2. Viktor
2
VIKTOR
“Brother, let’s ride.”
It was still early as Cam’s words sank into me. I had watched Ranger depart—for a month —the Rebel Kings’ compound from a distance, a kindness for us both, and then I had delivered Lida to Orla for the day, fulfilling Locke’s request for her to watch over his heavily pregnant queen while he was gone.
There was no discernible reason why I had grabbed my battered helmet from the garage shelf, where it’d been since the Rebel Kings had retrieved it from a ditch somewhere. My only bike at the compound was the black Ducati I hadn’t ridden since I’d crashed it, and until this moment, I’d had no conscious intentions to change that.
I had no conscious intention to change it now , but the words to refuse Cam didn’t come.
In any case, he did not wait for my answer. He strode away, eating up the distance between him and the powerful Harley parked by the bar doors.
The Ducati was in a storage locker on the other side of the yard, its home since Nash had deemed it roadworthy. The keys were in my pocket, but did that mean I wanted to face the bike I’d last seen broken and smoking in a ditch?
“Fucking Russian bitch. Shoot him up, keep him quiet. We’ll make him scream later.”
They had not made me scream. No one ever had. But they’d left their mark on me all the same, and my veins itched with a craving I was used to. A dark scrape of weakness infinitely more unpleasant without Ranger to distract me.
So ride, baby. Swap the bullshit for adrenaline.
It was ludicrous how much I loved him. That my assumption of what he’d say if he heard my thoughts had me crossing the yard without question.
The storage container had a combination lock. I typed in the numbers and lifted the door to face the Ducati, protected by a tarp until I pulled it back to reveal the immaculate restoration Nash had gifted it. The powerful machine looked better than when I’d stolen it from a ship in the Suez Canal. Perhaps it was a shame I did not have much enthusiasm for shiny things, but I appreciated Nash McGovern. We had become friends. And okay, maybe I did appreciate tyres that were not bald enough to kill me.
Regardless, I wheeled the bike out of the storage locker with more than a hint of discomfort in my damaged hip. Across the yard, Cam watched, but his expression was hard to read. He looked annoyed, but I had come to learn it was an O’Brian family trait to appear permanently vexed.
I blocked him out and considered the helmet under my arm. It still bore wounds from being run down that fateful night. I had another that I had used until now, but it was at the house with the red Ducati and Ranger’s bike. This one was heavy in my hand. I straddled the Ducati and regarded the worst dent, a roil in my stomach adding to the burn lancing my ravaged veins and the pain in my hip. It was a big dent. I had gone down hard, my focus weakened by my obsession with Ranger. But he remained the weakness I chose, and despite the vicious scars branded on me, inside and out, I did not regret it.
I love him.
It was the greatest gift of my existence that he loved me too.
Movement in my peripheral caught my attention. The clubhouse doors opened and Liliana flitted out, Embry a heartbeat behind her. She waved, reminding me I carried something far more important than the grinding scrape my pulse had become in the last few minutes.
I dismounted the Ducati and crossed the yard to her, digging in my pocket for the small paper bag. “For you, little queen.”
“For me?” Liliana bounded down the steps to snatch the Spanish candy from my outstretched hand. “Where did you get it?”
“The airport.” Aware Embry didn’t speak Spanish, I switched to English as he approached. “Next time I will find you a bigger bag.”
Liliana garbled her thanks and danced away with the sweets.
Embry appraised me with a penetrating stare. “That helmet’s fucked.”
“Is fine.”
“Attached to it?”
“Perhaps.”
“He’ll be okay, you know.”
“Who?”
“Ranger.” Embry called for Liliana to slow down and wait. “The others will take care of him.”
“I am not worried about Ranger.” It was true. Ranger was fit to drive the lorries, even if I’d yet to understand why he wanted to. I knew the Kings would not have asked him to go otherwise. Perhaps I was worried about me . I had not been here, in this place, without Ranger since Locke and I had escaped captivity, and it felt strange enough that Embry’s response was distant. Detached. I heard his kind words, but they did not penetrate deep enough to stick.
The ear-splitting roar of Cam’s bike shattered the quiet. I tipped Embry a nod, with no regard that he was still talking, and returned to the Ducati.
I slipped the helmet on. It smelled of mud and blood, two things I’d learned were triggers for the dizzying flashbacks that hit me sometimes. But if Ranger had taught me anything, it was to plough through things instead of searching for a way around them.
