Page 67 of The Rebel King

“You didn’t.”

“But Owen…” My voice breaks. Somethinginsideme breaks, and my emotions are ungoverned, an anarchy of relief for Lennix, grief for Owen, rage at whomever set this tragedy in motion. If I’d lost them both, I’d be living in darkness. Lennix feels like my one tiny point of light, and still I can’t see.

“Maxim.”

My father stands over us, startling me. His bleak gaze moves between Lennix and me with a kind of dull acceptance.

“Dad,” I say, my voice as strong as can be expected through a throat grated by the lifetime of sorrow I’ve crammed into the past two hours.

“The medical examiner is ready to talk to the family.” He looks at Lennix and then away, his mouth a grim line.

“Go,” she says softly, lifting wet, spiky lashes to catch my eyes. “I need to call Kimba back. Could you let me know what we should…um, say to the press? The scene has been locked down, but thereare already rumors circulating. I don’t want us to say anything your family doesn’t want us to.”

The reality of moving forward with the logistics crushes me. The press will make theater of my family’s real pain. Owen will be “the senator,” “the candidate” on the morning news and in all the papers, but to my mother, in so much pain she’s had to be sedated, he’s “the son.” To Millicent, dull-eyed, devastated, he was “the husband”—the love of her life. And to the twins, he was “Dad.”

To me, he’s the big brother I never said “I love you” to enough. I didn’t voice how much I admired him, not for the laws he passed or any of the things the reporters will commemorate. I admired him for the way he loved his wife and kids. For managing to be a good man who genuinely cared about others when he could have been, by all rights, an entitled asshole who cared only about himself.

I finally nod and dip my head to kiss Lennix’s temple. “I’ll let you know.”

“Thank you.” She scoots off my lap, and in the fitted evening dress, it will be hard to get up with dignity. I know she’s cognizant of my father’s presence here, so I stand and pull her up. She shoots me a grateful look and then shifts her glance to my father.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Cade,” she says softly, a little stiffly. “Owen was one of the finest men I’ve ever met.” Her eyes soften, and her shoulders lose some of their tension. “I mean that truly.”

“Thank you,” he replies, his tone abrupt but not rude or cruel. He tips his head toward the waiting room. “The medical examiner is waiting, son.”

She holds the phone to her chest, and I know her quick mind already has to shift to her team and the press and the shit I don’t care about at all right now but know must be done. Leaving her to that, I follow my father into the gruesome new reality that none of us can ignore.

CHAPTER 28

LENNIX

I’ve always avoided funerals. I imagined I’d sit in the audience the whole time thinking the family at least “lucky” to have a formal goodbye. To know what the end held and have closure, unlike my family.

This is not luck.

Millie sitting between her twins in the front row before a casket that can’t even be opened because her husband is so disfigured and badly burned inside—that’s not luck.

Salina sits beside Darcy, brushing her hair with one hand and pressing the little girl’s head to her shoulder. “Auntie Sal,” they call her. I’m sure, had the campaign gotten further along, we would have had more contact. She seems deeply embedded in the family’s lives. Apparently, she was legal counsel for one of Warren’s companies before opening her own law firm specializing in immigration law. Seated between Darcy and Maxim, she fits right in, and I can’t help but think she’s exactly the kind of woman Warren would choose for his son.

“You sure you don’t want to sit with Maxim?” Kimba whispers as we take our seats a few pews back.

“I didn’t want it to be awkward. His father should be able to grieve with his family without the added tension of our…history.”

“And since no one knows about you and Maxim, the press might latch on to that and make more drama.”

“Exactly. Drama they don’t need. Neither do we.”

The press has constantly fed the public’s voracious appetite for every available detail of Owen’s assassination, as it’s been termed. Every time I hear the word, I want to vomit. I’ve barely had time to process what’s happened because we’ve been responding to inquiries and figuring out what to do for our team. It’s been a week, and the shock of Owen’s death has reverberated all over the country—the world, really. You can’t turn on the television or radio or walk past a newsstand without seeing it. The promise of Owen’s campaign had garnered a lot of international attention and coverage, even at this early stage. It’s not every day the son of one of the most powerful men in the world runs for the most powerful job in the world.

Owen’s gone.

There’s nothing I can do to make this better. No lever I can pull. No one I can persuade or situation I can spin to fix things.

I don’t understand it. I couldn’t have forecast it. I’ve never lost a candidate. Not just any candidate, but a friend. It wasn’t even that long ago when he came asking for our help, and I assumed he was just another privileged white man expecting the best of everything to be handed to him on a silver platter.

But he wasn’t. He was so much more, so different, and my heart opened to him in ways I’d never anticipated. He would have changed the world, that elusive concept held together by the last shreds of idealism and hope. He would have achieved it. And I have no idea why now he’ll never get the chance. With all the technology at our disposal, with all the security cameras, bodyguards, precautions and protocols, we have no leads on who assassinated Owen. How is that even possible?

With Owen gone, our team is all out of jobs. Technically, Kimba and I aren’t, but most of them contract with campaigns. They have families and mortgages and lives to support. We usually have a few elections running at once, especially midterms, like Susan’s was in Denver, but we had never run a presidential campaign. It requiredall of our dedicated resources. We can float most of them for a little while, but people have already started accepting other offers since we’re so early in the campaign cycle, still nearly a year from the Iowa caucus. Plenty of time to land somewhere else.

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