His gaze shuttered, like an iron curtain slamming down around him, and it freaked me the fuck out. Cam didn’t always tell me everything, and sometimes I didn’t want him to, but the blankness in his eyes was unnatural.
Fuck that. It was terrifying.
The turning for the compound was coming up. I sacked it off and threw the SUV off the A-road.
A couple of country lanes took us to a campsite on the coast. At the highest point in the main field, you could see the ocean. At the lowest, was a copse of trees that sheltered the converted van I called home when I wasn’t at work.
I owned the entire site, but I left the running of it to a local who was scared enough of me to do an amazing job. A handful of bikes, a van, and two fields. It was all I had, and it suited me.
The van was a Sprinter. The engine had seen better days, but I didn’t drive it much.
Inside was a different story. While everyone else was fucking their way through Whitness and beyond, I’d built a kitchen from scaffold boards and reclaimed metal. A bed from old pallets.
You’ve fucked people too.
Course I had, but not as much as everyone else.
Not as much as Cam. Truth be told, I could go months without sex. Years even. So it surprised me when, unbidden, I recalled the first time we’d shared a girl. A woman with long red hair and curves for days. She was beautiful, soulful, affectionate, but it wasn’t her I remembered from that night; it was him. God, it was him. Everything from the curl of his lip as he’d slid inside her, to the way he’d grabbed my arm as he’d come, counting on me to hold him up.
I’d never let him fall. And I’d never forget that night either. Only watching him fuck Alexei filled more space in the heady part of my fucked-up brain.
“What are we doing here?” Cam sat up. “You need something from your place?”
I parked the SUV next to the collection of beat-up bikes I never got round to working on. “I need to feed the crows.”
“That a euphemism?”
I slid out of the car without answering and moved to the Sprinter, opening the barn doors at the back. Under the raised bed, I kept supplies for the injured birds who always seemed to find me.
Loaded up, I shut the van doors and rounded the bonnet, following the natural path into the tiny forest I called home.
In the centre was a tree stump.
I whistled.
The juvenile crow I’d befriended in the summer appeared from nowhere, already squawking for the food in my fist.
I spread some on the stump, then opened my palm to him. He hopped onto my wrist, pecking. Then he did what he always did and took a moment to stare into my soul.
“Is this some kind of metaphor?”
I’d heard Cam coming. So had my friend, but neither of us moved. “For what?”
“For what we need to do.” Cam came closer. “You’re taming the crows. Is that symbolic?”
Not on purpose, and I wasn’t a hundred per cent on what the ever loving fuck a metaphor was, but I got the gist. “I hadn’t even thought about them. You think Rocco’s president now?”
From behind me, Cam grunted. “Fuck knows. It’d be good for us if he was, but Crows pass that shit down through blood.”
I knew that, but Frank Crow had left no sons and even less real friends. Whoever led the Crows next would be a wild card. “You like Rocco?”
“He’s not the biggest cunt in the room.”
“We should bring him in.”
“I know. Pick him up when we’ve figured out where the fuck we’re at right now.”
I filed the order away to act on when the time came. My feathered friend cleared my palm of nuts and dried mealworms, then hopped away.