Good. He needs you. Despite all the higher-ups here, they don’t mean as much to him as his family.
I grin, knowing she’s right. Are my brothers and Wren there yet?
Yes. Finn and Wren were the last to show, but they’ve been here awhile now. She pauses, then adds, If you can believe it, Miles Fenske’s daughter is also here.
Melissa?
Yes.
Did she call Declan an asshole yet?
In the seconds it takes for her to respond, I know I’ve missed another of her cute laughs. No, but everyone is drinking, so I’m sure it’s coming. She waits, then adds, If she doesn’t sleep with him first.
What the…? You serious?
Curran, it’s odd. But despite their atrocious first meeting, neither can seem to tear their eyes off the other.
No shit? On my way. Save me a ringside seat.
I pocket my phone, but stop short when I catch sight of who’s waiting for me.
Joey sits by the entrance in his wheelchair, arms crossed, face tight. Seeing how his group had to wait for mine to end, it looks like he’s been waiting there a long time. All that aside, he doesn’t seem in a hurry to round the corner and head inside.
“Hey, Curran,” he says. “You have a minute?”
I don’t. But for him I do. “Yeah. Sure.”
I sit on the bottom step leading out of the elevated garden area. For all he seems to want to talk, he takes his time. I don’t rush him, just wait. I owe him as much. He angles his chair around so instead of facing me, we’re both looking in the direction of the parking lot, the streetlights casting an odd shade of white against his light skin.
“Do you want to know something about me?” he asks.
I steel myself—expecting him to say he’s getting worse, or that he can’t have kids, or that I screwed him up more than I know. “Yeah. Sure.”
He keeps his sights ahead. “I was supposed to be better than you.”
I frown his way. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
He rubs his hands, his expression turning dark despite the glare from the lights. “In the academy, me and the other recruits, all we heard about was you—how fast you moved, what a first-class shot you were, and how your instincts were something they couldn’t teach—an ‘ingrained talent’ one of the trainers called it.” He huffs. “They played you up like you were some sort of god—even the way you wrote up your reports was something they threw in our faces. Your agility, your speed—it wasn’t enough you had the physical shit down. The old-timers made sure to tell us you had the smarts, too—and the rest of us could only be so lucky to sweat in your damn shadow.”
I’m not sure where he’s headed, but I listen, and listen hard.
“Thing was, I was fast, too. I could shoot, and passed my exams like they were nothing. Reports? Hell, they were almost a joke to me. But it wasn’t good enough. Not like the legend of Curran O’Brien,” he says, playing with the brakes on his chair. “The first time I saw you was when you came to do a demo with an assault rifle. By the way the instructors talked you up, I thought you’d walk in wearing a cape or some shit. Do you remember that day you taught us? You remember me?”
I want to say yes, but I don’t want to lie. “No. But I taught a lot of recruits—”
“Save it,” he says, his nostrils flaring. “I hit every target faster and closer to the mark than anyone in my class. Every time I squeezed that trigger I blew my competition away, and you didn’t say shit. Neither did the other trainers. But didn’t the world stop spinning when you showed everyone how it was done.”
“You wanted praise,” I say, thinking I know what he means.