Chapter Thirty-Six: Betrayal

Keira froze when her nephew's voice met her ears, shrill and ecstatic to see her. "Auntie K!" he cried, throwing his arms open. Keira barely had time to kneel down before he crashed into her, already launching into an excited discussion of his activities with Winnie. Keira glanced up and saw the dispatcher giving her an apologetic look before hissing something to a nearby Spike; it was obvious that Winnie hadn't anticipated an audience when she returned with Brian.

"…and then we went outside, and then I saw a bird, and then a squirrel started chasing the bird and it was so funny, and then…"

Keira held Brian closer and forced herself to look up at her mother. Diane was gaping at Brian in astonishment, but already Keira could see the beginnings of desire forming in her eyes. Brian was her grandson, a chance at a fresh start—a child from her blood who didn't know enough to hate her yet. Like hell am I letting you anywhere near him, Keira thought, glowering.

Adding to her annoyance, Diane didn't even notice her expression.

"It sounds like you've been having an awesome day," Keira murmured to her nephew, scooping him into her arms as she cautiously stood. I have to get him away from her, she thought, angling herself so that Brian's back was to Diane. She felt panic blossoming through her chest, wending its way through each of her ribs and seeping into the organs within: Brian had no idea that he had a second grandmother. Jason had planned on giving him an abridged version of the story when he was old enough to process it, but under no circumstances had he been willing to inform Diane while Jim was still in the picture.

As if sensing her alarm, Will shifted closer, reminding her that she wasn't alone.

"This place is so cool!" Brian cried. Then, before Keira could stop him, his neck craned around and he abruptly fell silent. "Who's that?"

Keira came to a split-second decision that she knew right away would only make things more difficult for Jason; but she didn't see any other choice, at least none that she could stomach. "She's a visitor, just like you."

Brian considered this for a moment. "What happened to your face?" he bluntly asked Diane.

Before Diane could respond, before she could say something along the lines of I fell down the stairs or I got into a car accident or any one of the dozens of excuses she likely had at her command, Keira quickly intervened. "Sweetie, it's not nice to say something like that," she told Brian. "And what did Daddy tell you about talking to strangers?"

"That I'm not supposed to do it," Brian mumbled. Diane was staring at Keira in horror. "Sorry, Auntie K."

Greg had been watching quietly, but now he said, "Keira, don't you think—"

"Hey," Keira began loudly, smiling at Brian as if she couldn't hear her boss, "why don't you go ask Wordy to teach you some karate in the gym? Every good police officer needs to know how to defend himself. I bet Wordy could show you moves just like the Power Rangers." She pointedly raised her eyebrows at Wordy, willing him to shut up and go along with it.

"Wordy's not the scary bald man, is he?" Brian asked, biting his lip.

"No, he's not, I promise. He's that nice man right by the desk. And you see Lou and Sam close to him?" Brian nodded. "Maybe they can help you, too. Just remember to ask nicely." She wished she could have lumped Ed into the group of Brian's would-be instructors, but she knew better than to push her luck—Wordy, Lou, and Sam were already giving her incredulous stares, visibly torn between wanting to call her out on her evasion tactics and not wanting to do it in front of Brian.

Her nephew was already wriggling out of her arms. "I'm gonna be a Power Ranger!" he shouted, running towards her coworkers. "Please, Mr. Wordy?" he asked hopefully a few seconds later.

Wordy stayed long enough for his expression to inform Keira that he wasn't happy with the maneuver; then he started shepherding Brian towards the gym, gesturing for Lou and Sam to follow. The younger men threw exasperated looks at him, Keira, and finally each other, but did as they were told.

"Ed," Greg said then, startling her. "Eddie, maybe you should—"

"Not going to happen, Greg," Ed cut him off.

The boss is trying to give me space, Keira realized. She wondered momentarily if there was a reason he hadn't asked Spike to leave, before deciding that now wasn't the time to read into it. Later, she thought, pushing the worry aside. First, she had to deal with her mother.

