There was a photograph of Marcus with three other men, all of them in military fatigues, standing in front of a building I recognized from the operation. There was a copy of a report — heavily redacted, but with enough visible to confirm that Marcus had been officially blamed for the intelligence failure that had killed our men. There was a letter from a lawyer, addressed to Claire, explaining that Marcus had been trying to blackmail her and that she had legal grounds to go to the authorities.
She’d been building a case. She’d been preparing to fight back.
She’d died before she could.
I sat there for a long time, looking at the papers, feeling the weight of them. Claire had been carrying this alone. She’d been trying to protect us, and she’d been doing it without me. I understood why. I understood the fear. But I also felt something else — something that took me a moment to recognize.
Anger. Not at Claire. At myself. For not seeing it. For not knowing. For being so focused on keeping my past buried that I’d failed to see the threat that was right in front of me.
I gathered the papers and put them back in the box. Then I took out my phone and made a call.
It took me two days to find Marcus Webb.
He wasn’t hiding, exactly. He was staying at a hotel downtown — the kind of place that rented by the week and didn’t ask too many questions. He’d been using a fake name, but Tommy had given me enough details to track him down. A man with a scar on his face, wearing expensive suits, asking questions about Garrett Danner.
The hotel was a six-story building on the edge of the financial district. I parked across the street and watched the entrance for a few hours. Around seven in the evening, Marcus walked out.
He looked exactly as Tommy had described. Tall. Thin. Well-dressed. The scar on his cheek was visible even from a distance — a pale line against his skin, like a crack in marble. He walked with the easy confidence of a man who’d never had to run from anything.
I followed him.
He walked four blocks to a restaurant — a fancy place with white tablecloths and a menu posted outside that didn’t list prices. He went inside. I waited.
An hour later, he came out alone. He walked back toward his hotel, taking a slightly different route. I stayed behind him, keeping my distance, watching the way he moved. He didn’t check behind him. He didn’t seem concerned about being followed. That was either arrogance or stupidity.
I was betting on arrogance.
He turned down a side street — a narrow alley that ran between two buildings. It was dark there, away from the streetlights, the kind of place where a man could disappear without anyone noticing.
I followed him into the alley.
“Marcus.”
He stopped. Turned around slowly. When he saw me, his face didn’t change. No surprise. No fear. Just that cold, flat look I remembered from six years ago.
“Garrett,” he said. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”
“You’ve been looking for me.”
“I have.”
“Why?”
He smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. “You know why.”
“The operation. The men who died. You want to blame me.”
“I don’t want to blame anyone. I want what’s mine.”
“What’s yours?”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “This. A letter. Signed by your wife. Promising to pay me a significant sum in exchange for my silence. She never finished paying.”
I stared at him. “You’re lying.”
“Am I?” He unfolded the paper and held it up. Even in the dim light, I could see Claire’s handwriting. But I knew — I knew — it was a forgery. Claire had never mentioned any letter. She’d kept records of everything, and there was no letter in the box.
“That’s not real,” I said.
“It’s real enough. Real enough for a court. Real enough for the authorities. Real enough to make your life very difficult if I decide to share it.”
“You’re blackmailing me.”
“I’m asking for what I’m owed. You owe me, Garrett. You owe me for what happened over there. You owe me for the years I spent hiding, running, trying to survive. You got to come home. You got to build a life. I got nothing.”
“You got nothing because you got two men killed.”
His face twisted. For a moment, the cold mask slipped, and I saw something underneath — something raw and ugly and desperate.
“They were soldiers. They knew the risks.”
“They trusted you. They trusted the information you gave them. And you sold them out.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“You sold them out for money.”
“I did what I had to do!” His voice rose, echoing off the walls of the alley. “You don’t know what it was like. You don’t know what I was dealing with. You were always the hero, Garrett. Always the one who did the right thing. You never had to make the hard choices.”
“I made plenty of hard choices. I just didn’t make the wrong ones.”
He laughed. A bitter, broken sound. “You think you’re so different from me? You think you’re better? You killed people, Garrett. You killed plenty of people. The only difference between us is that you got to call yours justified.”
I felt the old machinery stir. The cold, precise part of myself that I’d spent four years trying to keep dormant. It would be so easy. One step forward. One precise movement. One moment of pressure applied to exactly the right place.
But I thought about Milo. I thought about Claire. I thought about the promise I’d made in that hospital room — the promise to make sure our son grew up knowing more about kindness than combat.
