“Nice of him.”
“It was. His old man caught him and made him tell me why they had my dad hog-tied on the floor.”
“That’s how you found out?”
Skylar nods, blank and distant. “I didn’t believe them. I fought Cam harder and he had to put me down.”
I will kill him in his fucking sleep.“What happened next?”
Skylar refocuses on whatever he’s seeing through the window. Beyond the storm and the angry sea. “They made me watch the footage they’d collected for their own proof. Of my dad and his soldiers transporting fucking kids between one cartel and another, of my dad…” Skylar chokes. “…sampling the fucking merchandise for himself. That wasn’t CCTV—it was a video from his own bedroom.”
Nausea tilts my existence off its axis. A cold heat behind my ribs. And the worst thing about it is this isn’t even close to being over.
Another shiver hits Skylar.
I hook my bag with my foot and draw it closer, snagging a t-shirt from the messed-up contents, one Jack must’ve missed when he was searching for something to replace the clothes Skylar puked a bellyful of water on when he was unconscious on the hallway floor.
It’s the one I was wearing the night we met. When the thrum of attraction between us was something we only recognised as a one-time thing.
I stand and take it to Skylar, slipping it over his head, threading his arms through the holes. “You don’t have to be cold, Sky.”
Sky.
Our faces are inches apart.
For a fleeting moment, Skylar nuzzles my throat. Then he pulls back and that deathly vacant stare comes back stronger than ever. “The video on that cracked fucking phone screen, it wasn’t a self-tape. The person holding the camera flipped it round to turn it off. That’s when I realised it wasn’t my dad running the show…it was my mum.”
It’s my turn to choke, my pulse a sudden, shocked tirade, banging against my eardrums. “Your mum?”
“Yeah.” Skylar speaks without emotion. “She ran the whole thing. My dad was her little bitch, but I guess they were both monsters in the end.”
“They’re dead?”
Skylar shakes his head again, but it’s less violent this time, and I feel the energy seeping from him. “My dad is. My mum…the Kings thought her crime was worse. So they broke their own rules and set her up to be caught by the feds—the police. She’s serving a life stretch in Falfield.”
I’m still gripping the hem of the shirt I slipped over Skylar’s head. I release it and let my hands slip beneath the fabric, skimming the cool skin of Skylar’s ribs, and the inked back I’ve spent way too much time entranced by, fucking him when we should’ve been doingthis. “What happened to you after this all went down?”
“I was alone,” Skylar says flatly. “I should’ve gone into foster care, but the Kings didn’t like that. The morals that made them come for my parents had them taking me in. I lived in Devon for a while—in Cam’s house, with his sister and his kid brother.Went to school properly for the first time since I was really fucking young.”
“Then what?”
Skylar shrugs, a benign gesture that becomes the only thing between me and whatever punchline he’s about to floor me with. “My parents were the gift that kept shitting, even when they were both gone. The organisations they’d been working with, they weren’t happy that the Kings had shut down their main route through northern England, and Cam’s dad paid the price for that.”
“They got him?”
“Pipe bomb in the car he never drove. Blew him to bits. And then Mary…Cam’s mum, she couldn’t live without him and OD’d a few months later.”
I’ve seen and heard some shitty things in my life, but this…it’s a lot. I take a moment and breathe Skylar in, rubbing his cheek with my scruffy one, willing him back from the trauma-fuelled vortex that has swallowed him whole.
I don’t expect him to speak again. He’s done, he has to be. But his lips move as he drags them along my jaw and steps out of my embrace, moving back to the bed.
My bed.
“Can you do something for me?”
I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t do for him. “Whatever you need.”
“Don’t tell me none of this was my fault.”