Page 168 of White Raven
“Not yet,” Brandon interrupted, carrying a bottle of scotch Foley kept in his desk, and four short glasses. “Something we gotta do first, guys.”
“What about Wren and Brent?” Sarah asked.
Rhaena tilted her head towards the other side of the cemetery. “They went to go visit Brent’s mom. Said they’ll meet us at the house.”
The four of them stood around a mountain of fresh flowers, and stared at their captain’s military portrait, each with a glass in their hand.
“Everything’s about to change, now…isn’t it?” Rhaena choked. No one said anything, and Brandon put a hand on Rhaena’s shoulder, raising his glass toward the portrait.
“To our captain.”
Rhaena raised hers next. “To my true father. My friend.Myalpha.”
Sarah raised hers. “To the protector of our deepest secrets.”
Athan thought back to all the years he’d served under this man. To all the moments he cowered under his stare, even being a vampire. To clinking glasses after hard cases and catching eyes through mini-blinds in an office that now sat empty. To empty sugar containers, and coffee pots. To every memory he was about to leave behind to start his future. The good and the bad. He raised his glass.
“To damning glares, and squeaky chairs,” he smiled. They all chuckled as they clinked their glasses together and downed the shots.
Everythingwasabout to change.
The sun was beginning to set.
She was so young the last time she vaguely remembered seeing the parade of flashing lights escorting her mother to the cemetery. Didn’t even understand at the time exactly what was going on. It’s a memory that Brynn Trainor was happy to remain a blur in the back of her mind. Time had stood still in Boston today as Malcolm Foley’s body traveled to his place of rest. A rest she’d once hoped would be fitful, and weary…until she’d taken Detective Northwood’s advice against her father’s wishes and spent a few hours in that storage unit digging up all her mother’s dirty secrets.
Brynn had spent most of her adolescent life determined to avenge her mother and bury everyone responsible under the law for everything she’d lost when she died. She blamed the world for the way she was forced to grow up…raised by a jaded widower, who was too angry and bitter to teach her to be anything but.
He’d been wrong.
Foley might have been wrong too, but only in the sense that he let his feelings for his partner go too far…and in the end it didn’t even matter. Northwood was right. Shewasa traitor. And Brynn wasn’t sure she wanted to know all the details of every blotted-out portion of all these reports. What she’d seen in that detective’s eyes on the porch that day had said enough.
If Lindsay Trainor had lived and learned from her mistakes, she’d be doing her best to keep her daughter from doing the same. At least Brynn hoped that would be the case. She decided to take Northwood’s advice, now that she knew the truth. To be on the right side of the law. To make something of herself, and not ruin the rest of her life, caught up with bitterness over something she’d never fully understand. No matter what these people truly were…Brynn was human. So was her mother. It was all a huge mistake.
Foley didn’t deserve to die.
And he didn’t deserve to die thinking that the only piece left of a woman he loved…a woman who’d betrayed him…hated his guts. As Brynn stood at her mother’s grave, she stared at a heap of long-dead flowers, with a small American flag still clinging to the middle. Every year, someone had placed a very expensive arrangement with the same tiny flag, around Thanksgiving. It wasn’t until now that Brynn realized…there wouldn’t be another.
She held a fresh bouquet in her hands and knelt down to pluck the flag from the withered bunch. As she stood, and looked across the cemetery, a dark blue tent flapped in the wind. Brynn started making her way toward it and apologized silently to the fallen captain through every step. It must have been a grand service. Now it was eerily quiet, and cold. She recalled the way Foley looked when she’d hit him in the front yard weeks ago. He wasn’t even angry. He seemed—proud. It suddenly felt like a blow to the chest.
It was all just a huge mistake.
Her eyes filled up with tears, and her throat hurt as she laid the bouquet down against his impressive display of flowers. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, letting the tears fall. She tucked the small flag among the arrangement. “Thank you…for loving her. I’ll make this right, okay?”
Brynn sniffled and swiped beneath her eye as she stood…and this time, instead of sneering at the captain, she smiled back at his grave as she whispered goodbye.
CHAPTER 34
BEANS ON TOAST
It was well past nightfall, and while cold, the sky was so clear and bright—even with the pollution of light from Boston, which carried on without the captain…the same way it had carried on without his mother. Brent took Wren up on her offer to walk around, and hustle the greasiest vendor cart out of their highest-calorie item on the menu. She hadn’t called him a pussy, or made the usual WrenVintorri-style dig at the emotion he shamelessly displayed when they visited Pat’s grave. Afterwards, she’d found ice cream, and told him he could ‘suck it’, and she was getting some even if they could see puffs of their breath in front of their faces. Now they were taking a rest for her blistered feet eating cones on the large fountain in the traffic circle outside a building he knew too well.
“I know you got out really lucky because of that little blonde trollop shafting you out at your firm,” Wren said between long licks of her ice cream cone. “But I wish I could’ve seen you drop-kick that motherfucker in there that day.”
Brent worked on his own cone, grateful that she’d talked him into it, and smiled as he stared at the steps of the courthouse. “I didn’t drop-kick anybody.”
“You hospitalized the dude, Brent.”
He laughed, licking around the side, and staring suggestively at her the entire time. “I’m gonna hospitalizeyou, later. And don’t fire off a warning. You know you like it.”