Or hit them with a hammer.
I started the Ducati and rolled to where Cam waited. He had dark eyes, but not darker than Ranger’s, and his simmering stare did not affect me. I pointed at the gates, gesturing for him to lead, and we sped away together.
* * *
We rode for a long time. Miles disappeared, and as the winter sunshine came and went, I paid little attention to where we were going. It was a while before I realised we had circled Devon to reach the coastal road that led to Crow territory.
I had no reason not to trust Cam. We’d fought on the same side too often to doubt each other now. But I did not like this place. Ranger had spent many years here. Few of them had been happy.
And Locke?
I shivered, my knuckles straining around the handlebars. I felt sick, weak, and the temptation to blow past Cam and escape tightened my throat. But I would not leave him unprotected. Whether he knew it or not, I could not think of a moment when I ever had.
We rode on, through the town the Crows had once called their own and to the tired complex that housed their base. It was boarded up and deserted, the only sign of occupation a cluster of young bikers who emerged from the dilapidated garage.
Kings, not Crows.
Mostly, anyway.
Cam eased to a stop. I pulled up behind and sent him a subtle nod.
I have you.
To what end, I didn’t know, and I did not much care. The business of the Rebel Kings interested me only as much as it involved Ranger, and he was not here, a reality that rattled me more than the discord I’d felt entering Crow territory in the first place.
I miss him.
Cam dismounted and approached a young King almost as tall and intimidating as he was. This man, though, he was no Cam O’Brian. His edges were softer, his gaze more placid than violent, and he lacked the barbed energy of a man who’d spent his whole life fighting to survive.
Axel, apparently. He was in charge of renovating the disused garage, and it didn’t take long to deduce the Kings now owned this space and the land and buildings around it.
You knew that.
If I did, it was from before , and beyond meeting Ranger— Asher —and the births of my sister’s children, there was not much from that lifetime I wanted to remember.
Axel gave Cam a tour. I took little notice of him either, save that this man was quiet and less irreverent than the Kings I’d grown used to. He certainly took life more seriously than Ranger, and it made me miss my love even more.
One month.
Cam and Axel parted ways at the edge of the Crow property. I slotted in beside Cam, facing the opposite way.
He lit a cigarette. “You don’t have to guard me from Axel. He’s been with us a long time.”
“He does not look old enough.”
“Neither do you.”
“He reminds me of someone.”
“Rubi.” Cam offered me his cigarette box. “Before he got hench, and when he had short hair for about a week. Everyone says it. How’s the bike?”
Save the similar tattoo style, I did not see this supposed resemblance, and I waved the cigarettes away, focusing on the question. Because I knew the answer. “Is fast. Loud .”
Cam exhaled and regarded me through the resulting cloud of smoke. “Something bothering you?”
“I do not like this place.” I verbalised my earlier thought and cast a wary glance around. “Locke was hurt here.”
Shadows darkened Cam’s face. “We didn’t know that when we won the auction, but we’re hoping we can fix the fucked-up aura this shithole has always had.”
“The aura, Cam? Really?”
His features lightened a touch. “Rubi got into it with Nanna Jean. She remembers thinking this land was cursed.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t believe anything is ever as final as that. And for all the Dog Crows were a fucking stain on the earth, a lot of people around here relied on them—for work, for community. Nash wants to give that back.”
The wind picked up, whistling through the broken space I remembered as being plagued with discontent and evil, the atmosphere nothing like the familial warmth the Kings fostered in their camp. “Nash is not the only big-hearted man you call brother. How do the others feel about it?”
“Depends on the day.” Cam shrugged. “Fighting the Crows cost us in ways I’d never thought to be afraid of, but they gave us three brothers I can’t imagine the future without, so it’s hard to have regrets.”
“Then do what makes you feel good. You all deserve that.”
Cam thought on that for a while, surveying the land around us. “I want better for them,” he said eventually.
“Your club or your family?”
“It’s all the same to me, but I meant Rubi and Nash. They’re wasted on what they do now we’re not fighting a different war every night.”
“Nash will be busy enough when the baby comes.”
“Babies grow. They go to school. Live their own lives. I want more for him than kicking around the garage.”
