Our condolences go out to the Ryan family. James Ryan is survived by his wife, Janet Ryan. Their son, Matthew Ryan, was killed in Afghanistan nearly four years ago. While details are still trickling in, we have learned that Mr. Ryan was killed in an attempted home invasion. At the time, his wife was vacationing in Switzerland and he was alone in the home. His good friend Senator Edward Reynolds was quoted as saying, “James was a great man and a great friend. He will surely be missed by all who knew him.”

—Capital Confessions blog

Kate

Well, that was a new low. My father had a way of taking the worst things you thought people could be, and somehow, impossibly surpassing even those benchmarks. Having a man killed and then fake-mourning him ranked pretty high on my list of how to be a horrible person. It was just one more part of this that felt like we were living in a nightmare.

The aftermath of Matt’s father’s death had left us reeling. Matt was not good.

He’d left shortly after I told him about his father and I had no clue where he’d gone. The look in his eyes had terrified me. Sometimes it was easy to pretend that we hadn’t really changed all that much, easy to slip into the relationship we’d had for years. I would have known what to do before, but times like this, he felt like a stranger.

He hadn’t been close to his father, to either one of his parents, really, but I could tell his father’s death had rocked him. The more details that began to emerge, the clearer it became that whoever had killed Matt’s father sounded a lot like the person who’d broken into my apartment. The only difference was that I’d gotten away with just having my stuff stolen. I didn’t know why I hadn’t been killed, but I was beginning to feel like it was just a matter of time, as though we were all little more than names to be crossed off of some hit list.

But why was James Ryan’s name on that list?

By all accounts, he’d been my father’s coconspirator. Was he taken out in an attempt to tie up loose ends in the face of my father’s potential presidential bid? Or did he do something to spark my father’s ire? Was he the one who had ordered the break-in and my stabbing? Was this my father’s way of retaliating? Was I off-limits? Or was it something else we just didn’t know about?

There were so many questions and virtually no answers.

The sound of a key opening the front door lock had me turning, my heart pounding, my hand on the baseball bat I’d grabbed when Matt left. The sane part of my brain told me that an intruder wasn’t likely to use a key, that it was probably just Matt returning from wherever he’d gone, even as the part of my brain that had spent way too much time in the path of danger freaked the fuck out.

The door opened and I breathed a sigh of relief as Matt walked over the threshold, his face weary, his shoulders hunched, exhaustion dripping from him. He locked the door behind him, careful to flip the extra deadbolt he’d installed after the break-in.

His gaze drifted from me to the bat. His eyes darkened, his jaw clenched as he let out an oath. “I shouldn’t have left you alone. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine. I’m okay.”

Right now I was more worried about the stamp of defeat etched all over his features.

“We’re going to the shooting range tomorrow,” Matt interjected. “You need to know how handle a gun.”

I’d never had an interest in firearms, had always been a little freaked out by guns, but considering recent events, it wasn’t the world’s worst idea. The bat would only take me so far.

“Where did you go?” I asked, noticing that his hair was wet as though he’d brought the elements inside with him.

Matt crossed into the living room, sitting down next to me on the couch, his big body pressing into mine.

“I went to my parents’ house.”

Fuck.

I’d been afraid of that. Afraid that his reaction to his father’s death would make him reckless. I understood the anger and confusion swirling inside of him—no one could relate to confused parental emotions like I could—and yet we couldn’t afford any mistakes, couldn’t chance the risk that someone would realize he was still alive—if they didn’t already know.

“With the police there?” I squeaked.

“It was so chaotic that I figured it would be the best way to try to blend in. The security was down so it was the easiest time to get in there to see if I could find anything incriminating. I picked the lock on the balcony door outside my old bedroom.”

He’d used the second-floor balcony to sneak out so many times when we were younger. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d go that route again, but the fact that he did it when the cops were there …

“You went into the house?”

I’d sort of been joking when I’d asked him to help me figure out how to break into my father’s office, but apparently he had skills beyond any I’d ever imagined. Not to mention a propensity for living on the edge that terrified me.

“Yeah.”

Fuck.

“Did you find anything linking him to your friends’ deaths in Afghanistan? Or to the arms sales?”

I figured it was a lot to try for a signed confession somewhere, but a girl could hope.

“No. The place had been tossed. Completely. We can scratch searching his office off of our list. Whoever killed him did a thorough job.” Matt stood abruptly, turning away from me, his stance tense. He ran his hand through his hair, his voice strained. “He didn’t die well.”

A chill slid down my spine. “What do you mean, ‘he didn’t die well’?”

He was silent for a beat. “They wanted something from him. My guess? Whatever evidence he had that implicated his partner. They tortured him to get it. By the look of it, for a while. Then they killed him.”

Oh my god.

I closed my eyes, fighting the bile rising up, holding back the tears that threatened to fall.

“I’m so sorry.”

It was woefully inadequate, but I had no clue what words would suffice in a situation like this.

I stood and wrapped my arms around him, some of the wet seeping from his clothes to mine. I leaned up on my toes, stroking the base of his neck, running my fingers through his hair, trying to bring him whatever peace I could.

“I’m so sorry,” I repeated.

“I’m okay,” he answered, his voice hoarse.

He definitely was not ‘okay’. He looked like he was falling apart at the seams carrying the weight of all the trouble surrounding him. Minutes passed by while we held each other, neither one of us speaking. And then one of the seams split open, and he let me inside.

“Fine, I’m not fucking okay. He probably deserved it, given what he did, but he was my father, and while I can’t lie and say that I didn’t want to see him pay for his crimes, I’ve seen people tortured. It’s a brutal way to go. It’s hard to think of him going out like that.”

I understood his point, knew that Matt’s feelings for his father were beyond complicated, and at the same time, if anything, his reaction made me wonder if, for all the darkness he feared was inside of him, he’d actually clung to more of his humanity than I had in the past four years. Because if it were my father …

Maybe I was the one who’d lost all of my soft parts.

“It wasn’t always like this with us. When I was younger, he’d try to make it to some of my soccer games, would occasionally take me out boating or to the movies. You remember what it was like between us—he worked a lot and traveled all over the world—but I looked up to him.” He swallowed. “I wanted to be like him when I was a kid.”

“Matt.”

“There’s more,” Matt continued, his voice rumbling, body tense.

My hold on him tightened, trying to infuse him with whatever strength I had, bracing for the next blow.

“What else?”

“I managed to get into my father’s study.”

“How did you manage that?”