No change there.
The joke was someone else’s. And a shit one. If there was one thing Rubi was good at, it was fucking talking—
I staggered, colliding with a wall. Or was it a door?Fuck,I can’t breathe.Heaviness washed over me. I wanted to stop. I wanted to lie the fuck down and close my stinging eyes. But I had a half-dead kid over my shoulder and nine more at my back. And if I couldn’t get them out, Alexei didn’t get out either.
Somehow, I kept walking, following the faint light in the distance. The heat began to fade, the smoke less thick, and then Decoy, of all fucking people, appeared from nowhere and yanked me the last few steps to fresh air.
We stumbled into the night. Rubi took the girl from my shoulder and Decoy steered us away from the imploding warehouse in his best impression of a lollipop lady. We reached wet grass. I sank to my knees, watching Rubi lay the unconscious girl out and Decoy stoop over her, checking vitals.
Gaze fixed on her chest—she’s breathing—I stayed in a crouch, sucking clean air, dimly aware of Rubi shouting into his phone and of Mateo in the distance towering over a body on the ground, a gun in his hand that hadn’t come from the club.
Alexei.
I reared up.
He was right there, hacking like me, soot smeared on his face.
I kissed him, but not for long. We didn’t have the breath.
Or the time.
Alexei leaned on me, fingers digging into my flesh the way they had when I’d fucked him. “We got McGif. I let Mateo kill him.”
“You gave him a gun.”
“He is not as pig-headed as you.”
I laughed into a cough, searching the carnage for Cam, but he wasn’t here, and I fumbled for Decoy instead. “Go. You shouldn’t be here.”
Darkness crossed his face as he worked on the unconscious girl in front of him. “Cam called me from the road and gave me the choice. If no one dies tonight, I won’t regret a fucking thing.”
The girl beneath him began to come round. Her friends helped Decoy sit her up and he asked her something in a language I didn’t recognise, let alone have a clue he could speak.
Alexei tensed and stepped forward. He spoke too, and the girl waved her hand at the burning warehouse, already fading out again.
Decoy turned to the other girls. They all clamoured at once, too fast and too loud.Decoy quieted them and said words even I could decipher:one at a time.
A girlstepped forward, gesticulating at the building. She pointed at Rubi too and pulled on her long brown hair.
“Blyad.” Alexei twisted around, following her wild hands. “Do they know who it was?”
Decoy asked the question and listened hard for the answer. “A biker,” he translated. “Dressed like us. Hair like him.”Rubi. He was standing on a refuse bin, searching the horizon, a police scanner in one hand, a phone in the other, long hair tied in a knot at the nape of his neck. “They’re saying he’s still inside,” Decoy said. “That he tried... to help them? I think. Fuck, it’s been a minute since I last had Albanian screamed in my face.”
“There’s someone still inside?” A brother? No. It couldn’t be. No King had hair like Rubi. Fuck, noCrowshad hair that epic, except—
I scrambled to my feet. “Rocco.”
Alexei muttered another hoarse Russian curse word. “I thought he was already dead?”
“Missing.” I started towards the warehouse.
Alexei pulled me back. “No.”
I shook him off and jogged closer, cringing as the heat hit me, searing my skin, smoke tearing at my already battered lungs. “Where?”
My shout reached Decoy. He asked the question and pointed at the main entrance. “Bathroom! Behind the desk!”
I could see the closed door from where I stood, but Alexei pulled me away once more, his grip on me iron clad and painful. “He is not your brother, wingman. Be here and whole for Cam. He needs you.”