I did not point out that up to his elbows in oil and engine parts seemed to be the place Nash was happiest when he wasn’t wrapped up with his lovers. Or that even when he was, the old sofa in the garage had many stories to tell. Instead, I turned my face to the sky, pondering why Cam had chosen me to unravel his thoughts with. “Nash does more than work in the garage. I did not see it for a while, but that man is never still.”
“He works to provide, to look after everyone except himself. I want him to find something that makes him happy. Rubi too. That prick was never meant to be a fucking accountant.”
“He should have been a clown.”
I did not mean it as an insult. But Cam had never seen the aid workers dance on the roads to the refugee camps. He did not know how a man like Rubi could’ve made that journey brighter for so many children displaced by war.
He snorted through a lungful of smoke. It turned into a cough that went on a little too long for comfort, drawing my attention away from the sky.
“Smoking is going to kill you.”
Cam scowled. “Tell that to Ranger.”
“I do, but he doesn’t listen. He cannot comprehend I love him enough to care that he lives.”
Cam’s glower softened to an expression that was almost a smile. “Feels fucking weird when you say shit like that. You’re so different to how I thought you’d be.”
“Based on what?”
“Every other gun-wielding cunt I’ve ever come across.”
“We did not all choose this life.”
“I know that. But you and Jakov weren’t people to me for the longest time. You were pieces on a chess board I didn’t really understand, and I regret that now.”
“You shouldn’t.” It began to rain, like it so often did in this part of the world. “Everything is as it should be, no?”
Cam opened his mouth to reply, but a rumble of thunder cut him off. Then his phone blared to life with a loud, obnoxious tune that had him scowling all over again. “How does he fucking do that?”
The ringtone, I presumed, as the name on his phone screen was Willow, Locke’s teenage daughter.
Cam took the call, opening his mouth and shutting it again too many times to count as whatever Willow had to say confounded and amused him in equal measure. “Slow the fuck down, sproggo. I haven’t trained in super-speed comprehension... I mean, you’re talking too fast. Uh-huh. No, he left this morning with the others—you didn’t know or you forgot?”
He listened some more. I scanned our surroundings again, hoping that whatever Willow needed from Cam would take us away from this place. My gaze fell on Axel as he jogged out of the garage to rescue some materials from the heavy rain. He had shorter hair than the Kings I was used to and just as much ink on every glimpse of skin I could see. He was tall and strong. Immovable, I could tell. But he still did not feel like a soldier.
Cam’s call ended. He met my gaze with a heavy sigh. “What do you know about pianos?”
* * *
More than him, it turned out. And definitely more than Willow Halliwell, if the thin rope she had tied between her exhaust pipe and a weathered upright was anything to go by.
I re-covered the old piano with the tarp that had slipped off in her struggle to stay on the road and turned my back on it, blocking out the ghost of a melody.
Cam crouched in the pouring rain, undoing the knotted rope. “This was never going to fucking work.”
“Don’t say that.” Willow sniffed, her sea-green eyes already big and wet. “I was only trying to take it home.”
“To your mum’s place?”
“No, to the new house. I thought Nash might like it to go with all the guitars he has in storage. He’s never had anywhere to keep them all before.”
Cam’s natural glare didn’t stand a chance. He went back to wrestling with the bizarre knot Willow had fashioned in her attempt to tow the piano while she hovered beside him, fraught anxiety lacing her dampened spirit.
I stayed with the piano, keeping my mouth shut. Alexei had warned me to be less Russian around anyone who didn’t sit at Cam’s table, and unless I was speaking Spanish, I had no idea how to do that.
“Are you Dodger?”
I shifted my gaze to Willow. She came closer, peering at me from beneath a hood that was doing nothing to keep her dry. You can fix that. I shrugged out of my jacket and handed it to her, but she was not so easily distracted.
“ Are you Dodger?” she asked again. “Were you with my dad when he fell off his bike last year?”
I was familiar enough with Locke’s cover story that her questions made sense. I had not heard the name Dodger before, though. “I’m Viktor.”
“I know that—you’re Ranger’s boyfriend. I saw you at the record fair. But I’d seen you before that.”
“When?”
“Ages ago. Before my dad and Folk moved clubs. Did you move clubs too?”
Cam glanced up from his work, conflict marring his face. Mild panic. He didn’t have the answers, so I went with a semblance of the truth, speaking slower, flattening my accent as much as I could without choking on my tongue, ignoring the sound of Ranger’s laughter echoing in my head.
