26. Skylar
Sunrise and I stand in the doorway of my wrecked bedroom. Soot-stained walls. Singed carpet. My bed stripped bare to the scorched mattress.
Jack is on his knees by the window with a torch, searching for fragments of broken glass from the shattered window.
He doesn’t know I’m home. No one does. Jack’s locked in, hyper-focused on what he’s doing, and Sol’s pacing our tiny beach, phone pressed to his ear, free hand wedged in his hair, staring at the ocean as if she holds all the answers.
And Mal?
I have no idea where he is. Just that the front door is fixed and his absence has widened the gaping hole in my chest. The emptiness in my stomach that’s eating me alive.
You fucked up .
Understatement. And I knew coming home would be a trip. But this…I can taste in the air that it’s a thousand times worse than I imagined the whole time I was gone.
I brave a step into my ruined room and rescue an envelope from the soggy carpet. I’ve never seen it before, but I knew it would be here. It’s that time—isn’t it always? Feels that way, but I’ve lost track of the days, the weeks, and every scrap of common sense I possess since I met Mal.
The envelope is dead weight in my hand.
I stuff it in my pocket and back up, leaning heavily on the door frame. “What the fuck happened?”
Jack startles, rearing upright, whipping around with alarm he doesn’t deserve in eyes that are so like Mal’s, and yet…they’re not. “Shit. Is it morning already?”
I nod, watching him use his tattooed arms to lever his body from the scorched carpet, one side dragging more than it has in a while. “You didn’t think to put shoes on your own fucking feet?”
Jack blinks. “Christ, you sound like Mal when you talk like that.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he okay?”
“I don’t know that either.” Jack’s gaze flits to the smashed window as a cruel breeze whistles through it. “I didn’t see him leave.”
“He took my car.”
I spin around.
Sol’s there, hair mussed, eyes heavy with exhaustion, but wired with stress. “Pretty sure he’s gone after whoever chucked a petrol bomb through your window last night.”
“ Whoever ?”
Sol winces, glancing over my shoulder. But Jack’s already gone back to trying to fix my room, and Sol grabs my elbow, tugging me away.
I let him haul me to the kitchen, then I’m on him with none of the gentleness I have for Jack. “What the fuck happened?”
Sol holds his hands up. “Honestly, I’m not sure. I woke up to smoke everywhere and Mal pounding on my door. Then him and Jack flipped their soldier switch and the next thing I knew, I was outside with wet feet and Mal was gone.”
“Gone?”
“He got us up.” Sol shakes his head, stressed, bewildered. “I don’t know what would’ve happened if he hadn’t been here. Or fuck, if you’d been in your bed?—”
“I wasn’t.”
“What if you had been? It could’ve killed you—fuck.”
I’m caught in thoughts of how Sol’s a deep sleeper and Jack’s sometimes so far gone we’re not sure he’ll come back. Of how quickly a fire could take hold in an old building Jack’s routed of damp. But Sol’s sharper concern pings my focus on him. “What? What is it?”
He scrubs a hand through his messy curls, emotion getting the better of him in ways I wish I was capable of. “Mal woke up funny last night. Or Jack woke him up. I’m not sure, but they got into it for a minute, before Jack got him down, and Mal was rattled after. I’ve never seen him like that.”
I can’t bring myself to picture what Sol means by got him down and got into it . Mal’s slept around me a lot, but I’ve never seen him dream. Just breathe and hold my fucking hand, and fuck , why does that hurt so much?
Because you pushed him away.
No.
Because I stepped away. Before he left, and I should be glad he’s not here.
I need him gone. But what Sol’s telling me underlines a truth that’s slowly dawned on me over the past few days—a truth that should’ve been on my mind from the start.
Mal needs Jack. He needs Sol. And they need him. I’m the disposable one.
I move back from Sol and grab a protein shake from the fridge. It goes down like sand and I feel him watching me. Knowing me as well as anyone ever has until Mal.
My stomach twists. I need his attention off me, before I puke on his fucking feet. And if there’s an upside to someone fire-bombing my bedroom, it’s that Sol has plenty to think about. “This was Couch. Has to be.”
His face turns grim. Guilty . As if the fucked-up reality we live in is anywhere close to being his fault. “Whitlock warned us.”
I force my mind back to that night, when the Rebel Kings appeared at the kitchen door like ghosts.
Because they’re different to everything I see when I look at them.
Everything I think I know. They told Mal to wait that night.
To go to them before he moved on Couch with his one-man army.
