30. Mal
I stop breathing for a beat. A jagged twist of truth sinks its claws into my heart, and the image of Skylar I’ve guarded all these months crumbles and reshapes as something that flays me to the fucking core.
He killed his father.
It should shock me, but I’m too war-weary and cynical for that. It fucks with my head more that he’s carried it this long, like a half-buried corpse, and every nuance and quirk I’ve seen in him shunts together to make a sickening sense. “How did you do it?”
Skylar doesn’t blink. “Stabbed him in the throat. I took the blade from Cam. I think he let me.”
“You think?”
“We’ve never talked about it. I don’t want to relive how I became a murderer in a split second and he respects that.”
“Who else knows?”
“No one. Cam took the fall. Even his dad died thinking it was him.”
I sit back on my heels, trying to piece it all together and build a picture I can contemplate without losing my shit.
It’s a process I used to be good at. However grim and whatever the context, information was a means to an end.
A tool to get the job done. But this…it leaves me as fractured and dizzy as Skylar’s starting to look.
Because you love him.
“What was your dad’s name?”
Skylar’s eyes roll a little and I realise he’s struggling to focus, to stay conscious, maybe. Hate that I have to let him. So he can get all this out before it fucking kills him.
“Mitchell,” he says after a beat.
“Buchanan?”
“Yeah.”
I process that. Wonder why it matters when the only thing I truly care about is that Skylar’s father is already in the ground.
Can’t kill him twice. “What happened to you after Cam’s parents died?”
“I moved on.”
“They didn’t want you?”
“I didn’t want them. Being around the club, the bikes, the noise, the fucking boots on the gravel outside their house—” Skylar brings his fists to his head and I read his intention to hurt himself. To drive his knuckles into his skull because pain is the only thing that makes sense.
I catch his wrists, stilling him. “How did you turn that into becoming an A&E nurse?”
Faint humour brings a hint of life back to Skylar’s face. “It was my job to stitch people up after trouble on the road. Putting it to good use kept me alive for a while.”
“Then what?”
“I met Sol. Oscar. Jack. And eventually we came back here and I found myself stitching up brothers for Cam too. I don’t do that anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t stand being around him. And I love him too much to hate him like that...”
Skylar trails off. Subtle discomfort flares in him again, and his eyes really do roll with exhaustion this time, like they did when he fell.
I’m not in a hurry to see that again. I’d rather fucking die. “Lie down with me for a while?”
He nods, slow and dazed. I take advantage of his softer state of mind and get him in my bed. On his side, tucked under my arm, his forehead resting against the ribs that bear the mark of his fists.
Sleep takes him hard, and it’s different to the altered state he’s been in since he went down, cycling in and out of awareness.
A world away from dozing in the sunshine by the lagoon.
This time he’s gone , unmoving and breathing so soft I have to keep checking it’s happening, and it takes me a while to relax.
I don’t know if I sleep. Just that I lose some time and open my eyes to him shifting closer to me, and I know how fucking special that is, even if he’s not doing it consciously.
He feels so good pressed up against me. My dick agrees, but I ignore it and try to keep my mind as still as Skylar is.
Thoughts of the past, of the future, they can wait.
Everything can. But I’m not as strong as I used to be, and matching Skylar’s disordered eating with the knowledge that his parents drugged him to conceal their twisted depravity, it fucks with me, and my pulse jumps around, demented and raw.
It’s the kind of fuckery Skylar’s noticed in me before, but even though his palm is splayed on my chest right now, he doesn’t stir. And I’m glad of it. I don’t want him to look at me and know what I’m thinking. What I’m imagining and how it makes me feel.
Movement in the hallway rescues me.
Sol.
Even without shoes, his footsteps are louder than Jack’s.
I turn my head as he appears at the open door and his eyes widen a touch to see Skylar sleeping in my arms.
He puts a couple of water bottles where I can reach them. My phone. He catches sight of the abandoned yoghurt bowl. “You hungry?”
Not at all. But I’ve learned this version of my body well enough by now to know I need to eat as much as Skylar does, or I’ll be no good to anyone.
I somehow manage to communicate this to Sol.
He disappears for a few minutes, taking that damn fucking yoghurt bowl with him, and comes back with a sandwich I can eat one-handed while he watches me with forlorn Bosanko eyes that make me think of the pewter-grey dog I’ve had to put out of my mind to be present for Skylar. “Where’s Jack?”
Beyond being holed up in his room with Sol, I have no idea how my brother has spent his day since he helped me.
Sol’s eyes warm a little at my quiet question. “He’s been checking on you, but I convinced him to take Fiadh to the beach while it’s dry.”
“Say what now?”
“He named the dog.” Sol says the old Irish name again, nailing the pronunciation— Fee-a —though he still sounds Cornish as fuck. “He won’t tell me what it means. Think he’s worried he’s messed it up.”
“It means of the forest . And you know what’s funny about that?”
“Go on.”
“I found her in the woods and I never told Jack that.”
“Saint did.”
“Saint?”
“Malone,” Sol clarifies. “The Kings found her pups. Took them to my parents’ place. Saint came by to tell us, and that’s what I came to tell you . We’re heading out there. Probably spend the night, give you some space.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I say absently, my mind on the Rebel King who seems to be everywhere right now, fixing shit I either can’t or haven’t thought of yet.
Sol lets me be for a moment, and his open gaze drifts to Skylar, guilt shimmering in his dark eyes.
To the friend he’s known all these years but not truly seen.
It’s not his fault. But he’ll never know that.