Diane was still staring at her in horror. "Jason has a son?" she asked, her lips trembling. "Why didn't he ever—"

"Send you a birth announcement?" Keira cut in, furious that her mother still didn't get it after all these years. "Oh, you mean, like, 'Hey, Mom, I've got a kid now, feel free to bring your husband over so he can beat the shit out of him'? Yeah,right, as if that'd fucking happen."

She was so angry that she could barely think straight, let alone censor herself. Does it even matter anymore? she wondered. Everyone knows now, thanks to her. "You know what the sad part is, though?" she barreled on, ignoring Will when he softly said her name. "Jason wanted to tell you. He spent fucking weeks agonizing over it. But in the end, he knew that you don't do shit without Jim, and there was no way he was going to let Brian anywhere near that asshole."

"His name's Brian?" Diane inquired softly.

Keira wanted to shake her or strangle her, one of the two. "Is that the only fucking thing you processed out of all that?" she asked in disbelief. "Actually, you know what"—she shook her head—"never mind. Just leave, and don't try to come back into my life again. Or Jason's."

Diane looked at her. "Brian's my grandson," she said, a slight edge in her voice.

"And I'm your daughter, but it's not like that ever meant anything to you," Keira retorted.

"You can't keep me from seeing him," Diane insisted. "He's my grandson—"

"Fuck you," Keira spat, practically seeing red. "Don't you dare try to pull the grandparents' visitation rights card on me. No judge in their right mind would ever let you see him, not once Jason and I were through telling them everything you used to do to us. So don't even bother trying, not unless you want to wind up getting charges pressed against you."

Diane wilted before her eyes. "Keira, please, I want to fix things—"

"You don't get to do that," Keira said sharply. "You don't get to come back into my life and fix things. You had your chance to be a mother and you failed at it, so that's your fucking problem."

Diane was weeping now, which only pissed her off even more. God only knew what Greg and Ed were thinking—watching her reject her battered, crying mother, forgetting all the training she'd had about keeping herself calm in situations like these.

But one thing was certain: no amount of training could ever have prepared her for this. She wanted to claw out of her own skin, to scream and lash out at Diane until her fists were blood and bone. They were trapping her in here, all of them—her mother, Greg and Ed, even Spike and Will. She couldn't escape from them, not anymore, and they were going to take everything from her.

"Maybe we should take a step back and talk this through," Greg remarked, as if he were running point on a negotiation. As if it would be that simple.

"Keira, you don't have to do anything," Will murmured, ever her defender.

"Yeah, let's talk," Keira said suddenly. Her mother's eyes widened in hope, then shrank when she saw how Keira's had hardened. "Let's talk about my fifteenth birthday. Or rather, the day after my fifteenth birthday."

The morning I woke up in Will's arms for the first time, because your husband had just raped me.

Diane stiffened. "I—I don't—"

Keira was barely able to hear herself over the ringing in her ears. "I told you about—something about Jim, and you said I was lying. You called me a liar, and then when Jim came home you told him everything I'd said. And then—look at me—and then you left the room when he took off his belt."

Tears were streaming down her face when she finished, adding to the humiliation she felt every time she relived the memory of that day. Although one of the earliest lessons she'd learned as a child had been that her mother wouldn't protect her from Jim, a foolish part of her had hoped that Diane would finally wake up once she realized how far things had gone. Instead, Diane had thrown her to the wolves—make that the singular wolf—just when she'd needed her mother the most.

And Keira would never forgive her for it.

"Do you still believe him?" she asked, advancing on Diane. Her mother held her ground, but visibly quailed under Keira's gaze. "Do you still think I was lying?"

Diane's voice was so quiet that she had to move even closer to hear it. "J-Jim wouldn't… He w-would never—"

Keira felt her hand rising, but it seemed to belong to someone else—someone else who backhanded her mother across the face, making sure their knuckles landed on the worst part of her bruises. She was actually surprised to hear words coming out of her mouth, because she still wasn't quite sure what had happened. All she understood was rage.

