Page 21 of A Brother's Secret

“Look, guys, I’m sorry… but there wasn’t anything any of you could do about it. Imean –“

Dragon waved me off, “Hell if you couldn’t find her, there wasn’t no way we were gonna. The problem is what do we fuckin’ donow?”

“Can’t neutralize the threat without a fuckin’ target,” Trigger stated. Ghost grunted in agreement.

“I need to go fish. Pick Mali’s brain, gather the information and find the proverbial man behind the curtain,” I said. “Then I should, in theory, be able to neutralize the threat before it gets inside a hundred miles fromhere.”

“It’d be nice,” Ghost said and I nodded, the worry plain in hiseyes.

“Let me do this my way, we’ll stay here until it’s in the bag, I’ll keep you updated every step of theway.”

“You’re fuckin’ right you will,” Dragon grunted.

“How deep am I in with the rest of the guys?” I asked.

“Not as deep as you’d think,” Trig answered.

“Every man’s got his secrets,” Dragon agreed. “We just never figured yours was thisbig.”

“Go big or go home, right?”

He chuckled and nodded, “What’re you gonna need out here?” he asked.

I sighed, “Hot water would be a good start.”

Trigger grinned, “Ain’t pretty but we got you covered.”

“I appreciate it, more than you guys can know…” I bowed my head and pressed fingers into the base of my skull in a shitty bid to relieve a tension headache that was brewing.

“What’re brothers for?” Dragon asked.

The silence stretched between the three of us for a long moment, a silence that was finally broken by Trig when he said: “You know it’s not going to be easy, right?”

“What part of any of this has been easy up to this point?” I asked, knowing, likely, where he was headed.

“True enough, she was gone, but now she’s here but everything is different… She’s going to be different.”

I nodded, “You don’t have to be gentle about it, man. Iknow.”

“I don’t know that you quite get what he’s driving at,” Ghost said uneasily, and I nodded.

“I do, I may have been born at night but I wasn’t born last night… she’s high-strung, been looking over her shoulder for seventeen years. It will probably take seventeen more and she still might not come back from habits that deeply ingrained. You don’t have to tiptoe around the subject, brothers… I know PTSD when I seeit.”

Trigger, Ghost, and even Dragon looked relieved and I sighed. “And before you even ask, no, I don’t know how I am going to handle it except a step at a time. Mali is stronger than you think, though, so it’ll be tough and take some doing but I have to believe that ultimately she’s gonna befine.”

“First things first, gotta know what’s doggin’ her steps and put a stop to it before she can put any kind of healin’ onher.”

“True, that… some sleep and I’ll work on that but we only just got here and I know I’m tired and I’m used to rides like that. She isn’t.”

“Rest up tonight, find out what you can about who’s after her ass and why, and we’ll get onit.”

“I know the ‘why’: she killed somebody to save her dad. The problem is the who… No idea on that front, but he must have been some kind of important to someone somewhere in the underground.”

“Well, we’ll figure it out in the mornin’,” Dragon said and bowed his head, scraping a boot against the cement in front of him; I nodded.

“Thanks for that, P.”

“Hell, you’ve helped us bury enough bodies, I figure turnabout is fair play.” I nodded again and we all let out closely timed big sighs.

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