27. Mal
My phone screen fades to black and I let it fall to the table in front of me.
Vintage.
The table, not the phone. It doesn’t match the tatty office chairs scattered around it, but I don’t much care for aesthetics.
It’s late evening. Golden hour. Sunshine dapples the old wood and makes me think of the grass by the lagoon, but the warmth in my chest is fleeting.
He didn’t pick up.
Skylar.
He’s probably working.
Or asleep, if such a thing ever fucking happens. But my hands itch to call again. To keep calling until he answers and the faulty organ skipping beats in my chest finally calms the fuck down.
Something’s wrong .
Fuck’s sake.
I dig the heel of my hand into my chest and reach for the phone, but a door creaks opens and more sunshine floods the room before I can even look up.
Folk Whitlock steps in as if he’s bathed in it, tanned skin and kind blue eyes, contentment rolling off him. He has grass in his hair and a child’s drawing scrawled on his hand.
I kinda hate him.
Not because he’s happy.
Mostly because he’s not alone.
Cam O’Brian fills the space behind him. Tall. Hot. Annoying in the appraising way he seems to look at me, before his gaze drops to the package I’ve picked up in the lost eighteen hours it’s taken me to stop roaming the South West like a homicidal maniac. “Whose dog is that?”
“Some cunt.”
“A dead cunt?”
I glance around the space. It feels safe to talk, but those same instincts drove me to leave Jack and Sol while Skylar’s bedroom carpet was still smoking from a petrol bomb, so I’m not sure they’re worth shit right now.
Reading me, Folk comes closer and folds his lithe body into a chair. “You can talk here.”
“About what?”
“About whether you’ve been on the rampage I smell all over you.”
He says it with a grin, but the question is real, and it gets my tired mind pondering what he’d say if my answer was an unequivocal yes .
What Cam would say.
The Rebel Kings’ president has claimed the chair opposite, but he seems more interested in the stolen dog at my side than the possibility I might’ve murdered her owner.
“I haven’t killed anyone.”
“Why not?”
That does come from Cam. I glance at him in time to see hardness flash in his gaze, and I realise he knows. About the petrol bomb and whose bed it fucking landed on.
“Your pal told me not to,” I tell him honestly. “At least, I figure that’s what he meant when he said my one-man plan would have flaws.”
“Saint,” Folk supplies.
Cam almost smiles. “He’s usually right. So what is this fucking plan?”
An hour ago, it had been the same one I’d left the Joker with. Then I’d retrieved my phone from a hole in the ground to see Skylar’s name on the screen and something inside me had given way.
Still don’t know what. Just that I’ve wound up here and I’m not altogether sure how.
Skylar .
His name is a tattoo in my veins. Jack and Sol are my family, by blood and by choice, but Skylar…
he’s the gravity I don’t notice until I’m already falling.
The blood in my mouth. I’m drowning by the time I feel the pull, but it’s a death I choose.
It’s love , and he doesn’t deserve that.
He doesn’t deserve me —the bitter, serrated edges I’ve never learned to dull.
The ghosts that come for me harder with every passing day, spiked boots in a glass-bottomed boat.
“Mal.”
I sense movement—imagined and real.
Folk is closer.
Cam’s gone.
Fuck.
Folk slides a mug towards me. “When did you last eat?”
The question stirs something in me. Something I’m not sharp enough to grasp right now, and that sudden fury claws at me again, a feral beast I have to wrestle into submission before I can answer Folk. “I don’t know.”
“You hungry?”
“No.”
“Can you eat anyway?”
Of course I can. Food is fuel, no different to the petrol I pumped into the shit heap Sol calls a car—an old hatchback so beat-up he leaves the keys in the glove box—and it’s this that ticks in my brain as I clear the plate Folk sets in front of me.
I don’t realise what it is until I’m halfway through it. Toast and red jam—Jack’s favourite. “You really do know my brother.”
Folk wraps wise hands around a tea mug. “I never said I didn’t.”
I feed the last crust to the dog at my feet. She’s a silky pewter-grey lurcher, with heavy teats and eyes like a sad Bosanko. “Someone stole her pups.”
“Who?”
“Whatever fucker left her tied to a caravan in the woods down your way.”
Folk’s gaze flickers. “Which woods?”
I tell him, and he rises, going to the door of this weird fucking room and speaking to someone I can’t see. When he comes back, the patience he started with has gone.
“Talk.”
And so I do.
