hell happened, because—”
“What do you mean, what happened?”
“Everything! How many kids does he have?”
“Five.”
“And he and Diego, how come they’re not sunshine and roses anymore?”
He hunched into himself, still typing. “Not my story to tell.”
“Tell me something, or I will punch you in the face.”
His head came up. “What? No, you won’t!”
“Try me. Fucking try me.”
He squinted at me in something that wasn’t quite a glare, but whatever he saw in my eyes made him falter.
“Fine, I’ll give you the public records version,” he said. “But not because you’re threatening me—you should stop saying such shitty things to your friends, by the way—but because you’re Arthur’s friend too and you don’t deserve to be kept in the dark. I wasn’t here when it all went down—I’d gone off to be a real adult and try my hand at being a productive member of society, believe it or not; I had some harebrained idea about making sure I could make it on my own without their help. When I get back in touch, I find out hell had frozen over while I was off playing dot-com rich kid—Arthur had gotten boned and thrown off the force, and he and Diego had split up, which as far as I was concerned was one of the top twelve signs of the apocalypse. I found Arthur working nights as a security guard for minimum wage.”
“That’s when you came back?”
He made a face and turned back to his screen. “Normal life was never a good fit for me anyway. I talked Arthur into starting the business and getting some meaning back into his life, and here we are.”
“So Arthur and Diego don’t speak anymore.”
“They keep it civil, but no, not really. Arthur’s in his kids’ lives every minute he can be, though. He’s a good father.”
Yet he had chosen to hide it from me. He had never wanted me to know about the most important piece of himself.
He’d made a conscious decision to cut a carefully Cas-shaped hole around everything that mattered to him most.
“And what about you?” I said to Checker, my voice treacherously even.
He cleared his throat. “I go over for Sunday dinner almost every week. They’re still family to me, even if we never made it official.”
I almost did punch him, then. “Two years,” I said. “That’s how long I’ve known you and Arthur. Two. Years.”
“People have a right to have secrets from one another, Cas—”
“This isn’t a secret!” The sting in my chest was writhing up until I couldn’t stop it anymore and didn’t want to. “This is—this is his family, practically your family too from what you just said—how far did you have to go out of your way to avoid ever mentioning them in front of me? How far?”
“It was Arthur’s call—”
“And what, he doesn’t trust me? To know his children exist?” I cried. “Jesus, that sort of thing is public knowledge if anyone wanted to look; it’s not even like it’s something dangerous I could spill to a bad guy. So, what, he just didn’t want me to know?”
“He likes to keep his family separate from his work life—”
“And that’s all I am to him, right? Someone he can hire to bash in heads when he needs to. Nothing more.”
A tool. A fucking gun in his arsenal. One he thought should be illegal if it weren’t so regrettably useful.
I’d been reluctant to have friends because they needed things from me and would make me feel shitty if they were inconsiderate enough to die. I’d braced myself for the guilt of inevitably letting them down.
I’d never prepared for … this.
“I tried to tell him it was getting ridiculous,” Checker said tightly. “So did Pilar. He was just stubborn; you know how stubborn he can be. But I’m sorry, Cas. Is that what you want me to say? I’m sorry. Though, come on, it’s not like you share anything unless you’re forced to, so can we call a fucking truce? Now, for the love of human progress, will you please sit the fuck down and get to work on finding him?”
I clamped down on my emotions like I was trying to reseal a shaken soda bottle and sat.
My fingers hit the keys with almost enough force to break them.
twelve
CHECKER—OR more likely Pilar—had already been sifting through the files from the data dump and sorting them into directories. Not a whole lot of it was decrypted yet, but the moment I opened the first file about Teplova’s surgical methods, I had