Which brought them right back to the matter at hand. “So, how do you want to play this, Kennedy? With Fenton ruled out as a suspect, that means the RPD’s investigation is going to dead-end unless they come up with a lead. I get that it was ‘only’ a dumpster fire”—he made sure his tone carried the air quotes—“but that shit is still serious, and if your brother is tangled up in it, guilty or not, we need to tell the cops.”
Kennedy surprised him with a nod. “I know. And I know it looks bad, but I’m telling you…” Her voice wavered, tiny hints of emotion slipping through the cracks in her tough façade for only a breath before she went chin up, armor on. “Xander wouldn’t do something that would hurt people. He wouldn’t.”
Gamble could strong-arm her, he knew, and at this point, he probably fucking should. They’d waited too long to talk to the cops as it was. But forcing her hand meant she’d clam up, and then the cops wouldn’t get anywhere regardless. They both wanted the same thing, which was to find her brother, albeit for different reasons.
“Okay,” Gamble said. “Then let me help you find him so we can get this sorted out.”
Her shock quickly fell prey to her fortitude. “I don’t need—”
“I don’t care,” he bit out, because on this, he wasn’t budging. “Look, I get that you’re tough, and I get that you’re used to flying solo, but this is bigger than me and you. I want to help you, Kennedy, but for Chrissake, if you want to help your brother, you’re going to have to let me.”
For a heartbeat, then a handful more, the only sound that passed between them was the muted thump of the sledgehammer hitting the tire from across the yard. Then, finally, Kennedy’s lips parted to accommodate her slow exhale.
“Fine. I know a way I can get him to meet me. It’s going to take a little time”—she held up a hand and kept talking before he could loosen the protest rising from the back of his throat—“I’m talking a couple of hours, okay? But it’ll work, and then we’ll know once and for all what we’re dealing with, here. I swear.”
Gamble hoped for all of their sakes that she was right.
10
Kennedy pulled her Nissan to a stop at the bottom of a dead-end street she hadn’t seen in half a decade. The scene looked mostly unchanged, although she couldn’t admit to being shocked to find it that way. After all, the city wasn’t going to sink the money into fixing up a park in the middle of the lowest-rent part of North Point only to have said park become a more scenic place for drug deals to go down. The residents who lived in the crowded row homes surrounding the stretch of scraggly grass either didn’t care about the view or didn’t have the means to try to refresh the place on their own, so over time, the playground equipment had faded and cracked, and the picnic tables and benches had been covered with so much graffiti, they were probably more spray paint than actual metal and wood.
Yet this had been Kennedy’s refuge, her very safest place, and didn’t that just put the first twenty-three years of her life into sharp perspective.
Especially since she’d left it firmly in her rearview, and Xander was still here.
She dusted away the thought—one mess at a time, girl—and turned toward Gamble, who had once again origamied himself into her life and her passenger seat. “You didn’t have to bring dinner, you know,” she said, since she’d already told him a half a dozen times that he hadn’t needed to cover the rest of his shift at the fire house to accompany her back into North Point, all to no avail. Despite her arguments, here he was, cozied up next to her in all his dark and broody glory.
“Sure I did,” he said. “I’m hungry.” Despite the claim, he passed her the foil-wrapped sandwich he’d taken out of the bag in his lap, waiting until she pulled back the wrapping to reveal a pastrami on rye that made her taste buds suddenly and unexpectedly giddy before digging back in for his own sandwich. “Plus, Hawkins is like a mother hen when it comes to feeding all of us. He wouldn’t let me leave the fire house without them.”
“Lieutenant Hawkins made these?” Talk about a whoa. Kennedy had known Station Seventeen’s rescue squad lieutenant ever since she’d taken over the helm at The Crooked Angel—the guy had been in the RFD far longer than her three-year tenure as the bar’s manager, and the men and women from Seventeen had been hanging out there since the dawn of time. Like the rest of them, Gabe Hawkins had come with the territory. His quick smile and Southern charm made him easy to like, although he carried a quiet edge that told Kennedy he was probably fierce as hell when it came to being a firefighter. Still… “I never pegged him as the Martha Stewart type.”
