Jack hesitated in front of the storage locker, looking over the usual implements of “persuasion,” as he considered them.

I have to know. I have to get to the bottom of this. Even if they send me back to prison at the end of it—I have to know.

His hands tightened into fists and Jack clenched and unclenched them, breathing slowly and steadily. The prospect of treating Riley, the man he’d considered his brother for so many years, the way that he treated the scum he took in as a bounty hunter was a difficult one to swallow. Maybe I can just threaten him—maybe I won’t have to actually use any of this on him.

Jack remembered the daily tension of his life in the prison, the fact of his sentence: thirty years before he could even be considered for parole. Thirty years of his life gone, never to come back to him. Jack took a pair of pliers off of a peg in the locker and gripped them tightly, reminding himself that if Riley was the man who’d done this to him, he deserved to suffer for what his actions had put Jack through. He picked up a hunting knife, from one of the shelves in the locker and started to slip it by the hilt into his pocket.

“J-J-Jack?”

Hardy turned around and saw Cassandra, back against the wall, staring at Riley. He frowned. He had expected that Cassandra—someone who’d only seen the fringes of the ugliness in the criminal underworld—would be squeamish about what he planned to do, but he had thought she’d wait at least until he’d started interrogating Riley to start freaking out.

“Riley!”

Her trembling hand pointed across the room. Jack looked over at his former best friend, just as the man’s eyes opened. Jack unsnapped the strap on the knife and pulled it out of its sheath, advancing towards Riley in an instinctive reaction.

“Fuck,” Riley said, groaning.

Jack watched as the man strained against the handcuff strips, looking around as he slowly came back to full consciousness.

“Where am I?” Riley’s head turned and he caught sight of Jack. “Jack? Is that you? Where the hell am I?” He looked down at his arms, confusion washing over his features. “What the fuck, dude?”

Jack raised the knife, but something inside his brain turned over; Riley looked, to his trained eyes, to be genuinely confused. If he had done something, wouldn’t he know why I’d brought him here?

“You framed me for murder, asshole,” Jack said, trying to maintain the firmness in his voice. “You killed Laura Granger and pinned it on me to get back at me.”

For a second—the span of a few heartbeats—Riley continued to stare at him in confusion, silence stretching between them.

Then, as suddenly as he had awakened, Riley began laughing. First it came as a quick guffaw, before it deepened into a belly laugh, Riley’s head falling back as he howled.

Jack glanced at Cassandra. Her expression had changed from terror to smiling; it was an awkward, nervous grin, but it lit up her face, softening her features, making her eyes gleam. The tension in the room evaporated, and Jack put the knife back into its sheath, stepping towards Riley.

“Jesus, Jack,” Riley said between slowly fading peals of laughter. “I thought I was never going to see you again—I definitely never expected to end up on the wrong end of a knife from you.”

Jack couldn’t help himself; he felt his lips turning up in a grin.

“There was a point when you figured you’d be on the right side of a knife with me,” Jack pointed out, crossing his arms over his chest.

Part of his brain insisted that he still had to go through with this; that he had to know whether or not Riley had been involved. He remembered the way Riley had punched him the day that he’d found out about Adrianna, and the threats he’d got word about.

“That’s in the past, man,” Riley said, shaking his head. “And anyway, everything ended up working out, you know? Why would I hold a grudge?”

“I ruined your relationship with Adrianna,” Jack pointed out.

“Well, for a minute, you did,” Riley said, shrugging as much as the position of his arms would allow. “But…” Riley stared at Jack in disbelief for a long moment. “Oh man—no, you wouldn’t have heard, would you?”

“Heard about what?”

Jack frowned. He knew that since he’d left town, since he had tried to distance himself out of shame for what he’d done, he hadn’t had much chance to hear about anything that had happened in his friend’s life.

“We got back together,” Riley told him, grinning broadly. “We broke up, obviously… but about a week after you and I parted ways, Adrianna called me. We met up at that restaurant—Angie’s.” Riley looked off into space and Jack could see the clear and obvious love in his friend’s eyes. “We talked about our situation; neither of us could stop thinking about the other. We decided to put it behind us and try again.”

“Oh, wow,” Jack said, glancing at Cassandra, trying to see if he was just being affected by his long relationship to Riley or if she believed the man too. He wasn’t sure when he had come to see her as something of a partner in his mission—but he couldn’t deny that she had handled herself better than he had expected.

