“Hey, if you want his life story, you’ll have to ask him.”
“Do you think I won’t?”
I knew he would. I let my thoughts drift to Alexei and wondered what he was doing. He’d left to go home and deal with his semi-honest day job, and I missed him already. Heck, I missedSaint, and the moody fucker was downstairs. If I looked out of the window, I’d see him lounging against the SUV, smoking, and counting birds in the sky.
Embry said something.
I missed it and blinked. “What?”
He laughed. “You need a holiday.”
“A holiday from this life is death. What did you say before that?”
“That you have my proxy vote for action on the Crows and Sambinis if you decide to bring it to the table.”
“I’m nowhere near that yet. I need to talk to Nash. And Saint. And find a new treasurer to make sure we can afford to go toe to toe with a continent-wide construction racket.”
“Alexei doesn’t want the job?”
“I haven’t asked, but I’m pretty sure he’d slit my throat before he sat at my table and followed my rules.”
“That’s a good thing, though, right? I think?”
“Only because he loves me.”
Embry’s smile softened and I watched the energy drain from him as the fatigue of the hellish few days he’d lived through caught up with him.
It seemed a nicer way to end it than hashing out gang wars.
3
Saint
No good ever came of Cam spending too much alone time with Embry. Beneath his kind smile, the good chaplain was a batshit lunatic, and he had a way of planting seeds in Cam’s brain. Of making him think about stuff he might’ve otherwise forgotten.
I watched him emerge from the hospital. With his arm in a sling and dressed in civilian clothes—no leather, no Rebel Kings’ cut—he didn’t look that menacing, but people gave him a wide berth all the same.
Cam didn’t notice. He was too busy patting his pockets for cigarettes he didn’t have. Up until this point, he seemed to have forgotten he’d ever smoked, and I hadn’t felt like reminding him.
Still didn’t.
He gave up on his search and looked up, catching me with a smoke jammed in my mouth. His gaze was sharp as he crossed the car park and plucked the cigarette from my mouth.
I raised an eyebrow.How is he?
Cam shrugged his good shoulder. “Stronger than me. He wants to eviscerate the Crows and end Sambini.”
“Which Sambini?”
“He wasn’t specific, but we don’t have that kind of reach regardless. I want them off our turf, though. No more blow runs or fucked-up construction bullshit.”
“Interesting.” I lit another cigarette, leaving Cam to enjoy the first as I digested his and Embry’s crazy talk.
I liked crazy, but this was an ambitious ideal. And a complicated one. None of us knew the exact terms Alexei had brokered with his kingpin ex-boss. There were lines in the sand, but we couldn’t see them.
He needs to talk to Alexei.But I couldn’t get the words out and I felt like punching the sleek SUV we were stuck with while his injured arm healed.
I opened my mouth. Took a breath. “Alexei.”