29. Mal
Skylar’s in pain. He’s good at hiding it, too fucking good, but he’s tired, and I see every flare and strain as if he’s lit up in neon lights.
I keep my hand on his abdomen, waiting for him to answer my question or chin me, accepting my fate.
Skylar takes a slow breath, exhaustion way past fatigue hollowing his features, his grey eyes so shadowed they’re like coal in the snow.
“I used to sleep a lot when I was a kid. Never made it through a film or a TV show. I thought it was normal until I went on a school trip and I was awake for a week.”
Foreboding thrums in my pulse. I’ve been eerily calm since Skylar passed out, distant from the horror of it. But my soul knows that’s about to change. “You didn’t like being somewhere different?”
“No, my dad wasn’t feeding me roofies to stop me noticing he was running a trafficking ring for underage sex workers.”
His vision hazes. Like Jack’s did when he had that absence seizure. Like Skylar’s did the night I met him, when every fibre of him was screaming out for help.
I squeeze the hand I’m still holding. Skate my thumb over the flat ridges of his lean abdomen. Wait for him to come back, but ready my heart for the war I might need to wage to help him get there.
He’s not gone that long. He retunes to our joined hands. Stares at them for a long, long moment, before he shifts his gaze to mine. “Ask me questions. I don’t know how to say it otherwise.”
I can do that. “How old were you?”
“Eleven when I went on the trip. Fifteen when I found out the truth.”
“How did that happen?”
Outside, a vehicle pulls into the pub car park.
People get out and make the trek to the pub door to find it closed.
They thump the old wood, hollering in the driving rain, but no one answers.
I don’t know where Jack is. Or Sol. Just that the Joker isn’t opening its doors today and I don’t give a rat’s fuck what anyone has to say about it.
Shoes crunch gravel as whoever it is stomps away. Skylar shivers, screwing his eyes shut, and the need to hold him rises so fiercely it burns me alive for the protracted seconds it takes for his eyes to flash open again.
“Let me up?”
I can’t refuse him. I give him space, and Skylar sits up, swinging his legs off the bed.
He’s wearing the sweats I dug from the drawers in his mutilated bedroom. Nothing else, except maybe the underwear I made myself grab without looking. Why? You’ve seen his dick. You’ve been inside him. You’ve come inside him ? —
Skylar plants his feet. I read him and take his hands, and we rise together.
I don’t know where he wants to go.
Neither does he. Just that he needs to be up to have this conversation.
He moves to the window and opens the blinds. Stormy skies greet him, wild seas. But the true tempest…it’s in his eyes.
“My dad worked a lot. He was a Rebel King…a chapter president up north, Stockport way.”
“Biker family?”
“Yeah, you were right. Even my mum had a hog.”
“So… you’re a Rebel King?”
“ No .” Skylar shakes his head, his whole body rejecting the notion. “I was born into it, like Cam, but I never took a patch.”
I absorb that and try to compute a question that isn’t fucking obvious. “Fifteen is young to take an MC patch anyway. Is it different if you’re the prodigal son?”
Skylar nods. “Everything’s different. People assume who you are— what you are. But you can know someone your whole fucking life and still come to realise you never knew them at all.”
“Your dad?”
Physical pain tightens Skylar’s already fraught build.
He pushes it away, watching the waves batter the shoreline.
“My dad and Cam’s were good friends—close enough that Cam’s old man turned a blind eye to mine skimming cash off the gunrunning and dope muling that made the Kings rich back in the day.
It gave my dad more freedom than most chapter leaders.
More clout with his soldiers—biker soldiers, not real ones. ”
“I don’t know about that. War is fucking war.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Isn’t it? I chose to be a para. No one put a gun to my head and made me.”
Skylar concedes my point with a dry half smile.
But we’re getting off point, and his humour doesn’t last. “My dad’s chapter were the lead group running the smuggling lines up north.
They made a lot of money, so Cam’s dad left them to it, and it gave my dad the opportunity to make deals with outside organisations.
I don’t know how that went from heroin to teenagers, but that’s what happened, and the first I knew about it was when the founding chapter—Cam’s chapter—came for my dad in the night. ”
“To your house?”
“We lived on the compound—in the residence above the workshops. In hindsight, it was a shithole, but it was all I knew. I thought everyone lived like that.”
I picture my dad’s grotty flat up the road. The threadbare carpets and mouldy walls. “Know how that feels. The shithole part, I mean.”
Empathy lights Skylar’s weary gaze, and I know I’m looking at the nurse who works sixty hours a week keeping people alive.
Helping them cope with unimaginable pain and survive injuries that should’ve killed them.
But that broken boy…he’s so close to the surface right now the years fall off him, and I need to know what happened so badly I take a chance and edge closer to where Skylar stands by the window.
God, I need to touch him.
I settle for taking a seat on the end of the bed, legs stretched out in front of me, like this is a casual conversation not the whole fucking world quietly breaking open between us. “How did they come for him?”
“Through the windows, with guns and masks. I woke up as he dragged me out of bed.”
The open windows. And Skylar’s voice catches on he .