Gamble laughed, the deep, rich sound arrowing right to Kennedy’s belly. “He’d probably stroke out if he heard you say that, but yeah, I suppose it’s accurate. Hawk has some pretty mad skills in the kitchen.”
He unwrapped his sandwich, his smile still firmly in place, and God, Kennedy couldn’t look away for all the world.
A fact that Gamble noticed in short order. “What?” he asked instead of starting to eat, and her cheeks heated. It was well into the evening, now bordering on dusk, so she couldn’t quite pass off her sunglasses as necessary, but clearly didn’t have the cover of the early nighttime shadows at her advantage just yet.
“No, nothing.” She took a bite of her sandwich—good Lord it was delicious—but Gamble simply lifted a brow at her.
“Are we seriously not past the bullshit phase by now?”
He’d stuck just enough humor to both his tone and his stare to pull a soft laugh past her lips. “Okay, fair enough. It’s just...you don’t laugh very often, and it’s, I don’t know. Nice, I guess.”
“Is that a compliment?” he asked, the humor on his face traveling up toward his eyes, and damn it, Kennedy laughed, too.
“Take it as you will. Just don’t let it go to your head.”
He took a bite of his sandwich, chewing for a minute before saying, “You’re a tough audience, you know that?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
They ate in silence, although it wasn’t some awkward gap in the conversation Kennedy felt she had to fill. She’d been hungrier than she realized, polishing off not only her sandwich, but also the snack bag of chips and half the bottle of water Gamble had also unearthed from the bag. He gathered the trash from their meal, carefully putting it back in the bag before tilting his head to look at her.
“So, I’ve gotta ask. What makes you so sure Xander will turn up now when he hasn’t returned any of your texts and we haven’t been able to put eyes on him anywhere else in the city? Because from where I sit, it looks like he really doesn’t want to be found.”
Kennedy’s pulse picked up the pace even though the question was totally legit. “Me texting him to ask if he’s okay is one thing. But telling him to meet me here is kind of like our bat signal.”
“Your bat signal,” Gamble echoed.
“Yeah, you know, when the people of Gotham City needed Batman, they’d flash that big ol’ beacon up in the night sky? The bat signal.”
“I know what it is,” he said, although not unkindly. “I’m just not following how this park is yours.”
Kennedy paused. She knew she could shrug it off or balk—God knew he was probably expecting her to do one or the other, possibly both. But he already knew most of the score between her and Xander. Letting go of this part of the story wouldn’t make her vulnerable or otherwise hurt anything, and anyway, as pushy as he’d been about coming with her, he had given her the benefit of the doubt, choosing to give her one last shot at finding Xander and hearing him out instead of simply going to the cops. She owed him at least this much.
“When I was thirteen and Xander was eight, we lived in a row home not too far from here. The park is nothing special”—she paused to gesture through the windshield at the decrepit playground equipment and crumbling blacktop, and God, time wasn’t kind to anything in The Hill—“but it was what we had.”
Here, Kennedy’s stomach squeezed, but she was already in for a penny. How mu
ch worse could the pound really be? “Xander was tough, but he was still a kid. Although he’d never admit it out loud, he loved the swings. So, when things got really bad, if we were hungry or we didn’t have power because our mom couldn’t afford to pay the electric bill on time, Xander and I would come here. I’d push him on the swings and we’d play the lottery game.”
“The lottery game?” Gamble asked, squinting at her through the deepening post-sunset shadows.
She squinted back. “Yeah. ‘What would you do if you won the lottery?’ Didn’t you ever play that game with anyone when you were a kid?”
“No, I…no.”