“I never joined your dad’s old club, but he’s part of the reason I stuck around the new one.”
“Right. So you are Dodger? You look like him.”
“How do you know?”
“Rubi said you were short and pretty, and you dance like you have one leg.”
Rubi Matherson. I had plans for him. “Okay then.” I resigned myself to my fate. “I suppose that makes me Dodger.”
Willow grinned and skipped back to Cam, oblivious to him rubbing his lips to hide his mirth.
I pulled out my phone, opening the short text thread I had with Ranger, every message sent from occasions when we had been inside the same building and he wanted me to bring him something ridiculous. Snacks, mainly. Or myself, naked.
Come to bed, Vik. I want you.
“Sorry about that.” Cam filled the space beside me, his voice low. “She asked a lot of questions when Locke was gone and we never got round to correcting the mess of how we answered them.”
He held out his cigarettes again to reinforce his apology.
This time I took one and lit up, shielding it from the rain with my hand as I shoved my phone in my pocket without texting Ranger. “Is fine. I have been called worse. Tell me, though, Rubi... what does he not like?”
Cam grinned and gave me a list.
I banked it for later and spent the rest of the wet afternoon helping Cam transport the piano to the big old house Locke and Nash had bought for their queen.
After, we escorted Willow home.
“Are you going to tell my dad?”
Cam gave her a tough look. “Tell him what? That you did something dangerous as shit with the car he’s told you a thousand times to be careful with?”
“It wasn’t dangerous.”
“Fucking was. Stupid too, and your dad has enough idiots in his life for that. Call one of us next time, eh? We’ll always ride out for you, kiddo. Even fucking Dodger.”
I flicked the water from my helmet into Cam’s face.
He didn’t blink.
Willow laughed and hugged him, and I could see how much her easy affection meant to him.
When she was safely inside, we rode out again, speeding into the driving rain but already wet enough not to care. Cam stopped a dozen more times, his phone never quiet as I shadowed him from place to place. As night replaced day, it dawned on me that he had as little desire to return to an empty house as I did.
It was how I found myself in a lay-by with him, smoking again, under the thick branches of an old oak tree, and dreaming of Ranger while Cam glared at the latest text message to annoy him. It was still raining. I missed the sunshine of my island home almost as much as I missed Ranger, but the patter of the fat drops hitting the hedgerow behind us had become a sound that soothed me.
“He didn’t have to go.”
I sat up from the slouch I’d found on the back of the Ducati. Asher . I could tell by the intensity in Cam’s gaze—these Kings, they always looked at me this way when they talked about Ranger. As if they worried I might dropkick his heart off the edge of the world. “You mean the haulage run?”
“Yup.” Cam blew smoke to the damp clouds. “Ranger didn’t have to go. Or you could’ve gone with him.”
I took a deep inhale of toxic smoke, enjoying the burn more than I ever did the vodka that didn’t touch the sides. “He did have to go. And I had to stay.”
“Why?”
“He has never left me.”
Cam frowned. “So?”
“So...” I searched for the words. English words I only tripped over during sex or when Ranger was this heavy on my mind. “He has not said, but I think he needed to know that he could. His injury...” I tapped my temple. “It scared him more than he will talk about, and he does not like to rely on people.”
“Even you?”
“Even me.”
Cam nodded, processing. “I never thought about it like that.”
“Why would you?”
“Cos it makes fucking sense. Saint was like that... after the fire. He needed us, but there were moments when he needed himself more.”
“That is a good way of putting it.” I finished my cigarette. Stubbed it out and handed it to Cam to place in the tin he kept in his pocket. “Not everyone is like that, though. Even if they think they are.”
Cam studied me, rain dripping from his riding jacket onto his denim-clad legs. “Who are you talking about?”
“Folk. He is unhappy.”
“Did you hack my phone?”
“What?”
Cam showed me his screen. A message from Rubi filled it.
Something’s up with the Fruit Pickers.
“I do not know what that means.”
“It means you’ve either got eyes on my inbox or you’re fucking psychic.”
“Observant, perhaps.” I lay back on my bike again. Cam was a dangerous man, but his bemused irritation didn’t concern me. “I saw him yesterday. And I see how Ranger and Locke watch him. That is not normal for them.”
