Page 30 of Tag (The Golden Team #9)

Aponi

T he hospital lights buzzed low, soft against the hum of machines and the steady beep of my mother’s heart monitor.

She looked small in the bed.

It didn’t fit.

This was the woman who used to braid my hair with fingers rough from work and hum lullabies in Cherokee. Who once stopped a drunk man from hitting a neighbor with nothing but her voice and a garden hoe.

Now she was hooked up to IVs, stitched and pale, and still somehow held herself like she was ready for war.

Faron stood at the window, arms crossed, face a mask.

Tag sat beside me in the room’s single armchair, silent, patient.

I hadn’t spoken since we got here.

None of us had.

Finally, my mother turned her head to me. “You want to say something. Say it.”

I blinked, and the tears started before I could stop them.

“You left me,” I whispered.

“I know.”

“You let me grow up thinking I wasn’t enough for you to stay. I used to pretend you were dead. Faron thought we were both dead, and you told me that he and my father were dead.”

Her eyes welled. “That’s not true.”

“But it felt true,” I said, voice breaking. “Every birthday. Every time I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see you there.”

“I watched over you. I swear it.”

“You watched me suffer,” I snapped, my tears falling freely now. “You watched me become a cop. Get shot. Fall apart. And you never came. Thank God my brother found me.”

She closed her eyes, and the sound she made wasn’t a sob—it was a wound reopening.

“I thought I was protecting you,” she rasped. “I thought if I stayed away, you’d live.”

Faron turned slowly. “We didn’t live. We survived. And we did it thinking we were orphans.”

She looked at him, guilt written deep across her features. “I never stopped loving you.”

He didn’t move. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

We sat in the silence that followed—full of every unspoken word we’d buried for decades.

Then Tag cleared his throat and pulled the flash drive from his pocket. “You ready to see what she risked everything for?”

I nodded.

He slid it into the laptop on the table. Files popped up instantly—organized, labeled, dated.

Transactions. Photos. Flight manifests. Shelter applications red-flagged with codes.

And then a folder labeled “VIP NETWORK.”

Tag opened it.

My blood turned to ice.

At the top of the list:

Franklin Graves.

CEO. Billionaire. Public philanthropist. Children’s Foundation sponsor.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “He funds the city’s Safe Haven program.”

Faron’s voice was quiet but deadly. “He’s one of the biggest donors to the LAPD youth protection fund. He is one of the biggest donors for the rec centers.”

My stomach lurched. “He’s been hiding in plain sight.”

“And he’s protected,” Tag said. “Politically. Financially. Legally. This doesn’t take him down—it paints a target on our backs.”

I stood slowly.

Not shaking anymore.

Not crying.

Focused.

Sharp.

“He doesn’t get to stay hidden. Not now. Not after everything.”

Tag looked at me like he saw it—that fire, that fury. The same fire that had been passed down from a woman who’d chosen shadows to protect her children.

“This time,” I said, meeting Faron’s eyes, “we burn the whole network to the ground.”