"You're lucky I don't have my gun right now, because I swear to God I'd kill you," she snarled, practically choking on her own saliva. "You're disgusting. You—"

And then Will was in front of her, one hand on her arm and the other on her waist, preventing her from hitting Diane again. He shifted his weight so that she could barely see her mother, so that all her senses were filled with him. "It's okay," he whispered, ducking his head to whisper in her ear. "It's—"

"It's not okay!" she screamed, remembering too late that Brian might still be able to hear her from the gym. Lowering her voice, she repeated, "It's not fucking okay." Yet even as she pushed Will aside to face her mother, she continued to hold onto him, making sure he stayed close to her. "I don't ever want to see you again," she told Diane. "I wish you had died in that car accident with Jim, you piece of shit—"

"Keira." Will was there again, his hands moving to her shoulders, so close to her that she could feel the heat radiating from his body. "Keira, look at me." Reluctantly, she did, the knot in her stomach easing slightly when their eyes met. No matter what her parents had done to her, Will had always been there to pick up the pieces. "You got out," he reminded her now, his voice somehow soft yet firm—gentle enough to diffuse the tension in her limbs, but strong enough to keep her focused on him and only him. "She doesn't have to be a part of your life anymore. It's your call. You can just walk away right now and never see her again. I'll be with you the entire time, I promise. Let's just walk away."

She looked up at him, some of her anger already fading beneath the steadiness of his gaze. Maybe Will was right. Maybe walking away was the best course of action, when her other option was to stay here and lose what little sanity she had left. "All right," she whispered, refusing to look at Diane. "You'll stay with me?"

"Always."

And everything might have been okay, if Jason hadn't shown up at that very moment.

She heard him first, a pair of boots sprinting into the lobby and a frantic "Where are they?" tossed at Winnie. But as she stepped back from Will, ready to face her brother, the boots stopped. And all she heard then was, "Mom?"

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Diane start to move. For a few heartbeats, there was silence; and then Jason's footsteps joined their mother's, until Keira craned her neck just in time to see her brother envelop Diane in a hug.

Jason's eyes were already glistening.

Will gave a small hiss. That was when Keira realized she had dug her nails into his shirt, squeezing until she reached skin. She immediately drew back and apologized. Her whisper caught Jason's attention. Still embracing Diane, he glanced up and spotted her; Keira was gratified to see him flinch, and guiltily pull away. Yet when he looked back at Diane, his expression softened. "How are you?" he asked their mother.

"Come on," Will muttered, placing a detaining hand on her shoulder; Keira hadn't even noticed that she'd started towards Jason. "Let's give them some time. You want to go and check on Brian?"

Keira gritted her teeth, but eventually agreed. She'd barely seen her nephew today; she didn't doubt he was in good hands with Wordy, but she didn't want to neglect him entirely. She allowed Will to steer her away from Jason and Diane, guiding her towards the gym, and did her best not to look back.

"Auntie K!" Brian shouted when he saw her. "I'm a Power Ranger, look! Hi-YA!" His right leg shot out towards Wordy, who barely managed to get the pad positioned in time.

"That was a great kick, Bri." Feigning enthusiasm seemed to take even more out of her than the rest of the day had. "Why don't you show me some more? I'll sit down and watch you."

Brian was happy to oblige—Wordy less so, but the officer chose not to press her for information. Instead, he motioned for Lou and Sam to form a circle around Brian. Each of them was holding a pad identical to Wordy's, and they took turns calling out her nephew's name, waiting until he whirled around before telling him what kind of punch or kick they wanted him to throw. Brian was having the time of his life, and fortunately paying zero attention to Keira.

She sat beside Will on a bench, wishing she could lean against him but unwilling to do so in front of her coworkers. He kept his distance as well, limiting himself to a searching glance every once in a while. The relative peace was interrupted a few minutes later when Greg slid unobtrusively into the room, glancing around before approaching Keira.

"Boss, I'm not ready to have this conversation," she said, wanting to cry at the thought of rehashing it all now. It must have shown in her response, because she felt Will shifting beside her; and yet, mindful of their boss's presence, he didn't move closer.

