Page 32 of The Inheritance (Breach Wars #1)

And there was another part to it. I wanted Jovo to go home. I knew exactly how he felt, and I wanted him to get back to his clan.

“Okay.” I spread my arms in a gesture of resignation and surrender.

Jovo perked up, his eyes shining.

“We’ll try,” I told him.

The lees jumped forward, clearing the distance between us in a single leap, raised his hands and hugged me. For a second, I didn’t know what to do and then I carefully hugged him back.

* * *

Elias sat alone in his makeshift office inside Elmwood Library.

Outside the windows, the street was pitch black except for the floodlights bathing the area around the gate in bright electric lights.

His phone told him it was just past ten.

He hadn’t slept well last night, woke up at five, and then spent the entire day catching up on all the admin crap that had piled up in the past two weeks.

There was a chance that the Elmwood gate would be his last. Some people would’ve shied away from that thought.

He was a realist who liked to be prepared.

If he didn’t come out of the breach, the Guild would pass to Stephanie Nguyen.

As Chief Operations Manager, she was third in line after him and Leo.

The transition would be as smooth as he could humanly make it.

He was tired. He should’ve gone to bed as soon as he finished, but he couldn’t sleep.

Jackson was due to land after two am, if everything went well.

It would take him awhile to clear customs and get his baggage, so he would be on site by four.

Leo hadn’t come to bother him with any updates.

It probably meant that things were going as expected.

Elias thought of finding him to check in but decided against it.

The kid was running himself ragged as it was.

If another calamity fell on their head, Leo would appear and report to him about it.

Elias sipped the last of his cold coffee.

The picture on the tablet in front of him was twenty years old.

It was taken at the Chicago Botanical Garden on Thanksgiving holiday.

Brenda wore her favorite blue coat.She crouched on the stone steps, a wall of picturesque pines behind her, her arms wrapped around six-year-old Ryan.

Ryan’s face was scrunched up like he’d bitten a lemon.

His son had waged a private war against having his picture taken since birth, and the kid had won most of his battles.

Brenda was smiling, her soft brown hair spilling from under her white hat.

He didn’t know why he fixated on this particular photo. There were other pictures, some at the beach, some during other holidays, a few pictures from the army balls, he and Brenda dressed up and posing. But he always defaulted to this one.

Back then he had just come back to the States, with his second deployment under his belt, and he was done with the Middle East for a while.

He’d also made captain on his first try, and a company command assignment had been in the works.

He had no idea where exactly it would be, but he knew it would be stateside.

They would ship him off again eventually – he had no doubt of it – but for now he’d earned a couple of years of being home in the evenings, if not every night, then most nights.

It was that feeling of knowing that wherever they sent him, Brenda and the boy would be there too. That they’d be a family again.

Brenda had finished her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences.

She’d postponed the job search until they knew where they were going, but her degree was in demand, and she hadn’t anticipated a problem.

She’d stayed in Chicago, close to her parents, through his deployments.

They wanted time with Ryan, and she needed support while working on her degree.

He thought she would be reluctant to leave Chicago, but when he brought it up, she hugged him with that glowing smile and told him she couldn’t wait to escape.

He could still recall the relief he felt.

That picture was a moment in time when they had everything in front of them. Years of hard work and sacrifice were starting to pay off. The future looked bright.

Happier times. If he could go back to any point in his life, this would be the one.

Ten years later she was dying. The cancer was aggressive and resisted treatment. They thought they had decades left. They had months.

He took emergency leave and when that ran out, he asked to extend it.

It was denied. The command wanted to move him up from XO to his own battalion.

He was in line for promotion to lieutenant colonel.

His CO called him in and told him that he had to think about the future.

As tragic as things were, in six months he would be a widower, but he would still have a son and the rest of his life.

He had a solid track record. He could go very far if he made the right choices.

Once the funeral is over and your kid graduates and goes to college, what will you do with yourself? Make a smart decision.

Elias had resigned his commission the next day.

