17. Locke
17
LOCKE
Finding the time proved tough for all the best reasons. Logan and Remy hung around longer than I’d dared hope. Rubi cooked. There was beer. And later, when my brother really did leave and I walked him to the car that now ran like a dream, he said something that fuckin’ distracted me.
“You know, I still have two cots in the attic, in case you need spares for the flat.”
We had no cots. Buying them or letting Saint or Cam build one felt like tempting fate. We had nothing but a couple of babygros and a pack of nappies hidden in a bag none of us dared look at. But it was my turn to tell a big fat fib. “We have a cot.”
“Just the one?” Logan’s eyes—my eyes—shone in the dark, lit up by the fuckin’ moon.
He knows ?—
“Don’t.” I pressed my hand over his mouth. “Not yet.”
Logan frowned. Then he remembered, as if he could forget when he bore the scars of losing Wren on his heart too , why we were so fuckin’ scared.
He pushed my hand away and drew me into a hug. “I get it, but it’s gonna be fine, I can feel it, and Rem says that shit matters.”
“It does matter.”
“Then just know that we love you, okay?”
“I do know that. I love you all too. Text me when you’re home?”
“Yup.”
Lo turned away, and despite all I had to be thankful for, sadness wrenched my heart and I spoke my mind without meaning to. “I wish you lived here.”
My brother smiled. Well, a smile for him anyway, anytime he was talking to anyone but Remy. “Some days, so do I. Stay out of trouble, little brother.”
“Less of the little.” Without wars to fight, the Kings had time to train like beasts, so I trained too, and I’d regained the muscle I’d lost last winter. But Logan said nothing else regardless, and he was going to drive away without letting me know for sure why he’d really come, and there wasn’t much I could do about it.
I pulled him back for a last hug. “When are you back at work?”
“In the morning.”
“Be careful.”
“Always am.”
“No, you’re fuckin’ not.”
A low chuckle rumbled from my brother’s broad chest. “Now you know how it feels.”
He kissed my forehead and left. I watched his rear lights disappear, but I didn’t feel like he’d gone. Never did these days, and I knew who I had to thank for that.
Nash.
Orla.
My heart did that thing where it compelled me to find them. To be with them. Hold them. Touch them. Watch them hold each other while I mulled over what Alexei had dropped on me this afternoon. I hadn’t seen him since, but his ominous words played on my mind. Alexei didn’t like many people, but he was as fiercely protective of Willow as he was of all our brothers and their kids. And he didn’t waste words. If he didn’t like this mystery kid she was knocking around with, I was fuckin’ listening.
The compound was busy tonight. With the deadwood of the club finally cleaned out, the brothers who remained had come together for an MC-style wake for a soldier most of them had only known on the wrong side of a brawl.
I slipped into the bar. A wall of testosterone and metal music hit me, and I shouldered through the crowd, making my way towards the alcove where the council hung out on nights like this. The council and the motherfucking queen.
But I didn’t get that far. Alexei popped up again, a ring of space around him no brother, friendly or otherwise, would dare breach. “Come.” He pointed at the door. “I do not like having this on my mind.”
I followed him outside without catching so much as a glimpse of Nash and Orla.
Alexei pointed at a vacant fire pit. “Let’s sit.”
“Why?”
“So you are easier to catch if you overreact.”
“Excuse me?”
“ Sit .”
“You talk to Cam and Saint like this?”
“Yes.”
Exasperation rippled through me, but knowing he was telling the absolute truth, I buried it and took a fuckin’ seat.
Alexei passed me his phone. On the screen was a series of photos—a car, a pub in Cornwall, and the blonde head of my scatty kid as she talked to some drip who pissed me off already for the way he towered over her.
My face folded into a natural scowl. “That him?”
Alexei gave me a dry look. “Yes, Mishka.”
“Who is he?”
“All in good time.”
“Are you taking the fuckin’ piss?”
“Already?” Alexei lounged on the patio chair he’d coiled his body into. “I thought you were one of the reasonable men around here.”
“I’m not reasonable about my kids.”
“And I do not expect you to be. But I do expect you to listen.”
I wasn’t sure when I’d woken up under the thrall of a dude as young and fuckin’ small as this one, but it had happened. I gestured for him to carry on.
“She met him in Porth Luck when she went into the Joker and asked if she could perform there.”
“Who did she ask?”
“The fisherman who sings. Sol Bosanko. But he thought her too young and refused and she left with this man. Oscar saw them and told River.”
I pictured Oscar Kuznetov. Liked him. Trusted him. “What’s the problem with this mope?”