It’s so fucked-up to hope that he listened.
To know that he doesn’t listen to anyone. “You think Mal’s with him?”
Whitlock.
Folk.
Sol shakes his head. “I called Cam. They haven’t seen him.”
“You called Cam?”
More guilt mars Sol’s face. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“What did he say?”
“That they’d look for him where they’d expect him to be if he’s gone for Couch, but they don’t have many bodies to spare right now.”
Right. Because the Rebel Kings have gone so fucking legit they run their own festival every summer. One they built from the ground up in the fields where they burned my dad’s bike.
Sickness grips me. Too hard and too fast for nausea, it barrels up my throat as I screw the cap back on the empty bottle in my hand and crush it, slowly, breathing through my nose. “Who’s on the road?”
Sol snorts. “As if they’d tell me.”
Truth. Sol and Cam go way back, but beyond a bit of tobacco smuggling back in the day, Sol’s clean. He’s had to be to prop up his own father who’d be as dead as mine if Cam O’Brian was the same as the man who came before him.
“It’s done and it ain’t yours to carry. Now let it rot with his fucking bones.”
It’s me that’s rotting. From the inside out.
I fire the crushed bottle at the bin. I don’t miss.
Sol’s speaking again, but I can’t hear him, and I wonder if this is how Mal feels when he stands up too fast. How Jack feels when his brain short-circuits.
Then I bite down on the errant thoughts, because I know it’s not the same.
It can’t be. They’re not doing that shit to themselves.
On my good days, I know I’m not either. But I haven’t had a good day in a while. I can only breathe when Mal’s fucking me, when he’s holding my face and being the most entrancing human I’ve ever met, and I feel like I’m clinging to something that won’t fucking float.
Acid burns my throat. I’m losing the war with my diaphragm.
Sol’s still talking.
No. He’s moving, reaching for me. But I’m already lurching away.
In the bathroom, I lose the protein shake and whatever else I’ve eaten in the last few hours. It isn’t much. In fact, it’s so little I recall every bite. Every swallow. Every resolution that this wouldn’t happen.
I wipe my mouth.
Brush my teeth.
I breathe air that doesn’t carry Mal’s cedar-wood scent and I miss it. I miss him , and it makes me feel weak.
Call him .
The idea feels foreign. But it’s better than hiding in the bathroom with a chainsaw in my stomach. It’s better than contemplating the reality that I have nowhere to sleep.
Jack’s still in my room.
I go to Sol’s and lie down on his bed. It’s warm in here, insulated by the books lining the walls. It smells good too, like Sol always has. But my phone is a snake in my hands. I place the call and it rings and rings and rings.
Then it cuts out.
So do I.
I throw my phone at the fucking wall.
I sleep in Sol’s room.
Wake to a stiff neck, a looming night shift, and a phone with a screen that’s not much better off than my window.
Hunger gnaws at my stomach.
I ignore it and stagger out of Sol’s bed, grateful he has an old maritime clock on one of his bookshelves. I have an hour to get my shit together before I go back to work and it feels like a year wouldn’t be long enough.
Jack’s left me a note.
Sol’s left me dinner.
I take the note to my room and match it to what I’m seeing. The window’s boarded and the scorch marks in the carpet have been repaired. Everything else is still fucked and it suits my mood.
Sol’s left me chicken and rice.
I eat half.
Lose it.
Try again.
It stays down on my second attempt, but only because I eat it in Mal’s room on the bed he never sleeps in, staring down the bag that contains his entire life.
He’s never unpacked it and I don’t know why I’ve never noticed until now. Or what fuels me to set my plate on the floor and peer inside it.
Two t-shirts. A pair of socks.
His passport and a belt that looks like it could kill someone with the right swing. A medal box like Jack’s, and an envelope the same size as the one I wish had burned with my room.
The medal box makes me feel too much. I don’t even know what, just that I can’t.
I upend the envelope. It’s unsealed and military paperwork slides out, along with a tumble of photographs.
Like the ones in Jack’s album, they appear older than they are.
Taken on a disposable camera, green-cast and badly exposed.
Mal, though, he’s older in these photos than the ones Jack has. He’s not a lad in these. His eyes are different, his features more defined. Harder. Sharper. Like a man who’s seen too many of the worst things.
Doesn’t mean he’s not smiling, though. I trace the edge of a photo with my thumb.
It’s Mal and another soldier who’s a few years older than him.
Jack’s age, maybe. Dirt on their faces, they have their arms around each other.
