I knew it. Rubi knew it, Decoy and River, and together we were dying a slow, collective death as we waited for news.
Agitated, I got up with Lida in tow and walked out, leaving the ruined guitar and Rubi for Decoy to watch over. Like me, he wasn’t sleeping. How could he when Folk hadn’t been home since yesterday and he had no clue where he was? If he was ever coming back?
I promise, Orls.
Nash had uttered those words with his whole heart, but as the days passed, theweeks, it was becoming harder and harder to believe him.
Outside, it was still dark, the yard lit only by security lights and the glow seeping from the half-open garage doors.
River. Worried about Rubi, aboutme, and everyone else, he wasn’t sleeping either, taking his stress out on any bike unfortunate enough to cross his path. It was a minor miracle that every hog he’d set his hands to over the past month wasn’t still in a thousand pieces on the garage floor, but there was a method to River’s madness, even without Nash to temper him. Locke’s rebuilt Dyna was testament to that, a bike destined to remain riderless until this nightmare was over.
Maybe forever.
A cold breeze whistled through the yard, as if God was chastising me for faithless thoughts. Goosebumps prickled my bare arms. I rubbed them away and let my boots carry me to the perimeter fence, trudging the same route Cam, and my dad before him, did about eighty times a day, checking up—checkingin—on every soul on the compound. While Cam had been gone all those months, working on his mental health, I’d walked this loop with Nash, and it had taken him ten times longer. My boy was a kind-hearted chatterbox.
One of my boys.
Fear flooded my heart again, clawing at my insides like a pernicious disease. I came to the section of fence that had been reinforced since a hitman had infiltrated the compound, stabbed Embry, and shot Cam. Nash had been gassed that night, poisoned unconscious. He’d still got up and re-floored the club’s café the next day, an easy smile for everyone who crossed his path, saving his trauma to inflict on himself in his dreams. Back then, I’d thought nothing could ever be worse than the horrors we’d already survived.
And now here we were.
“Orla?” I turned to face the soft voice behind me. Juana stepped out of the shadows and handed me a blanket. “It’s cold out here, girl.”
“I know. I like it.”
She nodded, understanding. “I liked to walk in the dark before I came here. Making myself freezing and miserable was the only thing I could do without permission andaloneuntil Raul started following me around.”
“Then he warmed you up, eh?”
Juana smirked a little, though it was tinged with sadness. “We never got the chance to be as hot together as you and Nash, you andLocke. Can’t lie, I heard you fucking when I stayed over a while ago, and I was so jealous of how wildthey made you sound. I’ve never had that with anyone, not even myself.”
It wasn’t in me to be embarrassed. Nor did I have the heart to tell her that, mindful of her in the other room, we hadn’t really done anything that night?—
Nash pinned my arms behind my back, restraining me with one strong hand while he used the other to part my legs for Locke and his wicked mouth. “Make her come, brother. I wanna see how you do it.”
Heh. I blinked back to the present. To Juana. “You never talk about Raul.”
“What is there to say?”
“Whatever you want. Hiding from ghosts doesn’t keep them quiet.”
Juana stooped to scratch Lida’s ears. “Raul’s not a ghost. I see enough of him in the baby.”
Of course she did. Sometimes it slipped my mind that Mateo wasn’t Hope’s father. That all of my brothers weren’t her biological uncles. In a family like ours, blood didn’t matter.
Juana trudged the loop with me, then went back inside.
Lida and I walked on, the dog as restless as I was, stopping every time we passed the gates to paw at the dirt and growl.
“Come on, you.” I nudged her away. “I know you’d rather spend the night with a tall blond hunk of man meat, but we’re all suffering, okay?”
The dog huffed but followed my command to walk on.
We came to the garage. Thrash-punk filtered out, angry and loud. A few days ago, it had suited my mood. Now it washed over me, like every conversation anyone tried to engage me in, and I wondered if this was it. No Nash. No Locke. Just me existing in the blank space they left behind.
They’re coming back.
I held on to that thought and took a seat at a picnic bench that overlooked the entire compound. It wasn’t much of a view, but in the lightening sky, I saw rain clouds over the river in the distance.Darkrain clouds, staining the charcoal sky with inky navy blue.