For just an instant, his mind called up the feeling of Cassandra’s body pressed against the wall in her apartment, the way she had struggled against him. If he hadn’t had the element of surprise on his side, she would have given him a much tougher time. The memory of how Cassandra had felt, the heat of her body, the crush of her breasts against his chest, threatened to distract him and Jack savagely pushed it down. You’ve gone three months without sex before. Don’t let it distract you now. You need to figure this whole thing out, not fantasize about throwing her in the backseat and ripping her clothes off.

“We ended up getting married at the Justice of the Peace about two weeks later. It was no big, fancy wedding, just a couple of witnesses and a clerk.” Riley grinned again. “I wanted to tell you about it, but when things went south between us, I just deleted all your contact info. No one really knew where you’d gone.”

“Really?” Jack pressed his lips together, deliberating.

“Really, bro,” Riley said. “In fact, just a couple months later, Adrianna got pregnant.” Riley smiled again. “We had twins. And you know…” Riley shrugged.

Jack couldn’t quite work his mind around the fact that things had changed so much between him and the man he had once considered his best friend.

Riley tilted his head slightly, flexing against the strain from their earlier wrestling match. “After that…life just kind of got in the way, you know? Everything was the kids, Adrianna, work. I didn’t even think about it anymore.”

“I can’t believe it,” Jack said, shaking his head. “Congratulations, I guess.”

The man in front of him was happy, and there was absolutely no sign that Riley still resented the betrayal Jack had dealt him years before. There was something about that fact that almost rankled; Jack had put so much thought into the fact that he had ruined his friend’s relationship that the possibility of Riley moving on with his life and forgiving him had seemed almost nonexistent. He had been consumed with guilt; how could Riley not have been consumed with bitter resentment towards him?

“When I heard about the murder charges, I thought about trying to get back in touch with you. But Adrianna thought… She thought if I got in touch with you, it’d drag our family into it too, you know?”

“Yeah, I get that,” Jack said.

He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe what Riley was saying, but he also knew the other man well enough to know he wasn’t capable of making up a lie that was so involved when put on the spot.

“I saw kids’ toys in the front yard,” Cassandra said, breaking Jack out of his deliberations.

“Look,” Riley said, his face shifting into serious lines. “I know the way we left things. I know…that there was a time when I could have killed you happily, man.”

Jack smiled slightly; that at least was the Riley he knew. That, at least, was what he had expected from the man who’d been his brother in arms.

“But that was three years ago, man. Even if I still had any reason to hate your guts, I wouldn’t do something that’d risk me going to jail just to get even. Not with the kids.”

Jack’s hand hadn’t left the hilt of his knife. He gave the pommel a squeeze, trying to decide whether or not he could believe in this changed, family man. He’s let himself run a bit too fat, but it’s the same face. Riley never could lie worth a damn, unless I was backing him up. Could I really torture the guy who saved my life?

“I can’t believe you’re a married stiff,” Jack said, smiling around his clenched teeth.

What if I can’t get to the bottom of this? What if the cops catch up to me before I can find out who killed Laura? I can’t…I can’t just let this go. I can’t go back to prison without knowing.

Jack closed his eyes. Even with the nap he had taken in the back of Cassandra’s car, he was exhausted. He had spent every moment of the last three months thinking about his wrongful conviction, thinking about Laura Granger who—no matter what her sordid involvement with the city’s underworld—hadn’t deserved to be murdered. He couldn’t go back without knowing what had happened.

“Jack,” Cassandra said quietly.

He turned away from Riley, scowling at her. She was holding Riley’s wallet in her hands, and he realized that while he and his former best friend had been talking, she had been going through Riley’s things.

“Look at this,” she told him.

Jack’s scowl deepened, but he did as she asked. He took what looked like a playing card from her hands and glanced at it; it was a picture, taken in some medium-rate photo studio.

He recognized Riley right away, dressed in a polo shirt and khakis. Next to him, he saw Adrianna, dressed in a light summer dress. The two of them were each holding a young child—the two dark-haired girls couldn’t have been any more than two years old, and each one bore a resemblance to both parents, with Riley’s eyes and Adrianna’s nose and cheekbones. Jack smiled down at the picture and then handed it back to Cassandra, turning his attention back to Riley.

“They’re beautiful, man,” Jack said.

He stepped closer to the chair and pulled the knife out of its sheath. He tugged the handcuff strips around and cut them free of the arms and legs of the chair.

“With you as their dad, I bet they’re already a handful.”

Riley chuckled, and as Jack freed his hands, offered his former best friend a quick handshake. Jack pumped his hand and then, in an impulse, threw his arms around Riley’s shoulders.

“Let’s get you home before Adrianna comes for my head,” Jack said finally, stepping back and turning towards the storage locker.