Something’s up with the Fruit Pickers.
“I do not know what that means.”
“It means you’ve either got eyes on my inbox or you’re fucking psychic.”
“Observant, perhaps.” I lay back on my bike again. Cam was a dangerous man, but his bemused irritation didn’t concern me. “I saw him yesterday. And I see how Ranger and Locke watch him. That is not normal for them.”
“They’re close,” Cam hedged. “And they didn’t always tell the rest of us if something was up, but then Folk found Decoy, and Locke with my sister and Nash... it got better. They trusted us more.”
“Ranger trusts you.”
“Why isn’t he telling me something’s up with Folk then?”
“Maybe he is not sure.”
“You haven’t talked about it?”
“No.”
Cam breathed a slow sigh, deep in thought while somehow remaining present, a skill I had lost and not fought all that hard to get back. “I knew Folk wasn’t right before the summer hit, but he likes the sun, the beach, all that shit. It makes him happy and I thought whatever it was either went away, or I’d imagined it.”
“The cold months are hard for some people.”
“He’s lived through worse winters than this.”
We were not talking about the weather, and I knew that, probably better than Cam when it came to Folk Whitlock. I knew the wars he’d fought before he’d become a Dog Crow, and then a Rebel King. The horrors he’d seen and survived, because I had seen them too. “Well, whatever it is now, you will find a way to fix it. Is what you do, no? For your family?”
“I try. Doesn’t always fucking work—the fuck was that?”
Cam spun around in the same moment I surged upright, senses spiked on the wrench of sound that had pierced the air behind us.
I pulled Cam away from his bike and tugged him down, listening, unzipping my boot for the blade concealed there. “You have a gun?”
“Fuck no. You think I’m a fucking hood?”
“Ithinkyou are the high-profile leader of a motorcycle gang. Why would you not have a gun?”
“You don’t have one either.”
“I was not expecting to ride this bike today, and you forbade me from carrying firearms on your compound.”
Cam glared. “What do you want from me? A fucking medal?”
No. I wanted a gun. I wantedCamto have a gun so we stood a better chance of fighting off whatever lurked behind us. “You are a terrible criminal.”
“I’m not a criminal.”
I opened my mouth?—
“Anymore,” Cam clarified before the sound came again, eviscerating our window for conversation.
Staying low, I took point as we zig-zagged towards the sound, light on our feet, constantly in motion to avoid the crosshairs of any weapon, drills beaten into me in military school that had saved my life countless times since.
Cam slotted in behind me, his hand on my shoulder, his own knife clutched in his other fist, and though we had not fought together before, save the northern raid where he had colluded with my brother to be a preposterous human, I did not worry about him.
We would live, or we would die.
Thoughts I’d had many times before, but never about Cam.