The babies were perfect. And I would never get over the sight of Ranger with one on each arm, a sight Locke had seen before, but no one else had. It did not stop him scowling up a storm, but not many things did, and despite the maddening pain in my hip, I left the big old house some hours later with a smile on my face.
We rode for home, fetching Lida on the way from where I had left her with Saint at the compound. Somehow, we found Folk and Decoy again, already with Saint, who seemed bemused by having so much company he had not sought out. Though, perhaps he didn’t mind it.
At least, he did not leave.
Instead he gave Ranger and his borrowed clothes the same tilted frown as Lida and even came closer, as if he might legitimately sniff him. “Are you hurt?”
Ranger was already halfway into one of the Lion bars Rubi kept for him in the chapel kitchen. “Nah, just fucked up my hair do.”
Saint didn’t laugh. He turned his attention to me, but I evaded his penetrating stare and looked at Folk instead.
“How is the girl?”
We knew she was alive, but details had been sparse since.
“Conscious and talking.” Folk wrapped his hands around a tea mug. “She’d have drowned if Ranger hadn’t pulled her out when he did, though.”
Ranger snorted. “You’d have got her.”
“I was looking at Seth. I didn’t even see her fall.”
Ranger just grunted, finishing his chocolate and moving on to his tobacco pouch, rolling himself a smoke with deft fingers—a simple feat that shouldn’t have been attractive to me, and yet everything about him was attractive to me. Even the sheer pigheadedness that stopped him seeing the gravity of what he’d done today.
Especially that.
He went outside to smoke.
My heart followed him, but I stayed in the seat I’d fallen into, gritting my teeth against the sharp nerve pain throttling my side. I would have to move soon. Pace around. Bang my head against a wall. Drink vodka until I slept, but I was not sure there was enough liquor in the world for this pain.
I felt eyes on me.
Alas, Decoy was busy writing notes in the leather-bound notebook he seemed to carry everywhere, which left me at the mercy of Folk and Saint, an adventure in perception I didn’t need right now. “Locke said something about a whistle to Ranger earlier. What does this mean?”
Folk grinned. “Ranger was a lifeguard when he was a teenager. Until he got sacked for tipping the pool manager into the deep end and throwing bricks at his head.”
Nothing about that surprised me. “He swam so fast today, I did not know he could—I did not knowanyonecould.”
“Swims like he fights.”
That was Saint. I spared his rare words a glance. “You have seen this before?”
“Stray dog in the river.”
Folk raised a brow. “That was a year before we came here.”
Saint shrugged.
Folk shook his head, drinking his tea, still holding the mug as if his life depended on it, and I understood that more than I wanted to.
Pain spiked through my hip, flaring across my abdomen. They saw it, Folk and Saint, I knew they did. But I did not stay—I could not. I took Lida and left them, tracking down Ranger outside.
He leaned against the chapel wall as if he’d been smoking only to kill time while he’d waited for me. His hair was still damp. I tucked some behind his ears. “Can we leave?”
Ranger cocked his head. “You’re asking me?”
“Yes.”
“Why the fuck would you do that?”