“All right,” Samuels said. “We’ll see. Silver Star. Ivy League. It could come in handy with Senator Mills set to implode. Have Julian see me in a few days. We’ll talk.”

And with that Samuels left.

“Have you even spoken to Julian about this, or have you just decided to use him to your advantage?” Martha’s voice was loud, and her face liquor-red.

“Would you even give a shit?” Ledge hissed.

Martha turned away and grabbed another drink the waiter offered her.

Across the room, Julian grabbed another drink, too, raising the glass to his father and giving him the finger.

The senator helped Julian to the waiting limo. He opened the rear door and was about to guide his son inside when fog filtered down from the lamppost light and pulled Julian’s attention.

Julian stared at the swirling mist.

“What are you looking at, son?”

Julian was transfixed.

“Julian, what is it?”

“It’s just fucking fog.”

Julian shoved his father away and crawled into the back seat of the limo.

25

25

Sunday, September 20

Chilled deep under his skin and drenched in sweat, Julian woke in the room he’d grown up in. The nightmares wouldn’t stop no matter how much he tried to numb them.

The young girl he’d killed. The blood of innocent children splattered on walls of insurgents’ homes. The spilled guts of his own men who thought too long before they fired.

Julian forced himself out of bed and fortified himself with pills he’d brought back. Pills a buddy had told him to keep for the battles that would rear their heads stateside. The blues, whites, yellows, and reds that quelled the panic. Panic he couldn’t strong-arm like he’d been able to before the warehouse.

The ice-cold shower shocked him awake. And the pills calmed his mind. He felt weak needing these, but need them he did.

Julian walked through the home of his youth. The deep mahogany of the walls and staircase. Rooms filled with beautiful antiques and fabrics his mother had chosen in her few moments of happiness. They all held memories of anger and resentment now. The agonizing battles his parents had over his father’s absences and his mother’s drinking. Battles that carved psychic scars, and drove him into isolation as a child. Until he pleaded to be sent away to school. Away from the grief of living here.

His time at the sprawling campus of Carson Long Military Academy in Pennsylvania prepared him for even more assaults. The kind he’d find in other battles. And he joined the front lines in the war on terror when his father and others had voted to send young men to die. Julian despised their privilege and forsook his own.

Julian entered the den, surprised to see his father there and said, “Thought you’d be at church.”

“It’s been years,” Ledge replied.