4. Folk
4
FOLK
I heard the dog first. On some level, a deeper one than I wanted to face right now, maybe I knew it was Lida. Either way, I didn’t turn around as her rumbling whine reached me, cut off by the low command of the last person I’d expected to see tonight, despite being so close to his house.
Viktor .
Lithe and striking with his copper-streaked hair and light-green eyes, it blew my mind that I’d forgotten about him for so many years. It downright bemused me that he was part of my life now . He should’ve been dead, and maybe that’s what had surprised me the first time I’d seen him lurking around the Crow compound—that he’d made it that far.
That we both had.
“This is a nice view at sunrise.” He crouched beside me, smelling of earth and rain. “Lida seems worried you are going to spoil it.”
By splattering myself on the rocks below. I knew how this looked. “I made a promise.” I swept my thumb over a smooth stone by my foot. “No more cliff jumping at night.”
“It will not be night forever.”
“Did you believe that a year ago?”
Viktor leaned forward, scanning the drop and eliciting a straight-up growl from his loyal dog. “I am not sure what I believed a year ago, but I do know that I broke a lot of promises.”
I’d broken promises too, probably the same ones as Viktor. But he wasn’t talking about pill bottles hidden in rolled-up sleeping bags. Half-truths that became lies. Not really. He’d climbed up here to check I wasn’t going to off myself, and it would’ve been the easiest thing to reassure him. To be amused that he cared, even if it was proxy concern for Ranger’s benefit.
But the truth was, I didn’t have the energy—to say it or to feel it. I hadn’t for a while now, and searching for answers at the edge of this cliff had got me nowhere even before Lida had led Viktor up here. “Go home, brother. Your conscience is clear.”
Viktor snorted. “It is not, and it will never be.”
Mine either. I had blood on my hands, so much blood. But it wasn’t killing people that kept me up at night. It was losing people, and there was nothing Viktor could do about that.
I rose, stepping back from the cliff.
It took him a second to follow, but I didn’t look back as I hopped the railing and set my boots on the path.
I left, trusting Lida to keep him safe, and returned to my bike. I was home before I regretted it.
Silent house.
Dark bedroom.
Only texts on my phone screen for company.
Seth: embry said u went home. u ok?
Folk: All good. Think Ivy wanted some space
Seth: from u???
Folk: It happens. I’m not as much fun as Liliana
Decoy didn’t respond straight away. He was driving through the night until Mateo took over at dawn, and even then, I knew he wouldn’t sleep much until they hit their rest stop after lunch, too diligent to take the breaks he’d earned.
I loved him more than I’d ever thought possible. I was happy with him, and with Ivy. I wanted to marry Seth, adopt Ivy, and have more children, but somewhere along the way, I’d missed the dark cloud descending on me. And somehow, despite spending the past year more content than I’d ever been, I couldn’t see past it.
You can. You have before.
But this felt different. The answers to addiction were as obvious as the consequences of contemplating my own mortality. I didn’t want to die, so I lived. And I lived well. But I’d messed up. I’d missed something. And now here I was, dismantled by choking inertia and lacking the tools to fix it.
My phone flashed again. A photo. Ivy tucked up in a pink sleeping bag on Mateo and Embry’s living room floor, tongue poking out, popcorn in her hair. I smiled, and for a moment it felt real, but it didn’t last and gravelly exhaustion swayed me on my feet.
Go to bed .
Without Decoy.
I’d done it for thirty-five years before I’d found him. And I’d done it since—this wasn’t the first time one of us had been away. But as I contemplated our empty bed, I realised it was the first time I’d had to do it here. Alone. Without a brother or Ivy for company.
You don’t have to do this .
I could’ve stayed at Embry’s. At Orla’s flat with Nash and River. With Viktor on the clifftop.
You left him.
My phone weighed heavy in my hand. Remorse threatened my bleak mood and I let it happen, sitting on the edge of the bed. Then sinking back to stare between the blank screen and the ceiling. I had a benign number for Viktor and a gut instinct that he’d watched me leave, then carried on home to his Fort Knox house, Lida guarding his every step. But Viktor wasn’t a faceless mobster anymore. He hadn’t been even before he’d become everything to Ranger, and I’d missed that too.
Folk: Did you get home?
Viktor: of course
Viktor: you are all right?
Folk: Nothing some sleep won’t cure
Viktor: I am glad you did not jump
Folk: I wish I had, but not for the reasons you think
Viktor: you do not know what I think
Probably not. Viktor wasn’t as terminally enigmatic as Alexei, but though we’d fought the same wars for longer, I didn’t know him so well. Something I needed to fix now he was a permanent fixture in Ranger’s life. In Locke’s. They loved him, and neither one of them gave their hearts away for nothing.