I lean forward, bending my knees to drop my elbows on them. “Who?”
Skylar swallows. “Cam. I was a good fighter and everyone knew it, but he was older, bigger, better. His dad sent him after me to keep me contained.”
A few hours ago, I liked Cam O’Brian. But rage simmers in me now, a fury so potent I wish I’d killed him when he’d had the audacity to fucking hug me. “Did he hurt you?”
“Only when I fought him. His dad’s soldiers made him gag me, but Cam took it out when they weren’t looking.”
“Nice of him.”
“It was. His old man caught him and made him tell me why they had my dad hog-tied on the floor.”
“That’s how you found out?”
Skylar nods, blank and distant. “I didn’t believe them. I fought Cam harder and he had to put me down.”
I will kill him in his fucking sleep. “What happened next?”
Skylar refocuses on whatever he’s seeing through the window.
Beyond the storm and the angry sea. “They made me watch the footage they’d collected for their own proof.
Of my dad and his soldiers transporting fucking kids between one cartel and another, of my dad…
” Skylar chokes. “…sampling the fucking merchandise for himself. That wasn’t CCTV—it was a video from his own bedroom. ”
Nausea tilts my existence off its axis. A cold heat behind my ribs. And the worst thing about it is this isn’t even close to being over.
Another shiver hits Skylar.
I hook my bag with my foot and draw it closer, snagging a t-shirt from the messed-up contents, one Jack must’ve missed when he was searching for something to replace the clothes Skylar puked a bellyful of water on when he was unconscious on the hallway floor.
It’s the one I was wearing the night we met. When the thrum of attraction between us was something we only recognised as a one-time thing.
I stand and take it to Skylar, slipping it over his head, threading his arms through the holes. “You don’t have to be cold, Sky.”
Sky.
Our faces are inches apart.
For a fleeting moment, Skylar nuzzles my throat.
Then he pulls back and that deathly vacant stare comes back stronger than ever.
“The video on that cracked fucking phone screen, it wasn’t a self-tape.
The person holding the camera flipped it round to turn it off.
That’s when I realised it wasn’t my dad running the show… it was my mum.”
It’s my turn to choke, my pulse a sudden, shocked tirade, banging against my eardrums. “Your mum?”
“Yeah.” Skylar speaks without emotion. “She ran the whole thing. My dad was her little bitch, but I guess they were both monsters in the end.”
“They’re dead?”
Skylar shakes his head again, but it’s less violent this time, and I feel the energy seeping from him. “My dad is. My mum…the Kings thought her crime was worse. So they broke their own rules and set her up to be caught by the feds—the police. She’s serving a life stretch in Falfield.”
I’m still gripping the hem of the shirt I slipped over Skylar’s head.
I release it and let my hands slip beneath the fabric, skimming the cool skin of Skylar’s ribs, and the inked back I’ve spent way too much time entranced by, fucking him when we should’ve been doing this .
“What happened to you after this all went down?”
“I was alone,” Skylar says flatly. “I should’ve gone into foster care, but the Kings didn’t like that.
The morals that made them come for my parents had them taking me in.
I lived in Devon for a while—in Cam’s house, with his sister and his kid brother.
Went to school properly for the first time since I was really fucking young. ”
“Then what?”
Skylar shrugs, a benign gesture that becomes the only thing between me and whatever punchline he’s about to floor me with.
“My parents were the gift that kept shitting, even when they were both gone. The organisations they’d been working with, they weren’t happy that the Kings had shut down their main route through northern England, and Cam’s dad paid the price for that. ”
“They got him?”
“Pipe bomb in the car he never drove. Blew him to bits. And then Mary…Cam’s mum, she couldn’t live without him and OD’d a few months later.”
I’ve seen and heard some shitty things in my life, but this…it’s a lot. I take a moment and breathe Skylar in, rubbing his cheek with my scruffy one, willing him back from the trauma-fuelled vortex that has swallowed him whole.
I don’t expect him to speak again. He’s done, he has to be. But his lips move as he drags them along my jaw and steps out of my embrace, moving back to the bed.
My bed.
“Can you do something for me?”
I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t do for him. “Whatever you need.”
“Don’t tell me none of this was my fault.”
“Why not?”
Skylar sits down. It’s abrupt, as if his legs gave out on him too fast for me to see. “Because it’s not true, and now I’ve told you all this shit, I need you to understand that.”
He draws me in without even trying. Without even looking at me. I’m on my knees in front of him before I have the conscious thought to move. “How are you to blame for the sins of your parents?”
“I’m not, but the way you look at me sometimes—the way you’re looking at me now, it’s a sick reminder that I’m a sinner too.”
“Isn’t everyone?”
“You don’t understand.” For the first time since this started, he holds my gaze with a stare that doesn’t flicker in and out.
“That war…it started because my dad wasn’t alive to run that route anymore.
And Cam’s parents and every soldier they lost, they fucking died because everyone they were fighting believed the Rebel Kings killed my dad. ”
“So?”
“So… they didn’t kill him, Mal. I did.”