“They’re close,” Cam hedged. “And they didn’t always tell the rest of us if something was up, but then Folk found Decoy, and Locke with my sister and Nash... it got better. They trusted us more.”
“Ranger trusts you.”
“Why isn’t he telling me something’s up with Folk then?”
“Maybe he is not sure.”
“You haven’t talked about it?”
“No.”
Cam breathed a slow sigh, deep in thought while somehow remaining present, a skill I had lost and not fought all that hard to get back. “I knew Folk wasn’t right before the summer hit, but he likes the sun, the beach, all that shit. It makes him happy and I thought whatever it was either went away, or I’d imagined it.”
“The cold months are hard for some people.”
“He’s lived through worse winters than this.”
We were not talking about the weather, and I knew that, probably better than Cam when it came to Folk Whitlock. I knew the wars he’d fought before he’d become a Dog Crow, and then a Rebel King. The horrors he’d seen and survived, because I had seen them too. “Well, whatever it is now, you will find a way to fix it. Is what you do, no? For your family?”
“I try. Doesn’t always fucking work—the fuck was that?”
Cam spun around in the same moment I surged upright, senses spiked on the wrench of sound that had pierced the air behind us.
I pulled Cam away from his bike and tugged him down, listening, unzipping my boot for the blade concealed there. “You have a gun?”
“Fuck no. You think I’m a fucking hood?”
“I think you are the high-profile leader of a motorcycle gang. Why would you not have a gun?”
“You don’t have one either.”
“I was not expecting to ride this bike today, and you forbade me from carrying firearms on your compound.”
Cam glared. “What do you want from me? A fucking medal?”
No. I wanted a gun. I wanted Cam to have a gun so we stood a better chance of fighting off whatever lurked behind us. “You are a terrible criminal.”
“I’m not a criminal.”
I opened my mouth?—
“ Anymore ,” Cam clarified before the sound came again, eviscerating our window for conversation.
Staying low, I took point as we zig-zagged towards the sound, light on our feet, constantly in motion to avoid the crosshairs of any weapon, drills beaten into me in military school that had saved my life countless times since.
Cam slotted in behind me, his hand on my shoulder, his own knife clutched in his other fist, and though we had not fought together before, save the northern raid where he had colluded with my brother to be a preposterous human, I did not worry about him.
We would live, or we would die.
Thoughts I’d had many times before, but never about Cam.
Ranger .
Jake.
My sister .
The scent of orange-blossom flooded my senses. I gripped my blade tighter. We edged forward another step, sharing a readiness so taut it crackled between us, bracing for war. For the same fight to the death we’d both survived so many times to be here.
But as we breached the gap in the hedge and rounded the braid trunk of another tree, no enemies awaited us. No guns. No knives. In the ditch at our feet, we found only a horse, wedged in the mud and braying the low whine that had triggered us into battle mode.
“Fucking-A.” Cam relaxed, his hand slipping from my shoulder. “I thought that was van doors opening with a horde of cunts here to kill us.”
“Me too,” I admitted, adrenaline fading, leaving a grazed sensation inside me.
“This fucking life, man.”
I could only agree, but that didn’t help the horse, who was well and truly stuck. “We need to get it out.”
Cam moved closer, but the horse startled, flailing in the mud, splattering it all over him.
I did not laugh. Outwardly, anyway. “We need rope.”
“I have some.” Cam backed up. “But it ain’t gonna do us much good if we can’t get close enough to lasso that fucker.”
That fucker . My heart sent another pang of yearning to my brain. I heard Cam’s words in Ranger’s thick Leeds accent and wondered why life was cruel enough to have me living this absurd moment without him.
Cam returned to the bikes.
I found my phone and reopened my text thread with Ranger, falling head first into the last message he’d sent me. From upstairs in our house when I’d had the audacity to be downstairs.
Ranger: i miss u. come back and bring two bags of pickled onion
Monster Munch.
God, I loved him.
Tell him .
Cam returned before I could thumb out a text, bearing a rope long enough that I raised a brow in question.
“Saint. He likes to pack weird shit in my saddlebags when I’m not paying attention.”
“A rope is not that weird.”
“There’s three fucking apples in there too.”
“I will take one.”
“Fuck’s sake.”
Cam rolled his eyes and went back for my apple. I ate it while I studied the horse, allowing it to grow used to our presence before we approached it again.
