He’s wearing the sweats I dug from the drawers in his mutilated bedroom. Nothing else, except maybe the underwear I made myself grab without looking.Why? You’ve seen his dick. You’ve been inside him. You’ve come inside him?—
Skylar plants his feet. I read him and take his hands, and we rise together.
I don’t know where he wants to go.
Neither does he. Just that he needs to beupto have this conversation.
He moves to the window and opens the blinds. Stormy skies greet him, wild seas. But the true tempest…it’s in his eyes.
“My dad worked a lot. He was a Rebel King…a chapter president up north, Stockport way.”
“Biker family?”
“Yeah, you were right. Even my mum had a hog.”
“So…you’rea Rebel King?”
“No.” Skylar shakes his head, his whole body rejecting the notion. “I was born into it, like Cam, but I never took a patch.”
I absorb that and try to compute a question that isn’t fucking obvious. “Fifteen is young to take an MC patch anyway. Is it different if you’re the prodigal son?”
Skylar nods. “Everything’s different. People assume who you are—whatyou are. But you can know someone your whole fucking life and still come to realise you never knew them at all.”
“Your dad?”
Physical pain tightens Skylar’s already fraught build. He pushes it away, watching the waves batter the shoreline. “My dad and Cam’s were good friends—close enough that Cam’s old man turned a blind eye to mine skimming cash off the gunrunning and dope muling that made the Kings rich back in the day. It gave my dad more freedom than most chapter leaders. More clout with his soldiers—biker soldiers, not real ones.”
“I don’t know about that. War is fucking war.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Isn’t it? I chose to be a para. No one put a gun to my head and made me.”
Skylar concedes my point with a dry half smile. But we’re getting off point, and his humour doesn’t last. “My dad’s chapter were the lead group running the smuggling lines up north. They made a lot of money, so Cam’s dad left them to it, and it gave my dad the opportunity to make deals with outside organisations.I don’t know how that went from heroin to teenagers, but that’s what happened, and the first I knew about it was when the founding chapter—Cam’s chapter—came for my dad in the night.”
“To your house?”
“We lived on the compound—in the residence above the workshops. In hindsight, it was a shithole, but it was all I knew. I thought everyone lived like that.”
I picture my dad’s grotty flat up the road. The threadbare carpets and mouldy walls. “Know how that feels. The shithole part, I mean.”
Empathy lights Skylar’s weary gaze, and I know I’m looking at the nurse who works sixty hours a week keeping people alive. Helping them cope with unimaginable pain and survive injuries that should’ve killed them. But that broken boy…he’s so close to the surface right now the years fall off him, and I need to know what happened so badly I take a chance and edge closer to where Skylar stands by the window.
God, I need to touch him.
I settle for taking a seat on the end of the bed, legs stretched out in front of me, like this is a casual conversation not the whole fucking world quietly breaking open between us. “How did they come for him?”
“Through the windows, with guns and masks. I woke up as he dragged me out of bed.”
The open windows.And Skylar’s voice catches onhe.
I lean forward, bending my knees to drop my elbows on them. “Who?”
Skylar swallows. “Cam. I was a good fighter and everyone knew it, but he was older, bigger, better. His dad sent him after me to keep me contained.”
A few hours ago, I liked Cam O’Brian. But rage simmers in me now, a fury so potent I wish I’d killed him when he’d had the audacity to fucking hug me. “Did he hurt you?”
“Only when I fought him. His dad’s soldiers made him gag me, but Cam took it out when they weren’t looking.”