The Post-it was closer to Cam than me.
He ignored it, slaughtering Bear with his glare. “There’s no decision to make. We’ve told younoa hundred times already.”
“And yet you keep coming out to meet us.”
That came from the other copper. Couldn’t remember his name. Just that he let Bear spout endless bollocks before he swept in at the end with the real message.
“We already told you why we’re cooperating,” I said flatly.
“Right.” The other detective came closer. “To protect your members fromharassment. But it seems to me, Mr McGovern, that it’s more likely that you’re fishing here as much as we are.”
“Fishing?” That was a new metaphor for the game that wouldn’t fucking end, and it took me a second to figure out that it was a recycled version of a conversation we’d already had.Before, when I’d ridden out to meet them with Locke’s kiss still imprinted on my lips. On my skin. His tongue and his cock still a life-beat inside me.
Fuck.
A violent shudder rattled my body, like I’d been twatted with an invisible pipe.
I covered it by looming over the Post-it and studying the date.Willow’s birthday. As if I needed another reminder of what we’d left behind. Of what was at stake if we didn’t catch a break soon.
Finish this. It’s a distraction.
I jabbed a finger at the scrawled note before I scooped it up and stuffed it in my pocket. “Fuck that date. We’ll meet you back here in three days. Then this shit isover.”
Cam didn’t contradict me. He rose at my side, shoving his chair back with the same sharped-edged disgust, and we walked out together, an unbreakable unit until we got to our bikes and he shot me a hard stare, his unspoken question as loud as it would’ve been if he’d shouted it in my face.What the fuck was that?
I jammed my helmet on and rode away, and it was a few miles before he caught up with me and unceremoniously buzzed me off the road.
Irritated, I reached for my cigarettes and found my vape instead—the one that had lemon-pop-flavoured liquid in it, which did nothing for my mood.
Sucked on it anyway, though. What else was I going to do? Bum a smoke off Cam while he glared with enough force to drill a hole in my skull?
I stuck to the vape, chasing a shitty nicotine buzz while I waited for him to make his point.
“We need more time,” he said eventually.
I channelled my inner Rubi and exhaled a cloud of citrus vapour directly into his face. “For what?”
“To find a better answer thannofor these dickheads. They don’t have what they want on us, but they have more than that photo of you paying that dirty fed.”
I knew that, and from the last few years alone, there were a million things thatsomethingcould’ve been. And that was just me. “We need leverage—like serious fucking leverage.”
“You think?” Dryness sucked the life out of Cam’s tone. “Any bright ideas where to find it? And fast, given that you just cut our deadline in half.”
“It’s a distraction.”
“I know?—”
“Then why the fuck are we still here?”
I moved to gun my hog.
Cam swiped my keys. “Don’t lose your head. Not now.”
I ignored him, gaze fixed on the horizon, already checked out of this conversation. If Cam was living in a reality where he believed my head wasn’t already well and truly gone, I had nothing to say to him.
Nothing true, anyway.
He sighed. “I keep asking myself if how you feel now is the same as how I felt when Saint got hurt. Or when Alexei and Folk were in the wind and we didn’t know if they’d survived what they’d done.”