“Do you hurt the trolls?”

  He cocks his head but still no words come from his mouth.

  “Do you know the trolls?” Riley continues as if his silence means something to her.

  His blond hair, down now, moves as he shakes his head.

  “Well, that’s good. Trolls are nice. They sing pretty songs too.” She looks back at me and smiles her beautiful smile. “Let’s go, Livi. I’m ready now.”

  She’s ready now? God, this child. My heart swells every time she opens her little mouth.

  “Oh,” I start, clearing the hoarseness out of my voice. “You are now, are you?”

  “Yup,” she responds, popping the p.

  “Well”—I look up at Drew—“if you’ll excuse us.”

  I start to walk around him, but he reaches out and grabs my bicep with the most gentle of touches. I look down at his hand, up to his beautiful eyes, then back at the hand on my arm again. Repeating the motion twice more before finally settling on his eyes. I hear Riley giggle, but all my focus is on him.

  “I’ll walk you.”

  Wow.

  Again, that rusty baritone voice sends a jolt through me like my whole body has been hooked up to the entire electrical grid of Back Bay.

  “Uh, that’s very nice of you, but we’ll be okay. We do this every day.”

  His eyes get hard, narrowing slightly, but otherwise, he doesn’t move. Then, after a beat, he tips his head in the direction that we walk and raises one dark-blond brow—the one with the scar dissecting it.

  “We don’t need an escort.”

  He doesn’t say a word, per the norm.

  “Really,” I continue.

  “I’ll see you home,” he says, leaving no room for argument.

  “Livi! Yay!” she exclaims. Riley rips her hand from mine, and she leaps at Drew. He’s a little delayed but doesn’t miss a beat in dropping my arm and grabbing her under her armpits before she just bounces right off him. “I’m going to climb a giant! Look at me, I’m like Jack, but I get to climb the giant and not the beanstalk. HEY! Beans. Like me, Auntie!”

  The whole time she’s jabbering, my jaw drops farther and farther as she continues to do exactly as she says, climbing the muscular giant like it’s a completely normal thing for her—with his help, of course—which is even more confusing to me. I can tell the exact moment something changes for him. The storm settles a bit behind those eyes, the waters not churning uncontrollably but just calm and peaceful. He moves quickly, his arms dashing out as Riley’s legs lose their purchase, and she’s squealing in laughter as he tosses her up in the air in a spin, catching her so she’s facing the street and not his body. Then, in a move that I will never forget until the day I die, he settles her little body on his shoulders and hooks her ankles with his big paws, securing her on her new perch.

  “Livi, look! I’m a giant now, too!” Riley yells as if I can’t hear her clear as day.

  I clear my throat, blink a few times, and look from Drew’s very calm eyes up to her wildly excited ones. “I see that, my precious bean.”

  “Let’s go, giant!” she exclaims, pointing her hand toward the direction of our condo.

  “Let’s go, squirt,” Drew rumbles down to me.

  “Excuse me?” I gasp, so confused at this turn of events that my brain just can’t move quickly.

  Again, he tips his head and goes back to silence.

  “This is the strangest day ever,” I mutter under my breath, but do I do anything to detach my niece from him?

  No.

  Like the basket case I feel I am at this moment, I do the only thing that makes sense.

  I start walking home.

  “Hurt” by Johnny Cash

  A man experiences many things in life that scar him to the point that he’ll never be the same again.

  Some good.

  So good that you let those moments fill the space inside you the best they can—pushing the bad out.

  Some bad.

  Some, for a few, are only everything that nightmares are made of.

  Those moments will hit you out of the blue and knock you flat on your ass. You could be in the middle of something mundane and routine, and the next thing you know, you’re struggling to breathe. Or, in my case, struck with so much desperate grief that you feel like you really are dead.

  It’s been a battle for me mentally the past few days. Ever since I started walking Olivia and Riley home. Things I had long since stopped thinking about and dreaming of stayed in the forefront of my mind, not locked away where they belonged. I haven’t so much as explained myself to her, just made sure I was there every time she made that walk between her home and the coffee shop. It’s insane. I know this. Yet do I stop? No … I let the monsters in the dark start whispering louder in my head and keep showing up.

  I place one hand on the railing of my balcony and look down at the water of Boston Harbor. The other absentmindedly reaches for my shirt while the past enters my thoughts against my attempts to keep it away. I lift the cotton from my flesh, tucking my hand underneath. I don’t stop until my fingertip hits the puckered scar directly between my abs. With my finger touching that old wound, I think about those nightmare flashes of pain that had just hit me and reach for the bottle of Bulleit with my free hand, consuming half the bottle with one gulp. I’ll need it. When these days come, I always fucking need it.

  I don’t remember much from that first day. I know after I was patched up and my handler came in to explain what he needed from me, I demanded they take me to where I could see my family. Where I could watch them find out I was … dead.