“Oh.” She bit her lip. She’d thought pretty much everyone had given in to the imagination-fueled game with a sibling or a friend or a classmate at some point, but maybe it was just a poor-kid’s game. “Well, the sky was the limit in our version of the lottery game. We’d conjure up houses with ice cream parlors in them and bowling alleys in the basement, trips to Africa where we’d ride on elephants—you name it, and we probably turned it into a what-if.”
“So how does that make this your bat signal?” Gamble asked, and even though answering made her chest ache, she did it anyway.
“Because. When the world got shitty and we really needed each other, this was where we came. Even when we got older and I stopped pushing him on the swings, even after our mom moved us to a new place farther away, Xander and I still came back here when things got really tough. If either of us asked the other to meet up at the park, it was our way of sending up the bat signal. It meant things were serious, and whoever was asking needed the other one. And even though we’re not”—do not waver. Do. Not. Waver—“close like we used to be, I have to believe that if I ask my brother to meet me here, at this park, he’ll understand that I really need him, and he’ll show up.”
Gamble looked at her, his dark stare making her feel unexpectedly naked. “When was the last time he met you out here?”
Damn it, she should’ve never opened her big, fat mouth. “It’s been a…while.”
“How long?” Gamble pressed, and she exhaled slowly.
“Five years. But that doesn’t matter. He’ll come.”
A noise of doubt huffed past Gamble’s lips. “You know he’s probably guilty of a crime here, don’t you?”
“No,” she said, her blood beginning to move faster in her veins. “I don’t know that.”
“Kennedy—”
“I’m not an idiot,” she interrupted, her sharp tongue getting the better of her clam-up defenses. “I know Xander is probably mixed up in something he shouldn’t be. But that doesn’t make him guilty until proven innocent, and it sure as hell doesn’t make him a bad person.”
“The Xander you knew might not have been a bad person,” Gamble argued, low and gruff. “But you haven’t seen him for a long time, and he’s not living an easy life. Family isn’t always what it seems, and people change.”
Her chest constricted, the interior of the car feeling suddenly hot even though the engine was idling and the air conditioning was going full blast. “Not Xander. Not like that.”
Gamble shook his head, his expression hardening. “I just don’t get this blind loyalty you have for your brother.”
“Oh, yes, you do.”
The words vaulted from her mouth before she could bite them back, but now that she’d let them loose, she had no choice but to back them up, no matter how much it might piss him off.
“You ordered tequila shots the other night for someone who never came to drink them.” Although she spoke the words softly, he flinched nonetheless, and the flash in his eyes and the titanium set of his jawline told Kennedy she wasn’t wrong about what he’d been doing. Between the admission that he’d been in the military and the undiluted emotion that had been in his stare as he’d ordered those drinks and then left half of them untouched, it hadn’t taken much to connect the dots.
She’d worked in a bar long enough to know when people were celebrating anniversaries. Good and bad.
And the look in his eyes right now told her with one hundred percent certainty that whatever had happened to Gamble hadn’t been anywhere close to good.
“Those shots I ordered the other night don’t have anything to do with this,” he said, his voice sandpaper-rough.
Kennedy’s heart twisted before picking up speed in her rib cage. “They do, Ian. You say you don’t get why I have Xander’s back no matter what, but you understand that brand of loyalty just fine. The only difference is that you have a brotherhood, and I have a brother. That’s all.”
“I don’t…” He broke off, and for a split second, the emotion churning in his stare was enough to pin her breath to her lungs. He blanked it in less than the span of a heartbeat, but she still felt the effects as he continued to stare at her through the growing shadows. There was no denying that Gamble had been an integral part of the Station Seventeen crew ever since she’d known him, but he’d always been reserved, too, as if he stood on the cautious edge of the deeper inner circle. Kennedy had always thought it was because maybe he had secrets.
Now, she realized they were ghosts.
