“We’re going to get married in the summer.”
Ranger’s scowl softened a touch. “Good for you.”
“I’m hoping you’ll be my best man.”
His glower returned. “Fuck that. Make Poet do it.”
“Why?”
Ranger gave his cigarette a rough time, sucking it dry before he followed the Rebel King rules of stubbing it out and disposing of it responsibly. “I’m not your best friend.”
“No? Who is then?”
“I don’t fucking know. Locke?”
“Locke has Logan, and me and Po don’t have that kind of relationship. You know this.”
“Decoy then.”
“He’ll have other things to do.” Dryness laced my tone.
Ranger didn’t laugh. His fingers twitched for another cigarette and he frowned so hard he had to be in danger of a migraine. “What about Alexei?”
“No.” I loved Alexei and we had a bond I didn’t share with anyone else, but we’d barely shared a fraction of the life I’d lived with Ranger. “Ash, I want it to be you.”
Ash. Rocco had called him that first, before his habit of wandering off and not coming back for days at a time had led to my dad, of all people, coining him Ranger.
He sighed, his gaze flicking to the teenagers who’d climbed a little higher up the rocks before he let me have it. “Fine, but don’t ask me to do anything fancy.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. You want to walk some more?”
“Nah. Vik’s meeting me here and making me go and see the demon spawn.”
The babies. Plural. A fact that had somehow passed me by, much to my sister’s crowing delight.
“Are you all blind? Or did you think she was carrying a rhino in there?”
“Did you know?”
I blinked back to the present.
Ranger stared at me.
“Know what?”
“That it was twins. It makes sense now, I remember Lettie walking like that, but…” Ranger shook his head. “I don’t like thinking about her, so maybe I didn’t want to see it, you know?”
Lettie.
Rocco’s wife.
I’d barely met her, and I hadn’t been around when she’d carried Rocco’s boys. When she’d died giving birth to them. But Ranger had, so had Locke, and I wondered if that had been on Locke’s mind when he and his lovers had chosen to keep so much to themselves.
“I didn’t know,” I admitted. “Finch said we must’ve spent nine months with our heads where the sun doesn’t shine.”
“She always thinks that.”
“Yeah, well this time she’s right.”