"I know." Greg kept his voice down so that the others couldn't hear, but that wasn't stopping Wordy, Lou, or Sam from trying to listen in—Keira could practically see their ears pricking up. "But we're going to have a talk when you come back. I want you to take the next week off."

"What?" Keira demanded, causing Brian to look at her in alarm. Wordy swiftly distracted him with a kicking drill. "I don't need to take the week off," she insisted more quietly.

"Yes, you do." Greg's tone told her that this was non-negotiable. "You went through a lot today, and you're not going to be in any position to focus on the job. Not for a while. We'll talk when you get back."

Great. As if she didn't have enough reasons to hate her mother, now Diane had taken her job away from her—which meant that she would have nothing to distract her from the inevitable surge of memories.

"Oh, and Will?"

"Yeah, boss?"

"Stick around after the end of the shift, okay?"

Will's eyes narrowed slightly as he agreed. Greg smiled at him, then got up and headed back to the lobby. Keira waited until he was out of earshot before muttering, "What was that about?"

"Not sure." Yet he wasn't holding her gaze, and something was off in his voice—so he did know, or at least he had an idea.

You're such a shitty liar, she thought, but without any malice. It was one of the qualities she liked best about him, and probably why he was a better person than she ever would be. If he didn't want to tell her the truth now, she wouldn't press him—odds were his impending chat with Greg had something to do with her, and he was just trying to keep her from worrying.

Jason spent nearly an hour talking to Diane. Unsurprisingly, Brian tired long before that point; but Will dug up a few coins and started teaching him how to make them vanish into thin air, then reappear behind someone else's ear. Brian couldn't get enough of the simple magic trick, and he insisted on practicing on everyone in the gym. When he "found" a quarter in Keira's ear and shrieked with delight, glancing back at Will for approval, Keira wondered what on Earth she had done to deserve the two of them in her life.

She was discreetly wiping at her eyes when Jason appeared in the gym. Her brother's expression was grim, and his shoulders tensed when he saw her—meaning that whatever he had to say, she wasn't going to like it.

"Daddy!" Brian shouted, racing over to him. Keira hung back as her nephew proudly showed off the magic trick, then gave a lengthy description of all the punches and kicks "Mr. Wordy" had taught him. While he talked, Wordy, Lou, and Sam slipped out of the gym, until the only person remaining was Will.

"Brian, buddy, I need to talk to Keira for a minute," Jason finally said, extricating himself from his son's grasp. "And then we're going to go home, okay?"

"But Will said we were going to do more magic tricks!"

"You still have time to do a few. Why don't you go with him?" Jason glanced at Will in a wordless request. Will nodded and ushered Brian away, leaving the two siblings in a room that seemed to become unbearably thick with tension.

Jason was the first to break the silence. "How are you holding up?" he asked, moving further into the gym.

"Not too great." Keira managed to swallow the lump in her throat, but she wasn't able to hide the bitterness in her voice as she added, "Looks like you're doing fine."

Jason sighed. "Keira—"

"She wants to be a part of Brian's life now, did she tell you that?"

"Yeah. Yeah, she did." Jason shifted uncomfortably, his eyes darting around the room before settling on her again. "Keira… She's going to be staying with us for a little while."

She was on her feet before he had even finished the sentence, her fists curled and her ears roaring with blood. Just in time, she remembered to keep her voice low so that the others in the lobby couldn't hear. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

"She doesn't have anywhere to go—"

"And we're supposed to give a shit? Jim's dead, I bet she has plenty of life insurance—"

"It all went to his parents. He left her with nothing." Jason scowled, his brown eyes darker than usual. "Almost thirty years she stayed with that asshole, and he left her with nothing."

"So?" Keira snapped. "That's her problem, not yours. She can go homeless for all I care."

"You don't mean that."

