He'd had somebody else's blood on his hands the day he realized that the life he used to dream about when he was young was never going to work out.

It was a painful realization, like the last shred of his innocence dying away, the final nail in the coffin of the young man he used to be.

There would be no sweet, little wife curling up to him at night that knew that beneath his hard exterior laid the heart of a good man, as much as he had played at it with Aimee, because he wasn't so sure that was true anymore.

There would be no children to love him unconditionally that he could pass on the better parts of himself to, a clean legacy. It would always be too dangerous.

He mourned and he moved on.

Eventually he made a new family for himself, one that could understand every part of him, and he convinced himself that that would be enough, that it had to be.

So when Parker shakily announced to him that she was pregnant, with his child, the hitter received the news with a volatile mix of elation and trepidation, helplessly trapped between the life he thought he couldn't have and the one he had created for himself, and no matter which way he leaned on the subject, there was only one question burning in his mind.

How was he going to keep them safe?