Page 329 of Lodestar

“It’s criminal how we treat our veterans,” she stated grimly.

“True dat,” Conor concurred.

“The guys never stuck around for long. Creed did though. He was with us for a year.”

“Dead To Me liked him too, didn’t she?”

“They got caught fucking in a tank, Troy,” I retorted. “What do you think?”

“Hate fucking is totally a thing,” Troy retorted around a cackle, one that petered out into a long sigh. “They weren’t all shit times, were they? We had some laughs too.”

“We did,” I agreed. “It was only when Reggie left that things went to the dogs.”

“Regina was your CO, right?”

“She was,” I confirmed, answering Conor’s question. “She left and we started falling apart, got split up, and then I got captured. If I couldn’t trust my girls with half of the missions we were sent on, there was no way in fuck I could trust strangers.”

A soft, sad silence settled among us. It sank into my marrow—regrets. So many of them. Some days, I felt like I was drowning in them.

Conor cleared his throat, asking, “What’s our next step, then? Dagda?”

I frowned. “Why? I promised Aoife I wouldn’t kill him.”

“So kind of you,” he teased, lips curving into a wide grin. “I just thought you’d want him to confirm his involvement in your mother’s death.

"It's not like he’s going anywhere while he’s tied to a hospital bed. He can't run away from you, can he?”

“You think a man with his rep stays still for long?”

“He’s old, Star.”

“The only old spies are dead spies,” Troy intoned, but she was right.

You had to be reactionary in this life, no matter your age, or you’d end up in a coffin earlier than anticipated.

Unless the PTSD was bad like Maverick’s, you cared about dying ahead of time.

“Anyway,” Troy continued, “Star thinks Smythe was bullshitting.”

“He’d have told me that my dad was alive if he thought it would spare him.” I crumpled the Pixy Stix wrapper in my hand. “I should have fucked his face up even more for his audacity.”

Conor hitched a shoulder. “Wouldn’t you prefer to have confirmation from the guy who allegedly killed her?”

Perplexed by his blasé tone, I turned to him and queried, “Conor, how can you stand to be around him after everything? How don’t you want to strangle him?”

“That’s a dangerous question, Star.”

“Why?” Troy broke in to ask.

“Star… maneuvered things so that my father and another enemy of Dagda’s were at the same place at the same time. I’m sure you can imagine how that ended.”

Troy, never a jar short of cookies when it came to this stuff, snorted. “Cold, Star. Cold.”

“Which is why it’s a dangerous question.” Conor sighed. “My da had ALS. You’d have to know him to understand that a man like him could never be seen to be sick.”

“That’s very ableist of him,” was her pious retort.

“You can add it to the tons of other -ists that described him,” I mumbled under my breath.

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