“The rope must go around the body.” I passed it through my hands, testing the strength. “And we do not pull.”
“Done this before, have you?”
“With donkeys. We have a lot of them at home.”
Cam crushed a cigarette against a disused fence post. “I thought Ranger was taking the piss about that.”
“Maybe he was.” I handed the end of the rope to Cam and took a cautious step towards the horse. “You will hold this while I push, but it may not end well.”
“Story of my fucking life.”
“Shh now.”
Cam sent an abrasive grunt my way, but fell quiet, gifting me silence to approach the trapped horse. A grey-brown slender thing, though the colour might have been the mud, the horse had the darkest eyes, and I spoke words Ranger had uttered some semblance of once upon a time.
“We will be okay,” I said in soft Russian. “If you do not kick me.”
The horse shied.
I made myself smaller and tried again, edging closer with every attempt to comfort the trapped animal until I had the reach to wind the rope around its middle. “There you go. We will not leave until you are free.”
The horse was unimpressed, jerking its head to nip at my ear.
It missed, but Cam chuckled anyway. “You’re a shit horse whisperer.”
“It is true,” I agreed. “But we are all terrible at so many things the first time we try.” I moved to the rear of the horse, keeping a sharp eye on the kicking range of its trapped legs. “Apply some tension, but do not pull .”
Cam and I, we shared a unique dynamic. He had little authority over me and I none over him. But our tentative friendship had grown from the values we shared, and the unspoken agreement to defer to each when a situation demanded such things.
He obeyed the order, stretching the line taut while I massaged the horse’s legs and applied pressure to her rump, encouraging her to move, a suggestion she did not appreciate but I took as a positive.
She? I was not sure when my mind had made the switch, but I let it happen, trying over and over to persuade the animal to save herself, a mission that seemed fruitless until it wasn’t.
The horse took a wheezy breath I feared could be her last. Then everything changed. Her muscles bunched with intent and she drove forward, leaning on the momentum I gave from behind and chasing the tension Cam offered from the front.
She thrashed and charged, her progress slow, but I felt her determination as the same resolve Ranger had brought to my island home so long ago, when he would not let me die.
I pushed as she fought, and she took an incremental step out of the ditch. “Now,” I instructed Cam. “Pull, but not too hard.”
“What’s too hard?”
I did not know, and truly, as strong as I knew Cam O’Brian to be, he was not superhuman enough to bear the weight of an adult horse. But we had got lucky. Or perhaps the horse had. As her body emerged from the mud, I realised how juvenile she was, and the more steps she took, the more traction Cam found to propel her forward.
The young mare found a final surge of energy and burst from the ditch, sending me sprawling into the mud behind her and Cam to his ass in a puddle at her front. She kicked out, relishing her freedom, and I wondered if she would charge away with the rope still attached.
But she did not. She shook herself, waiting while I scrambled to my feet to untie her.
I released the rope and glanced around, surveying the land around us. “I do not think this is her field.”
Cam poured water from his boot, mud splattered on his clothes and face. “I don’t think it is either. Bloke who owns this place is a scrappy. If he has got hold of a horse, it’s not for anything good.”
“Then we cannot leave her here.” I checked the mare’s eyes while she seemed so calm. Her long lashes crusted with mud, but her gaze was bright. “Where can we take her?”
Cam sighed, pulling out his phone. “A few places, but the best person to ask about that isn’t my biggest fan.”
“Business?”
“Nah. I banged his missus a thousand years ago and he still ain’t happy about it.”
“That sounds like a fun call.”
Cam grunted and stomped away to endure it.
I checked the horse again. She had no obvious injuries and apparently no urgency to escape. She stood beside me, stoic and still, her tail giving a lazy swish in time with her steady pulse. Backed into a corner, I had thought her wild, but this version of her was a different beast. A tranquil one, as if all she needed was the air and the grass.
Ranger was like that when our lives were peaceful enough to allow it. The sun on his face and the wind in his hair. My arms around him and the food of his childhood. Most days he did not long for much more.
“Joe’s coming.”
I straightened from where I had leaned against the horse.
Cam offered me his last cigarette. I waved it away, my phone heavy in my pocket, the renewed longing for Ranger’s gruff voice and tough love hitting a new peak now the distraction of rescuing the horse was over.
