And with that, he broke away from Hunter’s soothing hand and stalked—lightly, of course, so as not to disturb Artur—across the bridge.
Hunter watched him go with a sigh. So much of the morning had been pleasant. The tour bus through Vancouver had been fun. Hunter, who had seen much of the world as a security threat that needed to be navigated, had spent the past year looking at it as an adventure. Going on an adventure with people who reveled in them was novel—and somehow more than that.
Hunter had spent much of his life as the outsider, the point man, the guard. He’d trusted the people who had his back because they’d all been following the same orders or getting paid by the same guy.
This was different. He trusted the people on the bus because they were kind to him when they had no reason to be, and because they were helping Artur simply because they could. Getting tagged by Josh to do things with these people because they all wanted to see some justice in the world felt like getting another chance to join the human race.
And they were fun—and funny—and the family snark had been in full force. Grace and Hunter had sat together, and while Grace wasn’t so much for hand-holding—which was fine, Hunter wasn’t either—their thighs had pressed together easily, and Grace’s forays into the conversation had been pointed and hilarious. Watching Grace and Josh and Molly flitter from one activity to the other in the park had been amusing. Hunter loved a good workout. He even enjoyed rock climbing. But watching the three of them, dragging a reluctant Stirling behind them as he followed a little more invisibly, was a delight.
He’d gathered before that the four of them had gone to high school together, and as college students had been involved in drama productions and other adventures—some of them possibly not so legal. But Hunter remembered being young and on leave, how he and the other young recruits had run through a marketplace in Kabul, equally excited. On one hand, the thought made him feel unbearably old, but on the other, seeing this glimpse into Grace, unguarded and at play, made him feel very privileged.
And also a little out of his depth.
He’d had boyfriends, but most of them had been like him. Worked hard, played hard, trained hard. Paulie hadn’t been his first relationship with someone in his pack—the old adage of not sticking your wick in the company pool had never made sense to him. He was on ops for months at a time. If he was with a guy who could make the downtime a little less boring—and the up time a little less high stakes, because he didn’t sleep with a guy if he didn’t trust him to have his back—why shouldn’t he?
But Grace was different. Grace wasn’t a trained soldier. Hunter had been respecting Grace as a special ops worker, but that wasn’t who he was.
Grace was a college kid—but older, somehow.
Grace was a thief, and bloody brilliant at it too. Any guy who slept with his own lockpicks and could do that thing Grace had done when he’d run up Lucius Broadstone’s body was damned impressive. But he wasn’t acquisitive. He wasn’t greedy. Hunter had been pretty sure Grace stole for the pleasure of it, and to be a complete and total asshole for whatever reason was driving him at the time.
But not now. Not after what Grace had just said about stealing something because… how had he put it? It needs to mean something.
Hunter thought about his first assessment of Grace as a bored rich kid and realized that of all the bored rich kids he’d known—and he’d guarded a surprising number of them in his mercenary days—none of them had worried about gifts or possessions that “meant something.”
Maybe Grace, for all his backward logic and amok moral compass, was on to something important.
He knew how meaningless possessions really were. The care of stealing something gave it value. The last job they’d pulled had involved jewelry and objets d’art, and one of the things Danny had emphasized over and over had been that even the copies had value because they added to the story of the original.
Somehow Grace, with all his feral intelligence, had learned something about material things that every other lost rich kid he’d ever known had missed.
The story had value. The effort had value. The attention and care—that was expensive. It was like… like….
Hunter’s mind flashed to the night before when he’d listened in covertly as Grace had been watching the ballet. He’d heard Grace’s caught breaths and certain sotto voce commands to the stage. “No, no—she’s still alive. Don’t—don’t take the poison! Why couldn’t she have woken up sooner? No!”
It occurred to him now that the ticket to the event itself had been worthless—but the performance had been Grace’s everything.
That’s what Grace valued. The performance, the dance of story that went with the objects he stole. Being with his friends was important. Helping Josh’s parents was important.
The things were fun and sparkly—but Grace had priorities.
Hunter had spent his whole life doing for others. Living a life of service. Trying to find the best outfit that would take his intelligence and physical prowess and use it for the best ends.
What would it be like, he wondered, to be one of Dylan Li’s priorities?
“They are a tight group, yes?” Artur Mikkelnokov broke into his thoughts. He’d sent Lucius on up ahead to peruse the gift shop, and he’d been carefully making his way along the bridge, his fearlessness indicating that once he might have been a dancer like Grace, and his care revealing that his joints and bones were not what they had been.
“Yes,” Hunter agreed. “You know all of them?”
Artur shook his head. “Josh, yes. Josh was there through Dylan’s hard years, and I was grateful. When you see a student one, two, three times a week, you can watch them turning down a wrong path, but you can’t always move fast enough with them to steer them the other way. Josh and his parents were there, every day, for Dylan. I never met them. I certainly did not know his mother was so charming, but I always felt as though we worked as a team.”
Hunter watched as the group of them went tear-assing across the Cliffwalk again, Grace at the lead. From behind Grace, he could hear Josh calling, “Grace—no! No, man, please? None of that crap here,” and Hunter’s heart sank. What was he planning now?
“So,” he said, eyes narrowed, tracking them up the series of stairs to where the Cliffwalk began. The walk was one of the park’s biggest attractions, and it featured a catwalk built around the great granite walls of the gorge. People who weren’t rock climbers could experience the freedom of rock climbing, as well as get the treat of seeing the lush green beauty and stunning granite savagery of the entire park. “What were Grace’s hard years like?”
Artur sighed unhappily. “I’m afraid I should let Dylan tell you the particulars,” he murmured, “but I will say this. His propensity for self-destruction really did frighten us all.”
Hunter swallowed and watched Grace leaning out over the angled railing for the Cliffwalk and thought, with his heart in his throat, that for anyone else, doing what Grace was contemplating should have been too difficult to even attempt.
“I can imagine,” he said through a dry throat, staring at Grace and willing someone, anyone, to talk him out of it. C’mon, man—don’t do this. Not for stupidity’s sake, okay?