“Fuck off.”
“I didn’t know it wasthis,” Mateo amended. “Thought it was a bug, and I didn’t want to bring it home to you. I can’t?—”
Something overcame him. Emotion or nausea, I couldn’t tell.
I let him sit with it for a minute, straightening up and scanning the car park for Cam. He was by the payment machines, smoking, glaring at the sky, which could’ve meant anything and nothing, when whatever my husband was trying to say meant everything.
Mateo fumbled at my hand.
I looked down. “What is it?”
“I was thinking of you,” he said, slowly, as if unpicking the words for himself first. “I know I always fuck everything up or say the wrong shit, but you’re always on my mind, cielito. I need you.”
“So why won’t you lean on me?”
“I do lean on you. For everything but this fucking thing.”
Deciphering that took more spoons than I had left. I leaned into the car again. Found his hands and squeezed them. Pressed my lips to his and kissed him as if he were made of glass until he groaned and pulled me closer, stopping just shy of dragging me on top of him.
Even fucked up and smelling like the hospital, Mateo did something to me no one else ever had. The only man I’d ever loved. Myhusband. I still woke up most days in awe of that fact, and I’d never get over how alive he made me feel. How his love had saved me long before I took a blade to the gut.
I lost myself in his mouth moving against mine. In his trembling hands gripping my face. His soft breaths as we kissed as if we had the rest of our lives to spend in this car park. As if he didn’t have three keyhole incision wounds in his belly and the hangover of a general anaesthetic rattling through him. As if a snatched car-park entanglement could lead to the one thing in our lives that truly felt undone.
“Hey,” I murmured against his lips. “When you feel better, maybe we could?—”
Footsteps approached.
I ripped away from Mateo and spun around, shielding him, living in the past when everything we’d survived meant the future was fucking bright.
Cam moved past me and opened the driver door. “We need to go.”
“Thought I was driving?”
“Change of plan.”
He got in the car, his profile unreadable, save the muscle ticking in his jaw and an emotion I recognised as grief shading his eyes.
“What happened?”
Cam started the car, staring at nothing, everything about him already somewhere else. “Saint and Alexei are coming in. They’re bringing Rocco home.”
Shock coursed through me.
Rocco St John.
I’d seen his body.
With Saint, I’d hidden it from Folk and Locke before I’d shot Liliana’s grandfather in the face, taking his life for the misery he’d inflicted on Mateo and Juana.
I hadn’t lost any sleep over that.
Rocco, though. I’d be lying if I said seeing him like that hadn’t haunted me. The bones, the rot, the fuckingsmell. And later bearing witness to Folk, Locke, and Ranger’s quiet grief for him. It was the strangest thing I sometimes forgot he’d ever existed.
I squeezed Mateo’s hands, then let him go to slide into the back, taking the middle seat where I could watch the road, the mirrors, my brother, and my husband from where I sat.
We were a long way from home, a reality Mateo would feel as fatigue and pain got the better of him.
And Cam?