“What’s different about tonight?”
Cam shrugged, still applying grounding pressure to my arm. “Me? The weather? It doesn’t matter. There’s only two people in this world who’d give me an answer without a damn blink, and one of them would be a resounding fuckingno.”
“River?”
“Maybe.” Cam rubbed my forearm, then let his palm slide away. “My point is, you don’t need to do this. You don’t even need to think about it. I just wanted you to know you had a choice.”
“I don’t need it.” The words fell out of me as my body settled down. “To do it, I mean. I need it to happen, for my kids, for my brother, but I’m not a killer, Cam. Even doing what I had to do to get back here is fuckin’ haunting me.”
“How bad?”
“What do you mean?”
“You sleeping?”
“Yeah.”
“Dreaming?”
“Not when I’m asleep.”
Cam nodded. “It happens that way sometimes.”
To him, maybe. But whatever common ground he thought we shared, I wasn’t ready to face it down. Not yet, if ever. Honestly, right now I just wanted to crawl into bed and shut my eyes for a hundred years.
Cam let me go, telling me to put all thoughts of Priest out of my head. That everyone loved me and they had my back, and I believed him. He’d never given me reason to doubt it. But the flayed feeling inside me wouldn’t quit, even as it dawned on me that he’d never once mentioned Orla. Never questioned my intentions with her or with Nash.
That a shed load of awkward you actually want?
Like a hole in the head, but maybe a slice of normality would’ve done me more good than a murder conversation. Who the fuck knew?
Brooding, I drove back to the compound. It was Friday night. I parked and heaved myself out, scanning the yard, the clubhouse, and the garage in search of the two faces that could make the worst fuckin’ things right.
I found Nash bent over my bike, having a deep discussion with River about something chrome I likely didn’t give a fuck about, and not just cos it was hard to care about anything when Nash’s profile hit me some type of way.
Those golden curls.
That scruffy jaw.
The ink that tasted as good as it looked.
Okay. Maybe my imagination wasn’t gone forever. Maybe I just needed to open my eyes all the way. Or at least lose this fuckin’ motion sickness.
God, I needed him. I neededher.But I was shit out of luck on that one. Orla wasn’t with Nash. Which meant she was with Decoy in the bar, or talking business in the chapel, the last places on earth I wanted to be right now.
I locked her car and started towards the garage. Halfway there, my stomach wrenched harder than it had all night, telling me I was either going to puke or I needed to sit the fuck down before it passed.
Either way, the bunkhouse was the nearest pitstop.
I ducked inside, the smell—bleach and leather—tripping my brain again. Orla had told me about the long hours I’d spent in here when I’d brought Viktor home with me, but I didn’t remember much, not even a random doctor stitching up my arm.
Didn’t remember Viktor leaving either, and despite the note in my back pocket, I half expected to see him wiped out on the bed, an image I couldn’t escape.
Instead I got Ranger, sitting on the stripped bunk, staring into space with a bag at his feet.Hisbag, the one he kept his three worldly possessions in: a flash drive with his favourite EDM mixes on, some scuffed Beats headphones, and a lump of amethyst quartz I’d helped him steal from his childhood home when his nan had gone into care and the council had taken her house back.
He’s leaving.
I knew the signs, and I’d been expecting it weeks ago.Before. Nomad life suited Ranger far better than riding with the Crows ever had.