“Oscar says he is twenty-five.”
I blinked. “What?”
Alexei repeated that monstrosity, leaning forward, poised to grab me.
But as much as I wanted to fly to my bike and hunt down my kid, I knew I couldn’t. Not yet. “Tell me everything.”
“I already have.”
“What?”
The nearby flames glowed silver in Alexei’s grey eyes. “This information came to me last night. I did not want to invade your daughter’s privacy without speaking to you first.”
He’d said shit like that before. But his stance had been fluid enough in the past that the tracker fitted to Willow’s car had been activated in time for Nash to get flattened by a lorry instead of her, a memory I did not fuckin’ need right now. “You don’t know anything else about him?”
“Only that he drives badly. Is this that brought me to you.”
“You didn’t think his age was a problem?”
“I thought it might be, but I do not know your mind, brother. Is seven years, not twenty. The gap between you and Orla is bigger.”
“ Orla isn’t eighteen.”
“Willow will not be forever either.”
I knew that. But Willow was nothing like Orla. She’d never shanked a man. Or slept with a blade under her pillow. She’d never killed , and I didn’t want that for her. I wanted her pretty head to stay in the clouds her whole damn life, and a twenty-five -year-old dragging her up too fast had no place in that.
“You know,” Alexei filled the silence. “He is not that much younger than Embry or River. Viktor even.”
I cut him a dark look. “And what do you think I’d do to them if they fucked my daughter?”
“I know what you would do to them. I was thinking out loud.”
“Good for you.” A brood settled over me. I crossed my arms to stop my hands balling into fists. Twenty-five. Twenty-fuckin’-five. This cunt was a grown man and my kid was barely out of school. “I want him dead already.”
I spat the words without considering my audience.
Alexei sat up with a shrug. “If that is what you want.”
He wasn’t joking, and I didn’t entirely hate it, a sure sign I needed to calm the hell down before I unleashed a professional assassin on my kid’s love life.
I took a ragey breath. Tried again with another that put actual air in my lungs. “Don’t murder anyone yet. I need to speak to Willow first. She with him now?”
“No.” Alexei relaxed a little, dropping his say the motherfuckin’ word stance. “She does not have enough fuel to drive to Cornwall tonight and his car is mysteriously broken.”
“You crocked it?”
“For now. I thought perhaps you could pay him a visit over the next few days. Perhaps take Decoy with you and assess the situation for yourself.”
“Decoy?”
“Mishka, please. There is no one else who can be trusted.”
“Not even you?”
“Especially not me. I do not know... how things should be with this kind of thing. I did not live this life and I am not a parent.”
I disagreed. There was more to being a parent than biology. Not a day passed when every brother on the council didn’t prove that. But I didn’t have the brain power to argue with Alexei and his lack of self-worth, and he was right about the rest of it. Left to my own devices, Folk would’ve been my first choice, and I’d have been wrong.
“I need to go.” Alexei rose. “Can I trust you not to move on this tonight?”
My grunt was noncommittal, but Alexei saw through it and walked away without promising the same and without giving me the chance to thank him for watching over my kid while I’d been gone.
It left me with my thoughts, and my mind began to feel like the expression I saw on Cam’s face sometimes. When he had so many things to think about—important fuckin’ things—that he needed to punch something to figure it all out. Or accept that he couldn’t.
And that’s what I needed too, the accepting part. Willow was an adult. If she wanted to be with a dude seven years older than her, there was fuck all I could do about it. Except— except , there were lots of fuckin’ things I could do about it, and the temptation to act on them was strong enough that I knew I needed to go back inside and find someone sensible to talk me down.
First, though, I pulled out my phone and fired a text to my daughter.
Dad: stay home tomorrow. i’m coming to see you
She didn’t reply, which let me know she was asleep, seeing as she was surgically attached to her phone when she wasn’t. And me? Despite my aching bones, I felt awake enough to never sleep again.
I hauled myself out of my chair and stomped back inside, heading for the residence this time, heeding a message from Nash that he’d taken Orla to bed and stayed there. On the landing, I checked the other rooms, habit more than anything. Rubi and River were asleep in Mateo’s old bed, Ranger in Nash’s, his long body curved around Lida. No fuckin’ clue where Viktor was, except a certainty that he hadn’t gone far. No one would, not for a while. I fuckin’ felt it.
I shut Ranger’s door and checked the landing escape routes. Then I finally let myself into the presidential suite our queen had claimed as her own these past few months—the big bed and the private bathroom.
The shower was on, which accounted for Nash. Orla was by the window, her leggings gone but still wrapped up in Logan’s shirt and thick socks pulled up to her knees.
