Not his.
Regardless, it was still my fault he’d had to jump into the scrap behind me. “All right?”
He lit a smoke and leaned against the cab. “Can’t complain.”
Mateo snorted, popping the cap on a Lucozade Sport with a hand that didn’t seem steady to my fight-hazed eyes. “You two are fucking mental. Someone could’ve filmed that shit.”
I dismissed the notion. “It was over too fast.”
“And it’s too dark.” Ranger blew smoke in Mateo’s general direction.
Mateo glared. “Don’t be a cunt.”
Decoy sighed some more. “You’re lucky no one called the police.”
“Fucking right.” Mateoagain. “Even if you didn’t get nicked, it’s still hassle we don’t need.”
I flexed my throbbing knuckles, then jabbed a finger at him. “Valid points, but I’m not taking a lecture on rowdy behaviour from your hooligan self.”
Mats almost grinned, but his face did something complicated instead. He took a drink from his lurid blue bottle and swallowed.
Hard.
Decoy frowned, already stepping forward.
I moved too, but we were both too slow to catch our brother as he lurched sideways and puked into the gutter.
10
DECOY
I was less shocked than Rubi to see Mateo unravel. He hadn’t been right since we’d left home. A bug or whatever, but without proper food and rest, as the days had turned into weeks, it had messed him up to the point where he hadn’t kept a meal down since yesterday.
He crouched by the wheel of a rig that wasn’t ours, a shaky hand pressed to his mouth, the other keeping him from tipping forward onto the tarmac. I took another step towards him, but Rubi got there first.
“Fucking-A, Mats. You look like warmed-up shite.”
Honestly, he looked worse than that, and it pissed me off that I couldn’t take the load from his plate. That none of us could without breaking driving regulations that existed for good reason.
Rubi helped him up and they disappeared for a while, leaving me with Ranger, a brother I had a lot of love for but right now could’ve throttled. “What the fuck was all that about?”
The fight. Not Mateo puking his guts up.
Ranger shrugged, nonchalant enough that my temper spiked again. “I didn’t start it.”
“You didn’t stop it either.”
“With what? A fucking tank?”
I gave up. Ranger possessed the kind of grit that could halt the tides. He hadn’t stopped Rubi because he hadn’t wanted to, and there was nothing I could do with that. How could there be when I didn’t altogether disagree with it?
Rubi, though. I’d forgotten how feral he could be without River, Nash, or even Cam to check him. On his best days, he was my organised brother-in-arms. Rational.Reasonable.But the mood he’d brought to the road this time around was unmanageable, and I was so unsurprised he’d popped off at someone in the car park it was almost funny. And it would’ve been if we’d been at home. Or a biker event where fighting was lore. But we fucking weren’t. We were inpublicand Rubi had caused the kind of scene that ended with handcuffs, DNA swabs, and prison sentences that lasted Ivy’s entire childhood.
The urge to smoke again swept over me. Only thinking about Ivy, and the damage chemotherapy had ravaged on Folk’s body kept my hands in my pockets, and like he’d heard my straying thoughts, my phone rang with a video call.
Folk. Or maybe Ivy, and it made a difference. Ivy was rarely satisfied with just me. She’d want to see the others, and Ranger and Rubi had blood on them, Mateo was sick as a dog, and my stress levels were high enough that a vein probably twitched in my forehead.
Daddy, why do you look like you swallowed a bad dream?