Another time, maybe, when Keira hadn't just been forced to relive some of the worst memories of her life, the disappointment in Jason's gaze might have subdued her. Now she lashed out at him. "She didn't do a fucking thing when Jim beat us up, and then she told you she would testify against us if you ever tried to take him to court. Remember that? Or did you already forget?"

"I didn't forget," Jason insisted. "But she was terrified of him. She didn't think she had a choice."

Keira's response was barely above a whisper. "So she didn't have a choice when she let Jim rape me?"

"That's not what I'm saying—"

"Really? Cause that's what it sounds like you're saying." She didn't bother trying to hide the tears that had resurfaced, spilling over the salty trails left behind by their predecessors. "And now you want to bring her back into our lives like nothing happened? You want Brian to grow up with someone like her as his grandmother?"

Jason tried to move closer to her, but she flinched and put more distance between them. Frustrated, he ran his fingers through his hair, answering, "I know you only remember her for what she did to us, but she was a different person before Jim. And now that he's gone… I want to help her. I want her to have another chance. So I'm going to help her find a job—you know she hasn't even had one since you were born?—and then she'll be able to afford her own place."

Keira stared at him in disbelief. She and Jason had never seen eye-to-eye about Diane, it was true; she had known for a while now that he didn't hate their mother as much as she did, that he even missed her for some inexplicable reason. But now he was talking about welcoming her with open arms, sheltering her for… how long? Weeks? Months? Keira couldn't imagine employers tripping over themselves to hire Diane.

So where did that leave her?

"Fine," she said hoarsely, stiffening her resolve. "It's your house. It's none of my business who your guests are. And you know what, she can have my room. Because I'm moving out."

Jason looked like he'd been slapped in the face. "You don't have to do that—"

"Yes, I do." It was getting harder to speak; the words were sticking in her throat, glued together by unshed tears. "I'm never living with that woman again. I'm done with her. I'm so fucking done with her after what she did to me. You have no idea what it was like—you got to leave and go to college, and for eight fucking years I was alone with him. I just—I can't—" More tears slid down her cheeks, ignoring her attempts to wipe them away. "I'm sorry, Jason. Until she's gone, I'm not coming back."

"Keira—"

Keira stalked out of the gym, biting the insides of her cheeks until she tasted blood. The first person she saw in the lobby was Diane, who called out to her; Keira brushed by without a word, bracing herself for the walk past her coworkers. They were clustered around the front desk, all of them: Greg and Ed, Lou and Spike, Sam, Wordy, and Will. And all of them were watching her, suffocating her with their gazes—even Wordy, who was theoretically distracting Brian with a hand game. She needed them to go away, to give her one goddamn moment to herself, to stop scrutinizing her like she was going to come apart at any second—

And then Will stepped forward. Please don't say anything, she silently begged him, because if he did she would start bawling like a child and she couldn't do that, not here, not in front of all her coworkers, and—

"Are you okay?" he asked, in the voice that was just for her, the one that meant she was safe, and it was too much and he could tell and he was already moving to block her from the others' view. She tried to speak, but she couldn't. They were all watching her and they would see everything, and—

At first, Will spoke so softly that she didn't even hear him. "Don't look at them," he said, having to repeat himself when she stared blankly at him. "Don't look at them. What happened?"

When she finally managed to respond, she cringed: her voice, trembling and uneven, was undoubtedly carrying over to her coworkers. "J-Jason invited her to stay with us. I have to go home, I have to—I have to move out, I can't—I can't be there with her—"

Before she could break down completely, she pulled away from him and left the lobby. "Keira!" she heard, followed by Will's pursuing footsteps, but she kept going—away from Jason and her mother, away from the rest of the team, away from the memories that tore at her until breathing became an impossibility.

Once upon a time, she had been stupid enough to think that she'd escaped her past. Now she knew better. All she had done was shove it into a dark corner where it would wait, and thrive, until it could sink its claws into her again and never let her go.

In the silence that followed Keira and Will's departure, Lou said to no one in particular, "How long do you think it'll take him to volunteer his apartment?"

"I'd give it a minute," Sam guessed.