“I thought you might be hooking up—or at least on the way there. I never dreamed you were in love with each other.”
“That’s not what you heard this morning.”
Sol smiles, soft and melancholy, but there’s something sure behind it too. “Mally, it’s what I see , now I’m looking with my whole brain, and it makes so much sense I don’t know how I didn’t see it in my tea leaves before you came home.”
“You don’t drink fucking tea.”
“Maybe I should.” Sol straightens from his doorway lean. “Would save a lot of wondering, eh?”
“About what?”
“Life. Love. Keep your phone close, yeah? Jack’s all in on that dog, but he’s still going to want me to text you every ten minutes, and it would make my life a lot easier if you answer.”
I can do that. For Jack, for Sol, I’ll do anything. “You’re really not coming back tonight? What about the pub?”
Sol shrugs. “The Joker’s been here a hundred years. One night’s not going to finish her off.”
He leaves and the world is quiet again. Even the wind and rain have packed in, though I can see from the bruised and sprawling clouds they won’t be gone long.
I like storms. Don’t you?
Beside me, Skylar stirs a little, edging closer to me, taking a deeper breath while I hold my own. But he doesn’t wake up, not now or in the hours that pass as the night draws in. It’s late evening when I have to leave him to take a piss, and without him pressed against me, reality bites my dick.
I find myself wandering the empty flat, the silence fucking deafening, even as Vinnie dies a hundred times, and I picture a young Skylar driving a knife into his father’s throat with no fucking idea the ghost he was trying to kill would haunt him forever.
It’s fucked-up. But none of it frightens me. It’s worse than that. I haven’t cried since I was younger than when Skylar took a life, but I feel like I might now, at the kitchen counter, my head in my hands, and that’s where Oscar finds me some time later.
He has the wind in his hair and a paper bag tucked under his arm. “White fish, my friend. For Skylar.”
I rub my eyes, trying to fix my face. “Thanks.”
“You are okay, Mal?”
“Aye. Sure.”
Oscar comes closer, peering at me in the dark kitchen with a gaze that doesn’t feel intrusive. Then he opens his arms and hugs the life out of me, no solutions, just comfort—and I let it go.
Not all of it, but enough to press my face to his big, warm shoulder. To unclench my fists and let my body tremble with the release of emotion, grateful he says nothing at all. Just holds me like a brother while Jack is gone.
When I’m done losing my shit, he makes me another sandwich and guards Skylar while I take a lukewarm shower.
Then he’s gone and I’m alone again, contemplating Skylar’s ruined bed.
It’s fucked.
I take it apart and carry it downstairs, piece by piece, dumping it in the half-filled skip, too aware that I should’ve done this in the first place instead of running out on everyone I care about.
Yeah, but then your brother’s new pal would still be tied to a caravan.
And of course Vinnie’s right.
He always was.
I dump the last of Skylar’s bed and drift back inside, checking every lock and camera as I go.
The footage of the hooded twat chucking the bottle bomb is already gone, and I’m as glad of it as I am that I didn’t kill him. You wouldn’t be here if you had .
A truth I readily accept, even before I go back upstairs to find Skylar awake and contemplating his empty room.
“You stole my bed.”
“Aye, I did.”
He turns to me with eyes a million miles from the hazy dead weights he went to sleep with. “And you stole a dog…right? I didn’t dream that?”
“You didn’t.” I put zero effort into any kind of restraint and insert myself into his space. “I found her in the woods and brought her home so she could ditch me and live with Jack instead.”
“So Jack has a dog now?”
“Maybe. She had pups too—the Kings found them and dropped them off at the Bosanko place. Jack and Sol took Fiadh there for the night.”
Skylar absorbs that while I process that his hair is damp, there’s water on his bare torso, and he’s no longer wearing my shirt.
In the time I’ve been outside, he’s woken up alone in my bed and got himself a shower and I don’t like any of those things, except maybe that he’s feeling steady enough to do it.
“What’s wrong?”
“Hmm?”
Skylar rubs his thumb between my brows. “You’re frowning hard enough to give yourself a stroke.”
“Fuck off.”
He rolls those smoke and metal eyes and it feels so fucking real. As if the last few days haven’t happened. He’s not okay. Neither am I. But in this quiet moment, we’re okay now , and maybe Skylar feels it too.
We’re already closer than blood and bone. Like this living, breathing thing between us wrote its own rules before we ever got a say. But somehow— somehow —he narrows the minuscule distance between us and kisses me.
And it’s different.
The heat is still there, the jagged edge of want , and there’s nothing soft and sweet about how he claims my mouth. But the frantic search for relief and distraction, for anything to dull the ache inside…it’s gone.
This isn’t a plea or a punishment.
It’s an anchor we don’t need to cling to.
We’re just here.
Or something. I’ll make sense of it later. For now, I sink into the bright and steady current that thrums to life. I kiss him back, done running, and with him so alive in my arms, even after everything, I wonder if maybe he is too.
“Mal?” Skylar pulls away, but he doesn’t go far—just enough to breathe my name and let it hang between us like mist on the ocean. For his eyes to dip to my mouth before he finds my gaze again. “You still want this?”
My restraint is paper-thin, ebbing away with every moment he has his hands on me and that barely there tremor beneath his skin. In my head, I’m already moving, jumping from the plane with no fucking chute. But I make myself wait, and give him the truth.
“I never fucking stopped. And Sky?”
He’s staring at my mouth again. “Yeah?”
“There’s no one here.” I let that sink in for him. For me . “We don’t have to be quiet.”