I moved behind her, circling her bump with my arms and lifting it just a tiny bit, taking the weight.
She groaned, low in her throat. “You have no idea how good that feels.”
No. But I believed the primal sounds she made every time I did it. And I knew the physical toll this pregnancy was taking on her. The fatigue, the sickness. The sheer endurance of carrying two extra humans. However much she welcomed the discomfort for every day it kept our babies safe inside her, it was a marathon only she could run.
I kissed her neck. “Maybe you should lie down.”
“Maybe you should stand right there all night and tell me what Alexei said to piss you off so much.”
“I’m not pissed off.”
“Fucking furious then. Whatever. Don’t get pedantic with me, sweetheart.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” I eased my arms from her stomach and turned her around, drinking in her flushed face—her glowing face, despite how tired she was. Her full lips and huge tits. That belly. She’d been beautiful before, but pregnant... fuckin’ hell. I wanted her so much and it had nothing to do with sex. “Lie down with me.”
“Sure, if you feel like being squashed.”
I didn’t mind it. We moved to the bed. I ditched my boots and swapped my jeans for sweats, losing the hoodie and T-shirt I’d ridden home in, the ones I’d walked into the sea to keep Folk with us. It had been a wild few days. Weird, for a passage in time that had felt so fuckin’ quiet.
“Willow has a boyfriend.”
Still undressing, I said it without looking at Orla, giving her my scarred back.
I felt her move closer, her hands a soft contrast to Nash’s as she smoothed them over my ruined flesh.
“Okay. What’s the problem with that?”
“He’s twenty-five and drives like a cunt.”
“How do you know that?”
“Alexei told me.”
Orla’s hands paused. “How does he know—wait, don’t even bother. He followed her, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. After Oscar told River he’d seen them together.”
Orla snorted. “The circle of spies. I know how that goes.”
I twisted to face her. “Oscar’s not a spy.”
“No, but he knew what would happen if he passed the information on.”
“You’re saying it like it’s a bad thing.”
Orla’s steady gaze drilled into me. “Maybe because I’ve been the girl who can’t take a step without having to explain herself. Can’t make a new friend without them being hazed by a gang of neanderthals.”
“He’s twenty-five .”
“So was the first boy I slept with. No one younger would dare.”
“Willow’s not you.”
“And what the fuck does that mean?” Orla shot back. “That she’s too stupid to make her own decisions or I was too loose with mine?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“So what did you mean?”
“I—” Actually, I didn’t know. I scrubbed a hand down my face and rose to meet Orla as she left the bed and crossed the room, irritation in her gait. Stress that she didn’t need. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t know I was going to be a caveman about this, but now I’ve started, I can’t seem to fuckin’ stop.”
Orla opened a drawer and pulled out a knife. She held it out, blade first, in the same moment Nash opened the bathroom door and read the room through a cloud of steam.
He dropped his towel, reaching automatically for a weapon. “What happened?”
“Willow got a boyfriend. Locke wants to kill him.”
“I never said that.”
“Please.” Orla flipped the knife and tried to press it into my hand. “Do you think I don’t know what a murder conversation looks like?”
“It wasn’t a murder conversation.”
Orla hissed and let the blade fall.
Frowning, Nash swiped it from the floor as if it had plague germs on it and I was out of patience for no reason whatsoever.
“What the fuck is up with this knife?”
Nash set it down and backed away. “It has history?—”
“It’s mine,” Orla cut in. “My dad took it off me when I shanked someone with it. Gave it to Cam, along with my agency, and told him to keep a better eye on me. I think you should give it to Willow.”
“I’m not ever going to do that.”
“Why not? Because she’s not like me ?”
“No, because she doesn’t have to be. If her boyfriend needs cutting into a thousand pieces, I’ll do it myself.”
Orla’s eyes flashed as my voice thundered in the dark. She opened her mouth to decapitate me, but Nash stepped between us, arms spread, eyes wide with genuine bemusement. Naked , as if this whole clusterfuck could be more ridiculous.
“Enough. Both of you. The fuck is going on?”
Orla planted her hands on her hips. “Locke wants to murder people for existing?—”
“I never said I wanted to kill anyone. Just that this mope is twenty-five and I don’t fuckin’ like it.”
“He’s twenty-five?” Aggression threatened Nash’s calm gaze. “Who the hell is he?”
“Jesus Christ, not you too . ” Orla looked around for something to throw. I didn’t entirely blame her. Some distant part of me got her point. But I needed the validation of Nash’s reaction. I welcomed it, and Alexei’s prophecy that Decoy was the only brother who could help me made more sense than ever.
