I think hard. Too hard, maybe, for what I’m supposed to be doing, but I find the trail of a memory and follow it to the end. “Mali. He was a squad leader at the IDP camps. Pretty sure he ran the logistics that kept the aid flowing through the gates.”
That’s it. The end of the story. But when I find Folk again, he’s staring at the soldier as if he’s never seen him before.
It takes him a moment to come back, and the spasmodic nature of this fucked-up conversation starts to get to me. I don’t know why I’m here. Why I haven’t abandoned Sol’s car, murdered Couch and his pack of demon spawn, and got on a fucking plane, a boat, a rocket to the moon. I don’t know whatthe fuck I’m going to do with this dog.
“You have war in you.” Folk is out of his seat again, hiding in the shadow of a fading sun ray, watching the soldier and his kid retrace their steps. The soldier has glitter in his beard now and the sight of it does something to my sage new friend. Something that settles him enough to face me again. “But it won’t last, however hard you cling onto it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you didn’t kill anyone today because you don’t want to leave what you have here.”
A scoff builds in my throat. But it doesn’t make land. I think of Porth Luck and parts of me curl up and die, but maybe they’re the parts I need to lose. The parts that’ll follow me wherever I go if I don’t make peace with how good it feels to be around my brother again, and the fact I’m head over heels in love with someone as broken as I am.
I don’t know if Folk takes my silence as agreement. Either way, he leaves me again and comes back with a better plan than the serial killer aspirations I left the Joker with.
He brings a pal with a laptop and an accent so English he has to be fucking Russian. Doesn’t tell me his name, and I don’t much care. An hour later, the entire Couch family is hacked to death without a drop of claret spilt. Debt-ridden and bankrupt. Assets dissolved, accounts bled dry.
And there’s more.
The King who shadowed Folk to the Joker’s back door a few weeks back, the one who stank-eyed me the second night Folk and Cam came to call. The one who brought meherewhen he found me at the fence. He takes the fresh intel I’ve gathered about Couch senior’s whereabouts and roars away on his motorcycle, and distracted by Folk’s accountant or whatever playing his game of cyber chess, I have zero will to stop him. All that’s left is to wonder why it took them so long to act on something that’s clearly important to them.
Folk can’t answer that question, because I don’t fucking ask him. I don’t ask the numbers dude either, and he’s gone before I can change my mind.
I ask Cam instead as he walks me to the gates I bypassed this afternoon. I’ve only been here a few hours, but it feels like a week.
“Your people are worried about you.”
I cut him a dead stare. “Not what I asked.”
“I know. Just thought it mattered.”
It does matter. But so do Skylar and Sol, to me and to Cam. It makes no fucking sense that the Rebel Kings had this hacking shit in their arsenal the whole time and waited until now to use it.
Cam slows his pace to a halt.
With the dog at my side, glued to my heels like she’s always been there, I do too.
“You’re asking me why Skylar says no and I listen,” Cam says. “And I can’t answer that without breaking something I’ve kept whole more than a decade.”
“Breaking what?”
“Don’t.” Cam shakes his head. “All I can tell you is you’re the first person this conversation has ever got this far with and I’m not clever enough to know why.”
He shoots me a dry look, one that lets me know he’s far from stupid, even in a room with men like Folk, the nameless accountant, and the lieutenant in the wind with war in his eyes. That he’s emotionally intelligent in ways I’ll never be, so I need to listen to what he’s saying. To tolerate his hands on my shoulders when the urge to punch him in the face is so strong I nearly choke on it.
“We love Skylar.” He tells me like I don’t know—like it’s been sitting on his chest too long, a confession or a warning, I can’t tell. “He’s family to us, but we’re not the family he chose or the one he was meant to have, and that kind of hurt…” Cam exhales and I see real pain in his dark eyes. “It never heals when you keep it that close.”
I say nothing, and his words hang between us, scraping us both raw. But I find comfort in how he’s watching me, despite the weight of his gaze. We’re wolves guarding the same heart, and I’m okay with that, even if it is fucking obvious he’s trying to figure out if I’m going to fracture Skylar’s life or hold it together.
It’s a fair fucking question, and contemplating it for the hundredth time takes me out of myself again. I almost miss Cam’s quiet laugh as he drops his hands from my shoulders.
“You remind me of a friend of mine. In another life, I can see you tearing up the road on a hog.”
“Thanks, but leather ain’t my craic, so it is.”
Cam laughs again and moves past me to open the gate, the very last of the sunlight casting an amber glow across his face. I like him in this moment, and I think he likes me.
We say our goodbyes and I slip through the gates, taking the dog I found in the woods with me, unleashed and trotting at my side.