Yup.
She was asleep, a sandwich minus three tiny bites beside her and her pen clutched in one hand.
“Does she know Carlos is dead?” I wondered aloud.
Cam nodded. “Juana told me to speak in front of her, so I did. No details. Just that he hurt you and now he’s gone. It seemed to make sense to her.”
I took the smoke Nash offered and finished it. Alexei said more shit about dividing Esteban’s business between the mad Russians and Sambini senior, and the Crows being cockroaches who wouldn’t die. But my brain checked out. Like, fell off a fucking cliff or some shit.
Liliana.
Embry.
Liliana.
Embry.
I didn’t feel pulled between them, just dazed by how much I loved them.
And tired. I stubbed the cigarette out and slid down the bed. Somehow, my head migrated to Embry’s lap, his hands into my hair, thumbs kneading my sore neck. It was a position I’d never found myself in with anybody, but it felt so fucking good.
His touch was a live wire, and no one seemed to notice that we were more wrapped up in each other than we’d ever been around other people.
My eyes dropped to half lids. I accepted more reassurance from Alexei that my single-handed, decade-long conflict with an international crime organisation was over. That Mario Sambini believed Viktor had killed Lorenzo too. I voted yes to offering Locke and Folk a Rebel Kings patch and absorbed the messed-up news that Saint and Embry had found Rocco St John’s body ten feet from where I’d been held at the scrapyard.
Tenminutesbefore Embry had killed for me.
It all mattered, but Embry’s skating fingertips ruined me. Horny and soothing, a fucked-up combination that made me want to fall asleep with him and fuck his brains out.
I was obsessing over both when something occurred to me. By then, the pseudo church session was breaking up. Nash, Saint, and Rubi had already gone. Cam was in the hallway, watching the door.
Alexei was close enough that I caught his arm.
That he let me.
I sat up, long ago fears that weren’t mine crashing down on me. “Tell me the truth. What did Sidorov want from you? For helping? Did he want you back?”
Alexei darted a glance over his shoulder. Then peeled my hand from his arm. “Not in the way that you think. He set me free a long time ago and he meant it.”
“You wouldn’t have left us? If he asked you to?”
“No, Mateo. I would’ve killed Esteban if he’d asked it of me, but he did not. Shame, really. I would have enjoyed killing the man who caused you so much pain.”
“Why?”
Alexei gave me the warmest smile I’d ever seen from him. “Put it this way: if I wanted brothers, you would be one of them.”
He left, taking Cam with him.
Unable to hold back, I followed them into the hallway and checked on Liliana.
She hadn’t moved an inch.
I shut the door to Cam’s room and leaned on it, closing my eyes.
When I opened them again, Embry was inches away, watching me, holding my heart in the palm of his hand.
I lost myself in him, in his wild black hair and blue eyes. In the calmness that radiated from him. “I need a fucking shower.”