Page 165 of Shrapnel

“I love you,” he blurted, feeling tears prick at the back of his eyes. “And maybe my timing sucks and this is all wrong, but I do. I love you. I love you when you’re a killer and I love you when you’re a doofus making stupid jokes. I love your crooked smiles and that you named your gun Chicken Nugget.”

He kissed Jamie again. And again.

With his lips pressed against Jamie, he continued, “And I’ll love you even if you can’t love me back. Even if it’s impossible. I don’t care. I’ll love you enough for the both of us.”

Jamie slipped both his hands around Owen’s neck and dragged him back in for another kiss. Owen could feel Jamie’s heart beating against his chest. Their breaths matched and after a while they weren’t even kissing, just existing in the same space.

When they finally broke apart, Jamie was smiling shyly, one side of his lips higher than the other.

“I think I broke my leg,” he admitted.

Interlocking their fingers, Owen huffed a laugh. “C’mon Firebug, let’s go to the hospital.”

It was the perfect sort of day for a funeral. Roiling grey clouds hung low and pregnant, threatening to spill at any moment. The incoming storm whipped up the wind, rustling through the dead winter grass. Flower petals caught the wind, spinning as they were cast into the atmosphere. Jamie leaned against the headstone and scratched under the cast.

“Stop scratching.”

“But it itches,” he whined, glaring down at his neon pink cast ruefully.

Owen took his hand to keep him from scratching, holding it tightly like he was a child.

His leg did itch. A lot. No one told him getting proper medical treatment would be this annoying. Molly usually just gave him a brace or something. Casts suck. It was hot and itchy way down in there and he couldn’t scratch it. Worse, he was having dreams about his leg getting caught in something. Twice now he’d woken up tugging on the cast.

Owen threatened to tie his hands, but he didn’t like the face Jamie made after that suggestion.

“Is there a big turnout?” Noah asked from where he was crouched behind a headstone. Jamie liked to believe Ms. Ethel Allen would like the idea of a hot young man defacing her grave.

“No, everyone hates you.”

Owen elbowed Jamie. “There’s plenty of people.”

Noah ducked lower in his hoodie; fists clenched with the desire to look. Jamie told him it was stupid to come to his own funeral, but he wouldn’t be put off. So now they were standing on the hill overlooking the graveside, watching as everyone pretended to mourn an empty casket.

Well, mostly empty. Jamie had managed to enclose the entirePrincess Diariescollection before they sealed it shut. Noah would need some entertainment in the afterlife.

It was probably a moving service. He couldn’t hear a word of it, but the priest looked very somber. Kurt and Grant were standing at the front. Kurt looked like someone had just asked him to eat kitty litter. Jamie assumed that was his mourning face. Grant at least looked properly subdued. He was handsome in his black suit, hands clasped in front of him and head downturned. He was not there as a Weaver but as the lover of the man whose nephew was being buried.

Jamie and Grant’s relationship had changed. He couldn’t exactly say how—outwardly Grant was treating him the same. Besides insisting he takes time off—it had been business as usual in Weaver Syndicate.

But there was a change. An undercurrent of tenderness that neither of them knew how to operate around. Grant had promised he would come for him. And he had. Without a word, he had taken Dominic and Ian’s bodies into the street and burned them. He lit the match and watched Jamie’s past crumble to ash.

Then he took him to the hospital and stayed with him. Silently sitting beside him with an uncomfortably placid look on his face.

They hadn’t had any kind of talk. No heart to hearts or tearful moments where they laid themselves bare. They didn’t need to. Grant had proven what Jamie meant to him. He didn’t send Weaver lackeys out to rescue a wayward operative. He came. Himself. Not on a Weaver op, but on a personal mission.

He wasn’t just an asset.

Jamie was family. It was a family of murderers, thieves, liars, and the clinically insane. But it was a hell of a lot more than he expected. And it was his.

Grant knew. They all did. They all knew more than Jamie had ever wanted to tell, and it was a weird thing. Acceptance. The fact that not a single one of the people in his life cared about where he had come from. They didn’t look at him like he was dirty. Or broken. They didn’t look at him any differently than they had before.

After he had been discharged, he found himself in Elijah’s room. They had extubated him the night before. Tired, sleepy, and more than a little sore, he was alive. His eyebrows rose when Jamie limped into the room on one crutch.

“Aren’t there supposed to be two?” Elijah had asked.

Jamie stared at him. “Yeah, there are.”

And they both knew what he meant.