husband on the other. Inside the interrogation room, Aidan leaned against the far wall, his chin lowered but every muscle of his lean frame strung tight, flinching with each surly word Matt and Berat drew out of the suspect across the metal table from them.

Not just any suspect.

Aidan’s godson.

Angel Crane.

“When we worked Gabe’s case,” Jamie said to Danny beside him, “I researched Tom, but I was so focused on his financials and the connection to his and Gabe’s killer that I didn’t make this connection.”

“That his and Isabella’s son was named after Gabriel?”

Jamie nodded, recalling those early days when he’d been newly assigned to the San Francisco field office. When he’d watched from afar at office parties while Mel, Aidan, and his Bureau partner, Tom, would circle up with Gabe and Isabella and exist in their own seemingly perfect world.

During the investigation, Mel had told him that Isabella otherwise stayed far away from their work, that Tom and Aidan protected her from all of it. But then her grandmother’s immigration status had been used as leverage against Tom by the terrorist who’d ultimately killed him and Gabe. Who had tried to kill Aidan and Jamie, multiple times over, before meeting his own demise.

Aidan and Jamie had survived, Mel and Danny too, and they’d eventually gotten their happily-ever-afters, but what had happened to Isabella? And her and Tom’s son? Nothing good, it seemed, according to sixteen-year-old Angel’s rap sheet. He’d racked up an impressive number of speeding tickets, truancy calls, school suspensions, and a misdemeanor larceny. His actions today would add several felonies to the list.

Jamie dragged a hand down his face, wondering how the day had gone from damn near perfect, he and Aidan committing to plan for the next big step in their future, to the past rearing up and punching them in the face again.

A past that Jamie had only cursorily read over in Tom’s file and that Aidan had rarely mentioned. He’d never mentioned that Angel was his godson. Because he didn’t want Jamie to know? Or because Aidan had been cut out of Angel’s life? The latter seemed more likely, and by the heavy set of Aidan’s shoulders, he was deeply regretting his absence, involuntary or not.

“Did Mel get a location on Isabella?” Jamie asked Danny. They’d learned through official channels that Isabella was a flight attendant for a major airline. Those official channels were slower, however, than Mel’s bounty hunter ones at pinpointing a current location for Angel’s mother.

“Should be arriving in Paris soon.”

“Where’d the flight originate from?”

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