Folk: Find me sometime and tell me
I dropped my phone on the bed, flexing my sore hands, breathing through the pain that spread through the rest of my body. Winter was hard on my chemo-ravaged joints, especially when I spent my evenings damp and cold without the prospect of Decoy’s solid warmth to rectify it any time soon.
Ten days.
Sleeping without him felt impossible.
I sat up, a fatigue-induced headache pounding between my eyes, the bedroom closing in on me. If Locke had been home, I might’ve gone to him. But he wasn’t, and the roadblock in my head extended to more than just Viktor.
Eventually, I wound up on the couch, staring at a different ceiling with my phone on my chest. Did I sleep? I wasn’t sure. But as the living room morphed into somewhere else entirely, I wasn’t awake either. I was eighteen years old and about to get on a bus that would change my life forever.
THEN...
“Why does it have to be the Marines?” Rocco’s voice came from above. I looked up in time to see him spring from the bus stop roof and land in front of me. “You should be a teacher instead.”
My gaze caught on his tatty jacket. “What would I teach?”
“Whatever you want. You’re good at everything.”
“Am I?”
“Nah, your lad game is shit. Maybe you really should try girls for once.”
“What girls? They all like you too much.”
Bemused, Rocco grinned, shoving his dark curls out of his face with no real idea how attractive he was. “Finch doesn’t like me.”
“You want her to?”
“No, I’m just saying you’re wrong about all the girls liking me instead of you.”
“I don’t care if girls like me, especially my sister.”
Rocco sighed. “Shame. It’d be harder for you to leave if someone prettier than me asked you to stay.”
“You haven’t asked me to stay.” I rose from the bench as the bus appeared on the horizon. “And you’re moving to Devon anyway. It’s not like you’ll never see me.”
“Yeah, but...”
The bus drowned Rocco out, unnaturally loud as it rumbled up the street. I threw my bag over my shoulder and looked for him, but he was gone, and time seemed to tumble forward at breakneck speed, careening through weeks and months and years until my surroundings made no sense. The landscape. The people. Why was Rocco in Helmand?
I moved towards him, barging through the chaos of Camp Bastion as mortar fire fell around us, but I wasn’t a Marine anymore. I was something else—something I’d never be able to explain even if I didn’t die trying to cross the camp to reach him.
“Folk.”
He said my name, his Norfolk accent as broad as mine had been before special forces selection knocked it out of me.
Play the grey man, soldier. Be forgettable.
Rocco had never been forgettable. I heard his laugh tangled with Asher’s as they stole boats from the harbour and threw traffic cones at passing police cars. I watched him shy away from the few teachers who noticed how clever he was when he wasn’t too busy chasing girls.
I watched his face fade as I found myself hurtling from Afghanistan to Yemen. From Sudan to Syria with no time to breathe in between.
“Folk.”
He said my name again. In the desert, the Arab sun beating down on us. I looked up and there he was, his feet in the sand, but he had no face. It had rotted away, ropes binding his arms, burned skin peeling from his body. Dead, but still tied to the world, screaming my name.
Begging.
Pleading.
But for what? The last time he’d begged me for anything it had been to save myself, not him, because he’d needed me. And he needed me now , but as fast as I ran towards him, I—I couldn’t reach him. I never reached him, and he died?—
Because you left him.
NOW
I gasped awake, rolling from the couch and reaching for a weapon, cold sweat coating my skin, my pulse beating out of my ears.
Rocco. Rocco. Rocco.
My knee hit the coffee table—I knew it was the coffee table. I knew where I was. But I kept reaching for that gun, my shaking hands finding nothing but air, and I tripped over my feet before I got a hold of myself.
Heart thundering, I pressed my hands over my ears, willing the blaring noise away, the whistling static of the radio embedded in my brain. But I knew this feeling—it wasn’t going anywhere until I did, and I was in motion again before I made a conscious decision.
My bike keys were still in my pocket. I stamped into my boots and ran from the house, on the road so fast my head spun hard enough for me to wonder how it was still on my shoulders. Or why it was this beach I rode to. The one I’d brought Ivy to yesterday after school, to swim in the sea pool in her lilac wetsuit, the last time before the water got too cold.
I abandoned my bike where I’d left it the day I’d found Decoy here, and the beaten-down sadness in his gaze had hurt so much I’d been grateful to him for giving me something to care about again. I still cared. About him, about Ivy. About myself . Beyond the numbness, I knew that.
But I needed relief. A reset before the healed parts of me broke again and the choice was no longer mine to make.
I scaled the cliff path.
And this time, without Viktor to stop me, I broke my promise.
I jumped.