Joe examined the horse and confirmed she was female, and young. Afilly. I absorbed the new word into my lexicon as he loaded her into his vehicle, called Cam a smug wanker, and drove away.
When he had gone, Cam bent over laughing, a sight I hadn’t seen before. “The fuck accent wasthat?”
“Alexei told me to be more English. It was not convincing?”
“It was until you got all tricky that he thought you’d yanked the horse.”
“Then what?”
“I have no fucking idea, brother.”
Brother. Cam was not Jake. But he was beginning to feel like him.
I walked away, the rope slung over my shoulder, and trudged back to our bikes, my boots heavy with mud.
Cam followed, still laughing, and threw a leg over his Harley Davidson. “You should try Irish next time.”
“I forget that most of you are not English either.”
“It’s a pretty even split, if you’re talking about the table.”
The table. Thecouncil. The rituals that kept these men sane when their world could be so chaotic. But even including Ranger, Cam’s numbers did not add up. “Folk and Locke are English, and maybe the chaplain if you do not trace his Roma blood across Eastern Europe. Who else?”
“Saint. Mateo.”
“Mateo is Spanish.”
“He’s from Finsbury Park.”
“Jake was born in Copenhagen. He is still Russian, my friend.”
“All right,” Cam conceded. “But Saint is English.”
“He is Polish.”
“What?”
“His mother was Zofia Zielinski. Does that sound English to you?”
3
VIKTOR
I revved my bike without waiting for Cam’s reply and pointed the Ducati in the direction of a place I almost considered home. I was wet, cold, and missing Ranger.
And perhaps I was hungry.
I sped away from Cam, aware of him behind me a few minutes later. I slowed to let him pass—he liked to lead on the road, and I did not mind it. But he stayed at the rear all the way to the small town synonymous with the Rebel Kings, only buzzing me to pull over when we were five minutes from the compound.
“How do you know that about Saint?”
The question came like machine gunfire, growled in my face before I had lifted my visor.
I did not rear back. Cam was no threat when he was this emotional, even if I didn’t understand what had agitated him so much in the last thirty minutes. “Jake did a deep dive on every top-level King before his father agreed to Alexei’s request for protection. Is how I know Nash’s cousin is married to a police officer and that his childhood was as unpleasant as Saint’s. But?—”
“Butwhat?”
“Saint was more complicated. His records were not digitalised—they needed to be stolen, not hacked, and Jake doesn’t do his own dirty work.”