I filled Nash in.
He eyed the knife.
Orla took it away and shoved it back in the drawer. Loudly, the commotion drawing a sleepy-eyed Rubi to throw open the door and glare into the room.
“What in the name of all dragons is going on in here—holy Khaleesi, Nashie, put your love noodle away.”
Nash grabbed some clothes. “How about you goddamn knock?”
“How about you don’t make a riotous racket that makes me think you’re all being slaughtered?”
As he spoke, River popped up behind him. “Why’s everyone fucking shouting?”
“Willow has a boyfriend,” Nash supplied, covering his junk. “And he’s old.”
River pursed his lips and made to slink away.
“Don’t you dare,” Orla snapped. “This is your fucking fault.”
“How’s it my fault?”
“Get in here.”
River ducked around Rubi. “What?”
Orla nailed him with a glare that he returned with immediate O’Brian attitude. “ You took this to Alexei.”
“And?” River widened his stance. “Locke wasn’t here.”
“ I’m here?—”
“You have enough to worry about.”
“Says who?” Orla shouted. “Who made you fucking god?”
“ Whoa .” Rubi stepped in front of River, spreading his hands. “Don’t get all riled up. It’s not good for the baby.”
“Do not”—Orla pointed a long black nail in his face, their last hurrah before she cut them short for the foreseeable future—“fucking tell me what’s good for my babies.”
Babies .
Plural.
But the room was chaotic enough that no one noticed.
“I’m not telling you anything.” Rubi kept talking, playing fast and loose with his balls. “I just think there are better ways of talking about this, if only that we don’t wake up Roo.”
Ranger .
The warning came too late. The door pushed open again and Lida slipped into the room, an irritated northerner not far behind her. “This had better be good tea or you’re all cunts.”
Rubi gave him the good news.
Ranger scowled, ready for carnage without missing a beat. “What’s his fucking name?”
Thank you, brother . And I felt like telling him, I really did, but an eviscerating glare from my queen shut me up.
“All right.” Rubi brought his hands together as if he was praying for calm. “What do we actually know?”
“Why don’t you ask River?” Orla retorted sweetly. “He’s the one with all the information.”
River rolled his eyes. “All I did was tell Alexei that Willow was knocking around with someone older. I figured he could take a look without her knowing about it and then we’d decide if he was a problem. I never said he was, and Locke, if you’d been here or anywhere that wasn’t where you were, I’d have come to you first.”
I knew it. And I was grateful he’d done what he’d done. Orla, though, she was still seething.
“You don’t get it— none of you get it. It’s up to Willow to decide if her boyfriend is a problem. We don’t get to choose her relationships.”
“But we have to protect her,” Nash countered. “Being one of us means she has enemies she’ll never fucking know about, and this dude could be anyone.”
Orla pursed her lips. “Okay, you’re right about that. But what if he’s just an idiot? How’s she going to learn what the world’s really like if we sanitise every encounter she ever has? How’s she ever going to know good from bad? If anything, she’ll be more at risk, and that’s if she doesn’t rebel to escape this bullshit and you never fucking see her again.”
Ouch . I felt that in my fuckin’ marrow and it rendered me mute as Rubi conceded the point.
“Valid.” He wagged a finger, ignoring the very real risk of Orla biting it off. “Your dad worried about that until Nash’s pretty face turned your head.”
“Whose pretty face?” The new voice in the room was Viktor’s. He filled the doorway, taking it all in. “What are you fighting about?”
I banged my head against the wall behind me as he got Ranger’s version of events. How had a simple conversation with my lover turned into this fuckin’ pantomime?
Cos they care .
All of them, including Viktor as I watched him mull it over.
“My sister’s husband is older than her. Twelve years.”
I expelled a stressed breath. “You like him?”
Viktor nodded. “He is the best man for her, and she chose him herself. In a life where she has not had much free will, that means something. Who does not like Willow’s boyfriend?”
“No one’s met him.”
Viktor turned to me. “Even you?”
“Nope.”
“But you do not like him anyway?”
Out of words, I shook my head, and Viktor appraised me with the same cool gaze Alexei had outside. The same silent offer of a permanent solution, and fuckin’ hell, for whatever reason, it was tempting tonight. But the spectacle we’d made of this conversation was starting to do its job. Orla’s stance gained a stronger foothold in my brain and I silently stood Viktor down.
He nodded and said something Russian to Lida.
She tilted her head.
He said it again and she padded to Orla, placing a paw on her bare foot. “Lida picks Orla. You should all go to bed.”
