A beat passes.
“I wound up in the woods,” Mal says eventually, filling the silence. “Roaming around like a ghost, rage chewing through my fucking brain. I stole a dog from a caravan—some cunt had left her there. But I didn’t stop walking, I couldn’t stop, until I came up on a fence and realised where I was.”
Dread flickers in my chest. “Where?”
“The Rebel Kings’ place. It was like my bones knew I needed to find someone who understood me, and the one who stares a lot was right fucking there.”
“Saint?”
“Aye, if that’s his name.”
I get it more than I want to. The tug in your gut that reels you in to the places you’re meant to be. “Did he help you?”
Mal takes a beat, clearly considering how much he wants to tell me. Then he takes a breath. “Folk and his mates did. I didn’t ask too much about what Saint was up to, but I absolutely fucking can if you want to know.”
“I don’t.”
The conversation peters out. It’s my turn to talk, and I don’t know if I can. This raw and splintered thing that lives inside me, it never learned how to hold something good, and the words I need, they don’t come. They sit in my gut with my favourite monster and I don’t know if they’ll ever get free.
Pain twists my stomach. I grind my teeth, the rest of me perfectly still, so fucking good at hiding this shit. But that was before Mal. He sees everything and his hand comes to my abdomen—like it always has.Because heknows.
“Skylar.”
“Yeah?”
“When did it start?”
29MAL
Skylar’s in pain. He’s good at hiding it, too fucking good, but he’s tired, and I see every flare and strain as if he’s lit up in neon lights.
I keep my hand on his abdomen, waiting for him to answer my question or chin me, accepting my fate.
Skylar takes a slow breath, exhaustion way past fatigue hollowing his features, his grey eyes so shadowed they’re like coal in the snow. “I used to sleep a lot when I was a kid. Never made it through a film or a TV show. I thought it was normal until I went on a school trip and I was awake for a week.”
Foreboding thrums in my pulse. I’ve been eerily calm since Skylar passed out, distant from the horror of it. But my soul knows that’s about to change. “You didn’t like being somewhere different?”
“No, my dad wasn’t feeding me roofies to stop me noticing he was running a trafficking ring for underage sex workers.”
His vision hazes. Like Jack’s did when he had that absence seizure. LikeSkylar’sdid the night I met him, when every fibre of him was screaming out for help.
I squeeze the hand I’m still holding. Skate my thumb over the flat ridges of his lean abdomen. Wait for him to come back, butready my heart for the war I might need to wage to help him get there.
He’s not gone that long. He retunes to our joined hands. Stares at them for a long, long moment, before he shifts his gaze to mine. “Ask me questions. I don’t know how to say it otherwise.”
I can do that. “How old were you?”
“Eleven when I went on the trip. Fifteen when I found out the truth.”
“How did that happen?”
Outside, a vehicle pulls into the pub car park. People get out and make the trek to the pub door to find it closed. They thump the old wood, hollering in the driving rain, but no one answers. I don’t know where Jack is. Or Sol. Just that the Joker isn’t opening its doors today and I don’t give a rat’s fuck what anyone has to say about it.
Shoes crunch gravel as whoever it is stomps away. Skylar shivers, screwing his eyes shut, and the need to hold him rises so fiercely it burns me alive for the protracted seconds it takes for his eyes to flash open again.
“Let me up?”
I can’t refuse him. I give him space, and Skylar sits up, swinging his legs off the bed.