It had hurt, letting him go. That he would return in a matter of weeks was hard to grasp with any clarity. He had gone with the others to test his own strength. I had not realised how much it would test mine. “This is different.”
Cam eyed me over the mare’s back. “What is?”
“ This . To when I left Ranger to fetch Lida. It was hard then, but this is so much worse.”
I was not in the habit of confiding my feelings to anyone who wasn’t Ranger or Jake. Or sometimes Locke. But the family I had found myself with in recent months had changed me even more than Alexei had warned me it would, and it didn’t feel strange to speak such honesty to Cam.
It didn’t feel strange that he did not flinch before conveying his understanding either. “I’d always rather fucking leave than be the one who’s left.”
“Why?”
“Cos I know I’m coming back.”
Ranger not returning was a hellish possibility I hadn’t considered. Why would he not come back? He loved me, and even if this time away from me convinced him he didn’t, his life was here. With his friends—his brothers. With his Nanna Jean. For Ranger not to come home, that meant?—
“Fuck. Sorry.” Cam reached over the horse and prodded my bicep with his fist. “Don’t make my nightmares yours.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing you need on your mind—you hear that?”
A vehicle approached, a large one with a grumpy diesel engine. “Your friend with the horse truck?”
Cam finished his cigarette. “Horse box . And I fucking hope so; I need my dinner.”
I slid him a sideways glance. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might’ve been hungry. I still didn’t think much about food unless someone reminded me. Ranger. Locke. Sometimes Nash. Always Rubi Matherson.
The vehicle slowed and a door opened. My blade was tucked in my waistband. I left it there, but I felt the smooth metal against my skin every long second it took for the driver of the vehicle to shout Cam’s name and appear through the gap in the fence.
“Brace yourself,” Cam muttered. “This moody cunt don’t like anyone.”
“Fucking heard that.” A tall man— Joe —descended the slope that led to the ditch, sending Cam a malevolent glare that softened as his attention shifted to the mare. “What have you got here, then?”
The man’s accent was as Cornish as Embry Carter’s, and a jolt hit my brain, as if I should have known who he was. But I had never seen him before... had I?
A different version of myself would have been sure. But I was not, and I was learning to be okay with that.
Joe eyed the horse.
I stood back and let him, staying quiet as he exchanged snipes with Cam. It was hard to tell if they truly did not like each other, and I didn’t care much. Joe, whoever he was, was as fierce as the day was long but too kind to pose a threat to a man who had rescued a horse. Even if that man was Cam O’Brian.
I banged his missus...
A long time ago, surely?
“How were her legs when you pulled her out? And who the fuck are you, anyway?”
Cam didn’t answer Joe’s question. I blinked and realised he was talking to me.
Don’t be Russian. “Dodger,” I supplied in my very best English accent, which... was not great. Or consistent. “Her legs were fine when she came out—we did not pull her.”
Cam’s face did something less than ideal. He ducked behind the mare while Joe glared at me, but like the O’Brian siblings, this man seemed to wear irritation as a second skin and I did not take offence.
Joe examined the horse and confirmed she was female, and young. A filly . I absorbed the new word into my lexicon as he loaded her into his vehicle, called Cam a smug wanker, and drove away.
When he had gone, Cam bent over laughing, a sight I hadn’t seen before. “The fuck accent was that ?”
“Alexei told me to be more English. It was not convincing?”
“It was until you got all tricky that he thought you’d yanked the horse.”
“Then what?”
“I have no fucking idea, brother.”
Brother . Cam was not Jake. But he was beginning to feel like him.
I walked away, the rope slung over my shoulder, and trudged back to our bikes, my boots heavy with mud.
Cam followed, still laughing, and threw a leg over his Harley Davidson. “You should try Irish next time.”
“I forget that most of you are not English either.”
“It’s a pretty even split, if you’re talking about the table.”
The table. The council . The rituals that kept these men sane when their world could be so chaotic. But even including Ranger, Cam’s numbers did not add up. “Folk and Locke are English, and maybe the chaplain if you do not trace his Roma blood across Eastern Europe. Who else?”
“Saint. Mateo.”
“Mateo is Spanish.”
“He’s from Finsbury Park.”
“Jake was born in Copenhagen. He is still Russian, my friend.”
“All right,” Cam conceded. “But Saint is English.”
“He is Polish.”
“What?”
“His mother was Zofia Zielinski. Does that sound English to you?”