Two months later, he was in the hospital room, exhausted and bleary-eyed, watching Brenda breathe.

They’d cut her open again, trying to remove the tumors.

He remembered sixteen-year-old Ryan resting his hand on his shoulder.

“ Dad, go home. Take a shower, sleep, maybe eat food. You stink, and you look like crap. I’ll stay with mom. I’ll call you if anything happens.”

He went home and crashed. When he woke up the next afternoon, the gates had burst, monsters overran the city, and the two people he loved most in the world were dead.

Before the gates, he was a husband and a father.

He had a wife. He had a son. Ten days later, all that was left were two urns of ash.

He had awakened as a Talent the morning after the funeral.

It hurt still. Time didn’t make it better. Killing shit didn’t make it better. He had only two options: to think about it and hurt or to not think about it and carry on.

And here was Malcolm, who had everything he’d lost. A wife, two children, family…

And a mistress.

And a huge gambling addiction.

And a debt he could never repay.

It made Elias irrationally angry.

He was pissed off at Malcolm for not valuing everything he had, while Elias was sitting here wishing he could rewind time.

He was pissed off at himself for missing Malcolm’s addiction, for giving London a second shot, and for putting both of them in charge of a team and getting everyone killed.

He was pissed off at whoever made the breaches. He was just fucking pissed off.

He saw Leo manifest in the doorway. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear that his XO could teleport.

“About that typhoon…” Leo started.

Elias’ fist landed on the desk. It cracked and shattered into a thousand pieces. His tablet and phone clattered to the floor.

Jackson stuck his head out, leaning from behind the doorway with a small smile. “I heard you’re getting the old band back together. Is this a bad time?I can come back.”

Elias swore.

“He put me up to it,” Leo said.

“I did.” Jackson nodded.

Elias just stared at them.

Jackson raised two mugs in his hands. “I brought you some of that swill you call coffee around here.Why don’t you come out of this tiny room and have a drink with me?”

“I’ll get the desk replaced,” Leo said.

Elias sighed and fished his phone and tablet from the wreckage.

They moved into the lounge outside of the office on the second floor, overlooking the library floor below.

Elias gulped his coffee.It did taste like swill, but at least it wasn’t cold. “How did you get here so fast?”

“Called in a favor,” Jackson said. “I didn’t have a choice about the departing flight.They escorted me all the way to my seat. Got off the plane in Hong Kong, got onto another plane instead of cooling my heels, flew around the storm, and here I am.”

Elias quietly exhaled.

The healer sipped his coffee and grimaced. “Foul.”

“It’s hot.”

“Well, there is that,” Jackson agreed.

He was a lean man, not just thin, but slight, short, and pale, with thoughtful eyes and light brown hair cropped close to his head. Easy to overlook. Easy to dismiss.

“A fine mess we landed in,” Jackson said.

“Yes.”

“Leo tells me that the DDC will be releasing the update tomorrow.”

“That’s right,” Elias said.

They were out of time. The DDC could only sit on the fatal event for so long, and Leo’s contact warned him that things had changed, and she couldn’t keep it quiet any longer. A press release would be coming tomorrow. As soon as it hit, Cold Chaos would become the focal point of the country.

It looked bad. An assault team and a mining crew were dead, a week had passed since they were killed, and both the DDC and Cold Chaos had done nothing about it.

The media would be all over it. The politicians would hijack it for their own purposes.

The rival guilds would accuse Cold Chaos of cowardice and dereliction of duty. Public pressure would be immense.

The law gave the DDC authority to reassign the ownership of the breach if the original guild was unable to close a gate. Tomorrow the country would demand accountability. The DDC would reassign the gate to get the focus off themselves.

The guilds existed in cutthroat competition with each other.

It didn’t matter how good your track record was; it only mattered how well you closed the latest breach.

Cold Chaos couldn’t afford to give up Elmwood.

If they let another guild recover the bodies because Cold Chaos was too weak to handle it, the DDC would divert the higher difficulty gates to someone else.

It would take them years to regain their standing.