Page 161 of Carrick
I nodded, even though it wasn’t true. “He said yes. I can hardly believe it.”
“That’s not a small thing,” Deacon said.
“No,” Quinn agreed. “It’s not.”
There was a weight to his voice. The kind of weight that came from knowing exactly what it meant to ask someone to live double. To exist with a gun to your back and a wire in your ear.
Maddy stepped forward. “What you said to him… about the rainbow. What was that?”
Everyone was listening now. I looked down at the phone. Swallowed hard.
“It’s a stupid thing,” I said quietly. “From when we were kids.”
Carrick tilted his head, waiting. Not pushing, but… waiting.
So I sat down. Slowly. Set the phone on the table and folded my hands in my lap. My fingers kept twitching, like they didn’t know how to be still without something to hold on to.
“When we were little, our parents used to leave us alone a lot,” I started. “They weren’t… violent. Not neglectful in the way that shows up in charts. But they weren’t present. There werestretches when we didn’t see them for days. Sometimes they left us with food. Sometimes they didn’t.”
I glanced at Carrick. His eyes never left me.
“Eventually we ended up in the foster system. We got separated for a while, but finally they placed us together in a home when I was ten, and he was eight. It turned out to be a lot like it was back when we lived with our parents. Lots of days—and nights—spent on our own. Not a lot of food. Sometimes they didn’t pay the bills, and our power and water would get shut off for days at a time.”
Maddy’s eyes grew glassy with unshed tears, but I ignored her and pressed on. I couldn’t let the emotion overwhelm me, or I’d break from the strain.
“If we had electricity, we’d watchThe Wizard of Ozon this beat-up DVD player our foster dad found in a pawnshop. We didn’t have a remote, and it skipped sometimes, but we watched it anyway. Dozens of times. It was our thing.”
No one interrupted.
“I was eleven when I started singing that song to him,” I said. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.Whenever we were hungry or scared or the lights went out, I’d curl up next to him and hum it. He’d hold my hand and close his eyes like he could picture it—this better world. One with warm food and soft beds and parents who remembered our birthdays.”
A beat of silence stretched between us, thick and humming.
“We used to whisper it to each other at night,” I added. “Beyond the rainbow. That’s what we called it. That someday we’d get there. That we just had to survive long enough to reach it.”
Maddy’s arms slowly dropped from her chest. Sully looked down at the floor.
Carrick stepped closer, crouching beside my chair, his hand resting gently over mine.
“You never told me that part,” he said softly.
I gave a small, broken laugh. “There are still a lot of things I haven’t told you.”
His thumb brushed over the back of my hand. “Then tell me now.”
And just like that, the weight lifted—just enough. Because even in this room full of people who’d fought wars and walked through hell… they understood what it meant to carry something inside you for too long.
It was Carrick who helped me stand. Not rushed. Not showy. Just one hand on mine, the other on my lower back, guiding me like I might forget how my own legs worked. I didn’t say anything when I leaned into him. He didn’t comment when I stayed there longer than I needed to.
There was a strange stillness in the room, like everyone was figuring out how to move forward without breaking the quiet that had settled around my story.
Then Quinn cleared his throat and sat forward, elbows braced on the table.
“If he’s really willing to feed us information,” he said, voice low, “we need to be surgical about how we handle it. No assumptions. No sudden moves.”
Jax nodded. “We’ll need to create a backdoor for him. An encrypted drop. Something that doesn’t rely on direct contact. The phone calls will work in the short term, but there are too many variables there. We need something more guaranteed, and we need a way he can pass us files and photos when he gets them.”
“And we’ll need to monitor the Dom Krovi’s reaction to his presence,” Niko added, already pulling something up on his phone. “If they start treating him differently—if he gets too close to a leak—he’ll disappear.”