Gamble needed a goddamned tourniquet for his mouth. He should have tied this conversation off as soon as Kennedy had brought up those tequila shots. The relationships he’d had with his recon teammates, much like the relationships he had now with everyone at Seventeen, had never been about blind faith. Those loyalties had been hard-earned, mostly because it had taken Gamble years to trust that he could even have them for anyone other than himself. He sure as shit wasn’t going to go yapping about what had happened to him in the Marines, no matter how big Kennedy’s pretty green eyes got. But there she sat, staring at him from the driver’s seat, expecting him to say something, and even though his brain commanded him to put a kill switch to this entire conversation, he couldn’t deny the raw reality filling his chest.
He trusted her, and it was starting to become a habit.
“You were right when you guessed that I’m an only child,” he said slowly. A good thing, probably, although, growing up he’d always wished it had been different. “I don’t have any siblings, and I’ve always been pretty much a loner.”
“I could see that,” Kennedy said. “I mean, obviously you’re tight with everyone at Seventeen and the cops from the Thirty-Third, but you’re kind of quiet about it. Like you’re maybe a half-step outside the circle.”
She turned toward him as she spoke, and Gamble shifted a little, too, even though the passenger seat didn’t give him a hell of a lot of room to do so.
He nodded. “When I tell you I don’t understand blood ties, I really do mean that. I’m not trying to be a prick. They don’t mean anything to me.”
Kennedy’s lips parted as she, no doubt, imagined all sorts of horrible things about his family life. Funny how horrible didn’t always look like people expected it to. “You weren’t close with your parents at all?” she asked, and ah, at least this was an easy question to answer.
“More like, they weren’t close with me.”
“I’m sorry.” Her forehead creased, a delicate little V forming right in the center. “I’m not following.”
“My parents weren’t very interested in being parents.” Gamble had never said this out loud to anyone even though he’d known it well for over twenty-five years, not even the head shrinker the Marines had forced him to go see after he’d come back from the nightmare that had ended his military career. The words didn’t feel awkward in his mouth, though—probably because they were true. “My mother and father were both really career-focused. High profile Ivy League professors with doctorates, her in biochemistry, him in molecular biology. She actually won a Nobel Prize when I was in high school,” he added, giving up a small smile at Kennedy’s whispered “whoa” in response.
“Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I just didn’t expect that.”
Gamble shook his head. “My parents didn’t, either. I think the last thing they thought they’d e
nd up with was a son with no interest in academia. While they were trying to force-feed me Mozart and Molière, I was begging to play Pop Warner football and join the wrestling team. It didn’t help that I’ve always been kind of big.”
Kennedy laughed, the throaty, surprisingly sweet sound wiping out some of the tension in his shoulders. “Gamble, please. Linebackers are ‘kind of big’. You’re…”
She trailed off, wiggling her fingers at him in an up-and-down motion that made him laugh right along with her.
“I’m what?”
“Gigantic?” she asked, and okay, he was six foot five and weighed in at about two fifty-five. She wasn’t exactly wrong.
He nodded in concession. “Well, as you can imagine, once it became clear that I wasn’t going to follow in their scholarly footsteps, my parents had no fucking clue what to do with me. So, they decided to go with full-on ignorance is bliss.”
“What do you mean?” Kennedy asked.
Gamble shrugged. He knew this story should bother him, but he hadn’t been raised as much as he’d simply grown up with his parents as distant bystanders doing their due diligence. Yeah, he’d lived in their house and eaten their food and slept under their roof, but he’d never really known them, and they sure as shit had never known him. His anger had turned to indifference a long time ago—not coincidentally, around the same time he’d joined the Marines and discovered what real bonds looked like. “My parents were both full-time professors on various academic boards. They also sponsored a small theater company and were active in the local arts community. It became clear pretty quickly that hands-on parenting wasn’t on their agenda.”
“So, what?” Kennedy asked, her eyes round and wide. “They just left you to fend for yourself because you weren’t who they wanted you to be?”
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