Despite their shared willingness to kill for my daughter, Viktor and Alexei were nothing alike. They shared a history, but they saw the world through a different lens, and their personalities were chalk and water. But somehow they both possessed the ability to speak as if they were the oldest, wisest men on earth.
Viktor extended his hand. Ranger took it without hesitation, and they slipped from the room, Lida padding after them with a quiet huff, taking some of the inexplicable madness with them.
From me. From Nash.
From Rubi as he shrugged. “Sounds fair enough to me.”
Not done, Orla glared. “You needed a dog to tell you that?”
“Lida ain’t no ordinary dog, Khaleesi. You know this.”
For a brief moment, Orla’s temper flared brighter. Then she sighed. “Maybe we all need a fucking dog to talk some sense tonight. I remember this—” Her gaze flickered to River. “—from the night we buried Ma. We’d found some peace, but we still wanted to fight the whole world.”
“Speak for yourself.” Rubi stretched his arms, flexing his neck with a wince. “I spent that night putting out O’Brian fires so poor Nashie and Saint didn’t burn to death. Can I go back to bed now?”
“No one asked you to get up,” Orla sniped, but her tone lacked the bite of any real temper and Rubi grinned as he let Nash push him out of the room.
River was already gone. It left us alone again, in mutinous silence, and I realised it was the first time there’d been any real discord between the three of us since the last time I’d royally fucked up and walked out on them.
I was a different man now. A better one—a healed one. I wasn’t going anywhere, but for some fuckin’ reason, my mouth stayed clamped shut, my feet rooted to the floor, when all my heart wanted was to crawl to my woman and apologise.
She came to me, her bump arriving first. “I’m sorry—I mean, I’m not sorry for what I said, but I’m sorry for how I said it.”
I skated a hand over her belly, feeling the lumps and bumps of eight limbs crammed in there, thinking of first baby girl, cos I’d dream her for as long as I lived. “I’m sorry too. Maybe you’re right about the post-funeral madness. I was okay when my parents died, but there’s some blank time after we buried Wren. Logan had to come and take me away somewhere.”
Orla scratched those nails through the scruff on my jaw. “Do you feel like that now? Like you need to be somewhere else?”
“ No , I’m just fuckin’ annoyed.”
“With who?”
“Myself, mainly. I knew it was a matter of time before Willow met someone, but she had a girlfriend a few years ago, so I hadn’t prepared for her hooking up with some old cunt.” Another rush of caveman energy hit me. I gritted my teeth, ignoring the amusement that was slowly replacing Orla’s rage.
Trying to, at least. But her wicked grin got me, every fuckin’ time.
“Stop it.” I hid my face in her neck.
She laughed. “You realise a girl can break her heart too, right?”
“Not funny.”
“I know, sweetheart, but you are.”
Her words feathered my ear as Nash filled what little space Orla and the babies had left him. He kissed my temple, and I sighed, soaking up the moment for what it was. Comfort from the people I fuckin’ lived for. “I really am sorry.”
Orla tipped my chin, forcing me to meet her tough O’Brian gaze. “For what?”
“For shouting. For not listening.”
“You heard me though.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“And...” I forced the lingering aggression away. “I’ll at least meet this drippy dickhead before I kill him.”
“How do you know he’s drippy?”
“Alexei showed me a picture.”
Orla’s gaze narrowed again.
“Oh, fuck no.” Nash intervened. “Let’s put a record on and eat something.”
Magic fuckin’ words. Orla poked my ribs and drifted away to her older brother’s record stack, which meant I was in for a few hours of hardcore metal, but I could live with that more than her anger, for no other reason than her flushed face and flashing eyes made me want to jump her.
I took a shower—a cold one that made my bones ache harder, but I didn’t care. I needed it, even if the throb in my back was enough to have me hunching over the sink like I was eighty years old, gone so long Nash came to find me.
He’d brought the magic hemp cream that smelled like Saint. He rubbed it into my tight muscles and it felt almost as good as when he’d fucked me this morning.
Reckon my face was the same.
“Come to bed,” he whispered when he was done. “Please?”
He didn’t have to plead. I was dead on my feet and I needed to be horizontal with my people to survive it.
I followed him out of the bathroom and claimed my place beside Orla. She was already asleep. With Nash warming my soothed spine, I curved around her, my hand on her belly—her tight belly, alive with the false contractions that often hit at night, causing her to shift and grumble in her sleep, growing in intensity as her pregnancy progressed.
Nearly there.
Just a few weeks. Then I’d have two more kids to lose my shit over, and as scary as that was, I couldn’t fuckin’ wait.