  My brother was the hardest. Though, I knew he would be. You don’t have a bond like we had and not realize the news of my “death” would break him completely. Somehow, I managed to stay put as the doctor walked out. I had been ordered not to move, not unless I wanted to really die because I was foolish enough to be on my feet after having surgery to repair the bullet that tore through my gut. But when I watched him process what the doctor said, I had to be held back. I remember Clark, my point of contact, holding his hand over my mouth to keep me quiet while two of his men held my body back as gently as possible. It didn’t matter, I still tore open what was just repaired the second my brother made a sound that came from his very soul being ripped from his body and fell to his knees.

  There is no way to describe the pure heartache that comes from someone who has lost someone they love, but to have him experience that while I was watching from the shadows … there’s no way to make anyone understand that. Everything inside me demanded I rush in and tell him it wasn’t real, but I knew better. I knew the costs. And I would do it all over again and spend the past two-plus decades living the life of a ghost.

  It wasn’t just my brother.

  When I saw the rest of my family, my five brothers who life had given me through our time in the Marines—their wives and girlfriends—it killed whatever was actually left inside me.

  At least, that’s what I thought before I had to watch my own funeral from the black windows of the SUV waiting to take me away from the life I had loved. The life I would never return to, not if I cared about what happened to the people I “died” to protect.

  It wasn’t seeing the men who had become my brothers not moving, staring at the casket they thought held me that killed the biggest part left of me. I knew they would hold themselves tight like that, but I didn’t expect them to work so hard to keep their shit together. Not even the rifles going off got a single blink from them. I knew what type of effort they were putting into their grief. It hurt knowing they were in pain I essentially caused but knew was unavoidable.

  It wasn’t seeing the girls crying for me that did it either, though it made me want to rush out of the car and be the man they knew me to be. The one that would rather get their laughter than their tears. No, that man died that day with each tear they cried for me.

  What it was, though, was my sweetest friend.

  I almost didn’t recognize him dressed in a perfectly pressed and tailored black suit. Dress shoes shiny from a fresh polish moving through the marked graveyard with a precision that shouldn’t shock me from him. Not once did he look away from the casket. He was there for one thing only, and it was clear in each determined step that he took. It was the buzzed hair that gave me pause. Gone was the flamboyant man who got as much pleasure in teasing me as I did in acting like I hated it. Gone was the man who couldn’t ever be brought down from the high of life he was riding. I had never, not once in the years I’d known him, seen that stoic look on his face. His mocha skin etched in stone, he remain focused on the box I wasn’t in.

  He didn’t stay long, but it was long enough that a mark on my soul would forever be an inch deep and never heal … constantly reopening. He left what he needed to with the moments he bowed his head and then turned and walked the way he had come. But I didn’t need anything more to know that my “death” would mark him just as deeply.

  With a deep sigh that I feel in my gut, I turn from the brilliant water over the harbor and turn into my condo. So different from the life I left behind, the one that I live as a ghost here in Boston. The bottle of bourbon goes back to my mouth, and I take another heavy pull, my eyes already trained on the object I want across the room, center shelf, with nothing else sharing the wooden surface.

  The ribbon isn’t bright anymore. It’s tarnished and dirt soaked, just like me. The glass doesn’t shine like it did the day it was pulled from its packaging. It wouldn’t, seeing that I find myself right in front of it almost like clockwork each week. But inside, each one of the flecks of gold glitter still shines just as bright as they did over two decades ago.

  I take another pull from the bottle and manipulate the glass in my hand, watching those pieces of glitter dance inside their space, and smile. It’s a twisted as fuck smile. One made of grief but also the love and happiness that this jar represents. I’m sure I look like a monster every time from the lack of smiling over the years.

  Goddamn Sway.

  Goddamn Sway and his fucking glitter.

  And goddamn me for taking a life sentence worse than death.

  But thank fucking God for this jar—my only connection to the life I had—because without it, I would have killed myself a long time ago. After all, what’s the point of continuing to live when you’re already a dead man?

  I place the jar back on the shelf where that part of me belongs and force myself away from it. It takes another five healthy swallows before I’m able to tuck Zeke Cooper back where he belongs, in the ground six feet under. The whole walk through my condo to the office I have in the back of my space gives me time to get my shit together. To forget the ghosts of the past and focus on the reality of my present.

  I boot my computer up and place the bottle on the desk, looking over my notes on the next man my team was in charge of killing. The next piece of shit the world would be better without. There’s a reason they wanted me “dead.” There’s a reason I could be wiped clean from the earth and start over a million miles away, completely untraceable. There wasn’t a person out there better to lead this team from the shadows than me. And after approaching me for years, it was a perfect storm when the shit stains of the earth were pushing in on their target—my family—and me getting shot. They didn’t waste a second pushing through the recovery room, having already stood like sentries when I was in surgery, I’m told, to explain the situation. They needed me, and if they didn’t have me, they couldn’t guarantee they could keep those important to me alive. Fewer than ten people in the government know about the men I work for. The nation’s boogeyman killers, that’s what we are. All three men who work with me are “dead,” the same as I am.

  What better man to hunt the vile creatures of this earth than a man who’s already dead, after all.

  With that sick thought, I grab the bottle and continue to drink while I plan the best way to murder this next son of a bitch.

