Crucible Steele (Daggers & Steele Book 5) by Alex P. Berg Page B

lucky. A thin bruise stretched across the top of it from jaw line to jaw line.
    The mark of a garrote.
     

13
    I sat on one of the stone benches in the courtyard, my hands clasped in my lap as I stared at my feet. A light snowfall drifted through the sky. Tiny flakes sparkled in the light of the three-quarters moon, some of them dusting the needles of the pines in the courtyard’s corners, others adding flecks of white to the shoulders of my dark leather jacket, and still others alighting on the bare flesh of my knuckles, where they promptly melted into wet specks.
    I suppose they felt cold, but I couldn’t really tell. They weren’t there, nor were my hands or my feet or the hard ground underneath. Griggs was. Front and center, slumped in his chair. His chest still, his skin pale, his furrowed brow creased… permanently . Nevermore would he stare at me with those inscrutable eyes that could’ve held anything from respect to confusion to disapproval. Nevermore would his tongue lash me with some bitter quip born from decades of his experiences, all of which he viewed through glasses made of increasingly thicker pieces of jade. Nevermore would he grunt and groan wordlessly for days on end, only to reveal after scores of prods that his back hurt.
    I never thought I would’ve missed those things about him…but you never know what you’ll miss until it’s ripped from your life for good.
    The clack of boot heels made me lift my head and focus my sight back into reality. Shay stood nearby, the long hair of her ponytail drawn over her shoulder where it fell into the wooly portion of her jacket. Her hands filled her pockets.
    “How’re you doing?” she asked.
    I took a deep breath and nodded slowly. “I’m hanging in there.”
    “Do you want to talk about it?”
    I paused. The old me would’ve shook my head and summarily dismissed the need for such a thing, or perhaps I would’ve hemmed and hawed and waffled and eventually allowed it to happen, but only as a formality. But the old me—the me that, ironically enough, Griggs’ hand had helped shape—wasn’t a frequent visitor anymore.
    “Yeah,” I said. “That would be nice.”
    Shay sat down at my right. She pulled her left hand from her pocket and snaked it in between my own hands, clasping my right tightly. While I hadn’t noticed the cold before, I did notice the warmth now, radiating through her soft palm and tender fingers.
    “Tell me about him,” she said.
    “You want the novelized version, or the bitter and frustrated one?”
    “How about neither, Daggers?” she said. “No spin, no spiel. Just the truth. About him, about how he made you feel. About how you still feel.”
    I took another breath and stared inside myself. “Twelve years we worked together, you know that? Twelve. He was a spiny old cactus. A real pain in the ass. Hell to work with. But…he was my partner. He always had my back, even when it meant putting his own life on the line, and at his age that wasn’t hard. He was rough around the edges. Hell, he was rough several inches below that. But…he was a good guy at heart.”
    Shay smiled and squeezed my hand. “Sounds familiar.”
    “Oh, Griggs was far worse than I’ve ever been.”
    Shay declined to comment. “Share a story with me, something featuring the both of you. A fond memory.”
    “Fond?”
    Shay tilted her head and arched her eyebrows ever so slightly. “Jake…”
    “Sorry. The façade I put on is so ingrained it’s hard to take off sometimes. It’s like a second skin. Alright, let’s see…” I smiled as I thought of something. “Okay. I think you’ll like this one. It happened a long time ago. A long time. I’d only been on the force for a few weeks. Two months tops—”
    “A rookie Daggers story?” said Steele. “This should be fun.”
    I snorted. “Yeah. Strap yourself in. Anyway, Griggs and I were over in the Erming. We’d been hassling street urchins trying to shake loose information on one of