Stolen Honor

My phone rang.

It was Terrence Fisher from Denise's law firm.

I put him on speaker.

"Graham, I've got a new lead on the killer. Ten days from now, he's supposed to make a deal at an underground fight club across the border. It's way too dangerous. Please, Graham. Don't go."

After the call ended, I looked around at everyone gathered there, tears spilling down my face before I could stop them.

Slowly, I crouched down and rolled up the loose legs of my pants and the sleeves of my shirt, exposing the scars covering my body. Around my ankle was a mangled burn scar, the flesh still uneven where a masked man had branded me with a red-hot iron while I was pursuing a lead aboard a ship.

My best friend, Brendan Brooks, had given me that lead. He'd once buried himself in gambling debt trying to scrape together enough money to get married. I paid off what he owed and helped him find a legitimate job afterward.

The stretched dark, overlapping whip marks across my back were the result of following another lead to an illegal casino near the border. A criminal gang caught me there and beat me for an entire day.

That lead had come from Julie Sutton, Denise's best friend.

When Julie's mother was diagnosed with cancer, I'd given her more than $10,000 to help with treatment. She'd always said she could never repay me.

Then there was the deep knife scar across my lower abdomen. I'd been investigating an abandoned slaughterhouse when one of the criminals stabbed me with a bayonet. The wound was so deep I nearly bled to death. I only survived because I managed to find something to pack against the wound and slow the bleeding long enough to get help.

That lead had come from Gordon Patterson. I'd financially supported Gordon for twelve years when he was growing up in poverty.

Now every single one of them was standing here.

There was only one thing I wanted to ask.

They had known Denise and my brother, August Rodriguez, were alive. They had known there was never any killer.

So why had they deliberately fed me leads that could have gotten me killed?

As they stared at the old and new scars covering my body, I saw none of the guilt I'd expected. Instead, there was only calm acceptance, as though everything had happened exactly the way they'd intended.

After a long silence, Denise stepped through the crowd and walked slowly toward me. Her fingers brushed lightly over my scars before she sighed.

"Graham, you've always been suspicious. If we hadn't kept you distracted with false leads, you would've figured out pretty quickly that August and I weren't dead.

"Those criminals were professional actors we hired. They knew how far they could go. You were never actually in danger of dying."

Brendan grabbed me impatiently and pulled me away from Denise. "They were actors, Graham. That's it. You got some superficial injuries. How bad could it really have been?

"Denise is August's wife now. It wasn't easy for them to get away from you and finally be together. Can you have some boundaries for once?"

It felt as though every drop of blood in my body had frozen. A deafening ringing filled my ears. I pressed a hand to my chest, unable to tell whether the pain or the nausea was worse.

So it wasn't only Denise's and August's deaths that had been staged. Every lead I'd nearly killed myself chasing had been fake too. Those criminals had all been actors they hired.

The scars I'd once thought of as proof that I'd never given up on them were nothing more than the punch line to a joke.

As far as they were concerned, as long as August got to be happy, what did it matter if I was left covered in scars?