I tell him how I’ve spent the last day and a half of my life.
How I’ve found Couch Senior’s house, his secret third property where he bones his mistress, and the strip club where he paid some dumbfuck a couple of grand to toss a lit petrol bomb through Skylar’s bedroom window.
“The eejit’s in the wind. I let him keep the cash. ”
“Why?”
“Because he didn’t target Skylar on purpose.”
“What about Couch?”
The dog lies down and licks my ankle, her nose nudging the water bowl Folk brought her. “Didn’t touch him.”
“Why not?”
I turn my head to the window. Outside, a little girl with long blonde hair is towing a biker across the yard.
He’s as tall as Cam and his skin is as stained with ink as every man I’ve seen here except Whitlock.
I tilt my head and the man looks like Jack, a thought that sends a shiver of déjà vu down my spine. He’s a soldier. “I’ve seen him before.”
“Yeah?” Folk sounds almost bored. “Where’s that then?”
I think hard. Too hard, maybe, for what I’m supposed to be doing, but I find the trail of a memory and follow it to the end. “Mali. He was a squad leader at the IDP camps. Pretty sure he ran the logistics that kept the aid flowing through the gates.”
That’s it. The end of the story. But when I find Folk again, he’s staring at the soldier as if he’s never seen him before.
It takes him a moment to come back, and the spasmodic nature of this fucked-up conversation starts to get to me.
I don’t know why I’m here. Why I haven’t abandoned Sol’s car, murdered Couch and his pack of demon spawn, and got on a fucking plane, a boat, a rocket to the moon.
I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do with this dog.
“You have war in you.” Folk is out of his seat again, hiding in the shadow of a fading sun ray, watching the soldier and his kid retrace their steps.
The soldier has glitter in his beard now and the sight of it does something to my sage new friend.
Something that settles him enough to face me again.
“But it won’t last, however hard you cling onto it. ”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you didn’t kill anyone today because you don’t want to leave what you have here.”
A scoff builds in my throat. But it doesn’t make land.
I think of Porth Luck and parts of me curl up and die, but maybe they’re the parts I need to lose.
The parts that’ll follow me wherever I go if I don’t make peace with how good it feels to be around my brother again, and the fact I’m head over heels in love with someone as broken as I am.
I don’t know if Folk takes my silence as agreement. Either way, he leaves me again and comes back with a better plan than the serial killer aspirations I left the Joker with.
He brings a pal with a laptop and an accent so English he has to be fucking Russian. Doesn’t tell me his name, and I don’t much care. An hour later, the entire Couch family is hacked to death without a drop of claret spilt. Debt-ridden and bankrupt. Assets dissolved, accounts bled dry.
And there’s more.
The King who shadowed Folk to the Joker’s back door a few weeks back, the one who stank-eyed me the second night Folk and Cam came to call.
The one who brought me here when he found me at the fence.
He takes the fresh intel I’ve gathered about Couch senior’s whereabouts and roars away on his motorcycle, and distracted by Folk’s accountant or whatever playing his game of cyber chess, I have zero will to stop him.
All that’s left is to wonder why it took them so long to act on something that’s clearly important to them.
Folk can’t answer that question, because I don’t fucking ask him. I don’t ask the numbers dude either, and he’s gone before I can change my mind.
I ask Cam instead as he walks me to the gates I bypassed this afternoon. I’ve only been here a few hours, but it feels like a week.
“Your people are worried about you.”
I cut him a dead stare. “Not what I asked.”
“I know. Just thought it mattered.”
It does matter. But so do Skylar and Sol, to me and to Cam. It makes no fucking sense that the Rebel Kings had this hacking shit in their arsenal the whole time and waited until now to use it.
Cam slows his pace to a halt.
With the dog at my side, glued to my heels like she’s always been there, I do too.
“You’re asking me why Skylar says no and I listen,” Cam says. “And I can’t answer that without breaking something I’ve kept whole more than a decade.”
“Breaking what?”
“Don’t.” Cam shakes his head. “All I can tell you is you’re the first person this conversation has ever got this far with and I’m not clever enough to know why.”
He shoots me a dry look, one that lets me know he’s far from stupid, even in a room with men like Folk, the nameless accountant, and the lieutenant in the wind with war in his eyes.
That he’s emotionally intelligent in ways I’ll never be, so I need to listen to what he’s saying.
To tolerate his hands on my shoulders when the urge to punch him in the face is so strong I nearly choke on it.