We burned through the gates. Out of habit, my gaze drifted to Cam’s bedroom window. The lights were off, save the glow from the steampunk lamp Nash had built for him too many Christmases ago to count. An outline of a body shadowed the window. Him or Alexei, I couldn’t tell, but I sensed eyes on me as I parked beside Alexei’s bike.
Go to them.
Part of my soul did. I hung Mateo’s helmet on the handlebars and drifted inside, drawn to the doors within the clubhouse that led to the residence, even as my skin crawled, the scar on my neck burning and acidic. Festering.
Stop.I forced images of bloody kitchen knives from my brain. Replaced them with the kind that made my heart thump for a different reason. A better one. Because I was a better person now. A bettermanthan the angry child I’d once been.
My foot hit the bottom step. I closed my eyes, remembering how it had been the last time we’d been together in Cam’s clubhouse bedroom. Cam’s kiss. Alexei’s. Them fucking as Alexei had taken me apart with his mouth. So much had happened since then, but I could still feel them. Hear them. Smell them. Maybe I’d fuck Alexei this time. I wanted to, but it scared me that being with him came easier than imagining Cam fucking me.
That I didn’t knowhowto be with Cam hurt, and it was the wrong kind of pain.
I froze on the stairs, the breeze block in my throat expanding, choking me. I wanted them—both of them—so fucking much, but where did it end?
Fuck, where did it begin?
I spun around and fled outside. Mateo and Nash were still in the yard, smoking and shooting the shit about the wild night we’d just lived through.
Nash saw me coming. He spoke before Mateo could warn him to leave me the fuck alone. Came up on me, invading my space. “Did you tell him?”
He meant the influx of muscle to the Crows’ ranks, and Iknewit. But my fragmenting brain heard something else. Heard the words I’d carried my whole fucking life.You aren’t worth it.
I shoved Nash away, uncaring that he stumbled into Mateo as I turned my back on all of them and headed for my bike. “You do it.”
9
Cam
Pre-dawn mist swirled around Saint’s van, frosty grass crunching beneath my boots. Unlike him and Alexei, I lacked the ability to be so light on my feet that no fucker heard me coming.Hewould hear me, of that I was certain, so what I found when I reached the van and its open doors caught me off guard.
Saint was in bed, on his side, his head pillowed on his bent arm, sleeping.
Unmoving.
Peaceful.
But I knew it wouldn’t last. If I’d learned nothing else about him, it was that he was a different soul for the first ten seconds he was awake. A younger soul. A boy who was scared to death of the life he was waking up to, and I hated that. Ihatedit. So I let him sleep a little longer while I stared at him and contemplated what had brought me to his bedside.
He ran. You followed. It ain’t that complicated.
But it was. Before Alexei, I’d have let Saint go. I’d have watched him roar away and spent however long it took him to come back drowning in regret. But things were different now.Iwas different. If Saint was the same as he’d ever been, so be it. I was right here, and I wasn’t going anywhere until I knew he was okay.
Also, Alexei told me to come, so there was that.
“I would chase him to the moon if it was me that could fix it.”
“Fix what?”
Alexei stepped closer, his skin still flushed from the sex we’d abandoned when we’d heard vehicles in the yard. “He is scared of losing you. And he is scared of how we fuck. He does not know how to find his place in that.”
It made sense, but this had to be about more than sex. Saint kept so much inside, but he’d always been fragile. Vulnerable, like he was now, sleeping with his van doors open to the elements.
Open to me.
The strangest sensation throbbed in my chest. A complex mix of emotion. Wonder at how beautiful he was. Deep sadness that he hadn’t come home to us, when in actual fact he’dgonehome, to curl up in the back of a fucking van by himself.
It’s not a van. It’s his home. The third incarnation of that damn-fucking word and perhaps the most painful. Saint’s van was cool as fuck, but I’d light it on fire if it meant he’d sleep in my bed forever.
A shiver ran through me, but not from the icy cold outside. Saint’s van was toasty warm with the dry heat of the wood stove.