Friends. Brothers. They’re laughing, Mal’s face split in half in ways I’ve never seen, and it’s another fucked-up feeling to miss something I’ll never have.
My vision blurs.
I need to eat more. Either that, or I’m crying, and I haven’t done that since I was fifteen.
Mal’s photos find their way back into the envelope. I put everything back in the bag and zip it up. I need to go, but leaving Mal’s room turns my legs into dead weight. It feels too final, like I’ll never see him again, and I’ve felt that before, about someone else, and I wasn’t fucking wrong.
Movement in the flat rouses me. I step out of Mal’s room as Jack appears in the hallway, holding a tablet that must be Sev’s.
“Can you help me with this?”
“Uh. Yeah.” I rub my eyes and follow him to the kitchen. “What is it?”
“Security footage. Sol doesn’t want me to look.”
“Why are you looking then?”
Jack sets the tablet on the counter, the metal casing thudding against the old wood. “Why wouldn’t I fucking look?”
Now it’s him who sounds like Mal, and the edge in his tone is sharp enough to yank me out of the daze I’ve been shuffling around in since I woke up in Sol’s bed. “Because Sol would’ve told you if there was something you needed to see.”
“Would he?” Jack’s not looking at me. He swipes the tablet, unlocking it, but that’s as far as he gets before he shoves it away, frustration and blue light from the screen already bothering his fragile senses. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Why would you say that?”
Jack turns to me, rare anger burning hot in his green eyes. “Because everyone’s fucking hiding something. Especially you .”
I flinch at that. Barely. But he catches it and steps closer, rattling the walls I’ve kept between us all these years with a frown that has nothing to do with confusion.
A frown that sees , like Mal does, and I can’t take it.
I lie and it tastes like blood. “No one’s hiding anything from you.
If you want to know something, just ask. ”
A pause stretches out. Jack’s composure settles, but he’s still watching me like a soldier. Like a Gallagher , maybe. “Where’s my brother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he go after someone?”
“I don’t know .” It’s easy to let real emotions seep into the words. To the truth. I don’t know where Mal is. What he’s doing. What he’s already done. “I wasn’t here when he left.”
“Are you all right?”
“What?”
“Skylar.” Jack moves even closer and his bulk swamps me, making me miss Mal’s subtle strength even more. “I know I’m a liability most of the time, but you can still talk to me. I’m fucking here for you.”
He always has been. But I can’t talk to Jack about the barbed wire in my gut any more than he can talk to me about the cracked part of his soul that aches so hard for Sol. It’s always been the worst thing to know he doesn’t even know what he’s lost.
Just that it’s gone.
I lie again. “I’m okay.”
Jack holds my gaze for a long moment. He holds me . But his bandwidth expires. He lets it go, and I’m gone from the kitchen before he can pull his thoughts together again.
In my room, I stuff clothes into my work bag. Too many clothes. As if I’m heading out for a week. Or maybe forever. But my head’s not screwed on right. I don’t know what I’m doing. I just do , I move, and I’m at my car before I know it, my broken phone tossed on the dash.
I’ve missed a sunny day and the air is beginning to turn humid, an incoming storm staining the blue skies I’ve slept through. It makes breathing hard. Or maybe I’m not trying.
I start the car and peel out of the space I jammed it in this morning.
Speed keeps me conscious. Tight corners on deserted roads I have no business blasting round when I’m this fucked-up.
But I do it anyway, until I reach the main road into Truro and I’m forced to behave.
To be the person I am now, not the person I was then .
The hospital car park reels me in. I slide into a space with ten minutes to spare before handover.
Without the engine running, quiet swamps me. Even my racing thoughts fade as the evening sun brings some warmth to my skin. I feel like I could sleep here. But I have a twelve-hour shift and then a wet bed to go home to. An empty bed?—
My phone rings, blaring to life at the volume I need to wake me up in a run of heavy night shifts, the screen spiderwebbed with broken light, a chunk missing from the bottom corner.
Mal .
A dozen emotions hit me like a freight train, but hesitation wins out. Then panic as sharp as the shattered glass my day has been made of.
I grab the phone, but the sensor is fucked, and the screen flickers under my thumb like it’s taunting me.
Like Mal ’s taunting me, but the anger I’m so quick to reach for, it doesn’t last. Fear returns, laced with enough guilt to choke me.
He’s calling me back. He’s reaching out.
I’m right here, and yet…I’m not, and it fits the gnarly mess we’ve made of whatever him and me are meant to be.
Static sounds in my head.
It muffles my scream.