I froze, not knowing what him stopping meant.
Did he stop because anger made him stop, or did he stop because of the surprise.
I didn’t know and the not knowing seized me up, preventing me from moving forward.
Hope however filled my heart when he took a step toward me.
Hope I hadn’t realized I’d wanted badly, and for years.
One more step, then another and I started walking to him too.
We met each other halfway and he looked me over with that classic look. Like he’d just seen a ghost.
He wasn’t far off since I’d been a ghost for the last five years.
“Xander? Is that really you?” he asked. His voice was heavy with emotion.
When I nodded a tear ran down his cheek and he pulled me in for a hug.
Chapter Fifty-One
Xander
It was so strange being back.
Being home.
Home.
Over the last few years I’d had some days where it felt like I’d never return. When I thought about it now, it was clear to me that I’d been on a mission of vengeance that would have carried me to the last days of my life.
Looking for Balthazar Kane and trying to find answers was like digging around a haystack looking for that proverbial needle. It was people like him who gave weight to sayings like that.
Simply because it was difficult.
Difficult but not impossible, but bordering near enough on the impossible.
Seeing Jack now made me see that realistically I’d erred on the side of failure because I couldn’t face him.
After that very emotion-filled reunion that saw me in tears too, we went inside the house. There the bulk of the time was spent tending to Frankie.
Just as I’d thought, Jack knew exactly what to do. The man was medically trained and just the sort of person we needed, who understood why we couldn’t pitch up to the hospital without answering some very important questions that would undoubtedly land us in trouble. More shit.
Jack skillfully removed the bullet from Frankie’s arm, patched him back up, and set him up in a room the way Frankie set me up at his family’s home.
Once we were all packed out with the little we had, I joined Jack for the looming conversation we needed to have.
The conversation that was a combo of two very big matters. The most pressing questions were where I’d been for the last five years and what happened to me. I’d practically returned from the dead.
The next big conversation was Giovanni, Jia and Frankie.
I’d pitched up on Jack’s drive in trouble, just like when I first met him at sixteen years old.
I couldn’t believe that was twenty years ago.
Twenty years ago I snuck into his garage, injured from being beaten up after a job with mobsters went wrong. I’d thought then that I was in the deepest shit of my life. It was my first taste of mafia guys and the last until this recent stint with Giovanni. It was enough however to teach me a damn good lesson.
Twenty years later I was in trouble again. Worse than ever before.
We sat in the kitchen at the breakfast table, opposite each other. It was close to lunchtime and the sun beamed through the window in all its glory.
It seemed brighter to me here, like everything felt more enhanced.
The thought was stupid because like the moon, the sun was the same. Couldn’t really vary in brightness across the states. Maybe across the world in some parts but not the way I was thinking.
“I kept imagining this,” Jack stated. He ran a hand through his salt and pepper hair and gazed across at me with that fatherly warmth I’d always appreciated.
I looked back to him. “That I’d come to you clearly in trouble again?” I might have been going for some element of humor but didn’t manage to pull it off. There was nothing funny or humorous in any of this situation.
He gave me a warm smile and rested his elbows on the table.
“Xander, this is me. I’ve waited years for this and I want you to be real with me. That was the first thing I asked you when we first met. Remember?”
“I remember Sir. Back then I had fewer secrets.”
“It’s not about the amount of secrets you have, son. It’s the content that defines them. Now I’m sitting here looking at a man who I consider my son. I was told he was dead, I even got his dog tags. I buried you, or what they told me was left of you and still I refused to believe it was true.”
His gaze clung to mine and I couldn’t look away.
“You didn’t believe it?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t believe it. Claire… she was a different story. I knew in my heart from the minute that girl decided she wanted to follow in her old man’s shoes that I was going to get that call one day. The call telling me something had happened to her. I knew it. I did. Just like me, she did plenty of things that were reckless. Unlike me though, she didn’t have that stroke of luck. For me I got lucky one last time and I threw in the towel. I saw it for what it was and took hold of the chance it gave me. I suspect Claire wouldn’t have done that. She would have kept on going until it killed her. She got that part from her mother.” He nodded.
His words tugged heavily on my heart. They were true.
I felt they were true and that part wasn’t me looking for an excuse so I wouldn’t blame myself.
Claire was a mixture of her fearless father, and her daunting mother who knew giving birth to her child could kill her but she did it anyway. That was how her mother died. In childbirth.
Just like mine. My mother died during child birth too and we always talked about that element of similarity we had. I knew for damn certain that I got my guts and courage from my mother.
I’d always considered that when I was with Claire. I imagined her mother making it her mission to give birth to her baby and sacrifice herself if she needed to. Her life a price to pay for what she wanted most.
That was what Claire was like and she would have indeed kept going until something stopped her. There were many times we got lucky, she just kept going though.
“I told you I’d take care of her.” My gaze dropped to the table and I sighed. When I looked back to him there was nothing but understanding in his eyes.
“And that was nice of you, but there would have only been so much of that you could do. She was her own person. Strong-willed and strong minded. So much more than me. But, I felt it in my bones that something would happen. It was almost a damn given and I prepared for it for years. I was told it was a bomb that took out the team in Nepal. They brought me her tags and yours.”
He paused and silence filled the space between us, opening the floor for me to speak.
As the conversation had taken the direction of the past first, I thought that was where I needed to start. I’d start at the past and work my way forward.
“It wasn’t just a bomb. That came after.” That was the best way I could start. Everything I would tell him next was top secret. This man however, was a man I had no secrets from. He was ex- military, ex-CIA, ex-SMF. We knew when to talk and when not to. He knew when I could and should talk and right now I owed no allegiance to anyone.
I drew in a breath and continued my recount. “We’d been tracking a man called Balthazar Kane for years. Approximately three. The situation with him had gotten so bad, we were ring fenced to deal with everything to do with him. Everything.”