David grinned. “So you’re saying it’s good that your ex-lover has a jealous, angry streak?”
Griffin laughed ruefully, and it hurt. Thinking of Keko usually did.
“Are you ever going to tell me what happened three years ago?”
David had been with Griffin in Colorado two months back when they’d discovered Keko being held captive by one of their own, and the revelation of Griffin’s previous liaison with the Chimeran woman had come to light. But Griffin had never spoken of the awful misunderstanding that final night three years ago around the Senatus bonfire. It would only undermine his already tenuous position among his own cabinet and his Ofarian detractors, who still possessed a powerful voice.
An image of the mighty Makaha, reduced to sagging in the snow and dirt, half his arm black, his mouth open in a scream, assaulted Griffin’s memory. Followed quickly by one of Keko, and her horror and shock and disgust. And then her back as she’d turned away.
“Maybe someday,” Griffin replied.
After the incident, he’d appealed to the Senatus many times, but his stance that Makaha had attacked first fell on deaf ears. So he’d given up trying to make contact, but had not given up on his dreams. He still desperately wanted to be part of the Senatus, but he realized now that he’d rushed the process before. He’d barged in waving his opinions like flags, but after witnessing their fractured system and lack of true communication, he knew now that he needed a new approach. He just didn’t know what that was.
David may have been more right than his joke intended. The chance to move forward with the Senatus had risen from the ashes of any possible future with Keko. Ash. Yeah, that’s what they were now. Griffin tried to see that as a good thing.
“Will Kekona be there?”
Griffin shrugged, feigning ignorance by checking his watch, but he remembered all too well what Cat had told him after she’d returned from Hawaii two months ago: Keko’s generalship had been given to Bane. He also knew that that action would’ve destroyed her. And there was nothing he could do about it.
As he caught David watching him, he knew that no amount of nonchalance would fool his friend, but that David would also never press for information Griffin wasn’t willing to give.
Griffin peered across the street to the picture window of the second-floor apartment, alive with the flicker from the TV. “You sure you want to sit out here tonight? Call up Hansen to be on watch. This is beneath you.” He said that last sentence with a grin.
“Nah. I’d rather handle it myself. Kelse is working late anyway.”
Griffin understood. Back when his main job had been the safety of Gwen Carroway, the woman everyone had thought would be the next Ofarian leader, her protection had been his life. He’d hated handing over the responsibility to anyone else.
“I’ll be just a couple hours. Want me to bring out leftovers?”
“Hell, yeah.” David patted his gut as he ambled over to the bus stop bench across from the Aames’s apartment. Perfect sight lines in all directions.
Griffin shouldn’t need all this protection in his own city, his own childhood neighborhood where he was about to have Sunday dinner with his family, but after the assassination attempt by Wes Pritchart five years ago, and the detractors that had since grown more vocal once his “relationship” with a Chimeran had come to light, they couldn’t be too careful.
Griffin jogged to his family’s building and inserted his key, the same one he used to wear around his neck when he was young and his parents had been away on duty. Inside, the same stairs still creaked. The same carpet still welcomed him into his parents’ place, only now it was flattened and darker with permanent stains.
“Hey, Pop.”
Griffin’s father sat wide-legged on one of the couches making an L around the TV. He looked up from the baseball documentary whose volume was cranked all the way up to compensate for the driving beat of the music pumping from his sisters’ room.
“Griffin,” Pop said with a nod toward the TV. “You’d like this. All about the Yankees.”
Griffin grimaced and chuckled. He loved baseball, hated the Yankees.
Pop lifted a beer bottle to his smiling lips. “I think your mother could use some help.”
Nothing like a visit home to remind you that you aren’t leader of the Ofarians in every way.
“Sure,” Griffin said, sliding around the pinch of furniture cramped into the tiny living room. How his parents had raised nine kids in here, he’d never know. But they’d stuck to their “Keep Ofarians Strong By Population” creed and had never once complained.
Until Griffin had helped overthrow the old Board. Until he’d been given command. Until his father had to take a position in a Primary security firm to pay the bills. After that, the issue of struggling Ofarian classes and touchy Primary integration sat right in the middle of the dining room table along with the mashed potatoes and pork roast. Pop thought that being born into and serving in the Ofarian soldier class was the greatest honor ever, and its reduction in numbers was a slap in the face. He never missed an opportunity to tell Griffin as much.
But then, Pop had never been an assassin.
Despite Griffin’s difference of opinion, they were still his parents.
Griffin leaned into the kitchen, where his mom was spooning green beans into a big bowl. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “Need help?”
She looked up, her cheeks pink from the warm kitchen and hard work. She had the exact opposite coloring of Griffin and his father—her blond hair just starting to gray at age 52, her pale skin barely showing her distinguished wrinkles. “Hi, baby.”
The endearment never failed to make him happy, even though she was only seventeen years older than he was.
She added, “Could you go tell Henry and your sisters that dinner is in fifteen?”
Down the short hallway, Griffin rapped on the door to his sixteen and seventeen year-old sisters’ room, which positively vibrated with the music’s bass. When no one answered, he cracked the door open. Meg, the older one, was teaching the younger, Eve, some sort of dance routine.
“Fifteen minutes,” he shouted. “And turn that down. I could hear it on the street.” They stopped moving, and Meg gave him a classic eye roll. He pointed a finger, grinning. “I could give you nelicoda for that.”
As he suspected, the threat of dosing her with the chemical that neutralized water magic did nothing, just made her roll her eyes even more dramatically as she reached for the volume knob and twisted it down.
“Close the door, will you?” Eve said on his way out.
“Not a chance,” he replied.
The door to Henry’s room—which had once been Griffin’s room, along with two of his brothers—was slightly ajar, and Griffin pushed it all the way open. The twelve year old was perched on the edge of his bed, playing a handheld video game.
Griffin lingered in the doorway, unnoticed. “Hey, you. Whatcha playin’?”
Henry finally ripped his eyes from the screen and looked up. “Griff!”
The kid was a mini-Griffin: thick, dark hair that could never be anything but super short, and brown eyes hooded beneath eyebrows that he would have to get used to being teased about. He dove back into his game, thumbs flying, elbows twitching up and down.
“Armed Battle 4,” Henry said. “Wanna play me? Bet I can kick your ass.”
“Language, dude.” Griffin crossed the carpet to ruffle his littlest brother’s hair. He peered over the small shoulder at the game screen. Humans destroying other humans and aliens that looked nothing like real Secondaries. Guns and knives and chain ropes. Blood and body parts everywhere. Death and glory in the form of points.