  Life wouldn’t be too bad if only everything that made my very alive heart beat didn’t hurt as painfully as it did—especially knowing that it would never be any different for an alive dead man.

  “Someone’s Someone” by Monsta X

  “He’s out there again,” Ella whisper-yells into my ear.

  Of course, it wasn’t a necessary warning, seeing that Riley’s been out there with him talking up a storm for the past half hour, so I already knew he was there. Without fail, he’s there propped up against the brick at the corner of my building each day like clockwork. She’s done the same thing every day when we’re about to leave, and he arrives. She joins his silent watch from his relaxed post at the corner of Olde Mug.

  Just like every morning when I leave my home and find him there, too.

  Silently waiting, like it’s the most normal thing in the whole world.

  My questioning became more persistent when he showed up at my home.

  When I walked out and saw him standing just outside the building’s front gate, I just knew something was going on. However, having that gut feeling doesn’t mean a thing when I can’t get the man to talk.

  It never works.

  I’ll give him credit. His stubbornness is one heck of a strong iron shield.

  I’m pretty sure he could withstand any kind of torture and never crack.

  I stopped questioning him a week in.

  A solid week of him walking with Riley on his shoulders and me locked in my head trying to figure out what the hell was going on. All the while, he stayed silent.

  I still tried asking every now and then, but really, I’ve all but stopped doing that. Somewhere around the two weeks mark, I just accepted his silence. Almost looked forward to it. But at the random moments when I did ask, there was still silence. He just looked at me, eyes calm, and cocked that damn brow. So I stopped wasting my time trying.

  “You get it out of him yet?” Ella continues.

  “I stopped trying,” I reply with a shrug. “I wasn’t getting anywhere.”

  “What the hell have you been doing for the past two weeks, then?”

  I shrug again, drying the teal deep-set coffee mug with swirling lavender vines on it with a towel. “Walking home. Just silently walking home with Riley’s chatter filling the air.”

  “And he still just leaves when you get inside?”

  “Yup.” I nod.

  Thinking back over each night he’s silently walked with Riley on his shoulders while she does all the talking for us, I noticed three days in that he was answering her with slight squeezes of her ankles with his hands. One hand for no and both for yes. I will never know how she knew what that meant, but it’s just another one of those things I stopped questioning.

  “This is seriously so strange, Liv.”

  “You don’t think I know that,” I snap, then sigh when I realize my tone is too sharp. “I’m sorry. I just have no idea what the hell is going on, and it’s driving me insane. When he ignored my questioning of it for so long, I just figured whatever. It wasn’t worth my mental sanity while I tried to figure it out on my own. He’s been coming in here for so long, it doesn’t feel like he’s a stranger, but maybe it should feel weirder than it does. It just is. At first, it was awkward. Now it’s just like … I don’t know? Maybe comfortable?” I lift my arms in sync with my shoulders as I shrug, sigh, and drop them heavily at my sides.

  “Oh boy.” She sighs, her eyes wide, staring at me as if I have two heads.

  “What?” I question, turning my head toward the front window, thinking that he was coming in. When I see him and Riley in the same position, her still talking with her animated movements and him just looking at her with all of his attention, I look back at Ella. “What?” I ask again, a little firmer.

  “You like him.”

  “What?” I gasp, my head snapping back like she had slapped me.

  “You like like him, like him.”

  “I do not!”

  “Oh yeah, you do.”

  “I’m just confused by him. I do not like him. He’s a puzzle.”

  She scoffs. “He isn’t a puzzle. You’re frustrated that you can’t just jump his bones.”

  I narrow my eyes. “Would you keep your voice down?”

  She tosses her head back and laughs loudly.

  I look around the room and see we’ve gained the attention of a handful of customers. I look back at the window, seeing Riley laughing with her whole body, jumping on her toes. When my gaze moves to Drew, I see his gaze on her, but his normally stoic face looks relaxed and almost boyish.

  I’ve had a lot of time to study him during our silence. As his attention is always on Riley, I take in as much as I can from the corner of my eye. Much more time than I’ve had over the years of him coming into Olde Mug. I knew he was older, but I had assumed he was, at most, five years older than my thirty-five. But when I get a good look at those sandy locks during our walks home, I’ve seen more silver in them when the sun hits his head. He hides them well, just as he hides the faint signs of him being older in his face. If I had to guess, he’s closer to fifty than forty. However, when he’s with Riley, a side of him comes out that looks a little more relaxed, giving him an air of something so contradictory to the harshness I’ve grown so accustomed to.

  The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes give him away. I don’t know what happened to him, but I have no doubt that Drew wasn’t always this closed-off, hard man.

  “Yeah, you definitely like him,” Ella continues, snorting out a laugh and walking away from me when a customer approaches the counter.

  I take my time with my thoughts, looking around the room at the four employees working on inventory on the merchandise shelves, restocking the milk and sugar stations, and tidying up the main floor. All younger college-age kids, all at the beginning of their lives, and always joking around and laughing with each other, keeping the atmosphere here light, happy, and relaxed.

  Is this what Drew has always been like?

  Was there a time when he gave his words away for free?

  And if he did, what happened?