“Were you his accountant too?”
“No.”
Cam reached for the Vicodin bottle on the bedside table. He uncapped it without reading the label and swallowed two pills. “Who do you work for now?”
“Myself.”
“As a...?”
“Financial advisor. I have never lied to you about that.”
“I never asked you, to be fair.”
“You did not. Would it bother you if I was still a sex worker?”
“Were you ever really that? You didn’t keep what you earned, right?”
I was a slave.I shook my head. “I’ve never thought too hard about the words I’d need to tell this story because I’ve never told it.”
“Why tell it to me?”
I didn’t know the answer to that and Cam seemed to sense the well had run dry.
He found my hands and tugged me close enough for another of those soft kisses that drove all sensible thoughts from my head. Then he pulled back and took my face in his hands. “Does hearing your mum put you back in that place?”
I gripped his wrists, needing the contact to tether me. “Sometimes. I feel small again when I hear her voice, and it reminds me of the path I took to get to this place. It... drowns me, and I’m sorry you saw me like that. I am so used to being alone that I forget I cannot talk when my head is too full.”
“I have a brother like that.”
“River?”
“No, in the club. It’s not just when he’s spooked, though. It’s all the time, like his thoughts come too fast for him to get them out. Then he panics and he can’t speak at all.”
Saint.His name whispered in my brain. “Are you patient with him?”
“Some days. Others I want to twat him with a hammer, but that’s got nothing to do with how he speaks. Or doesn’t speak. Fuck.” Cam shook his head. “I’m so fucking tired.”
And that was before the double dose of narcotics hit him. “You should sleep now.”
He didn’t argue.
I took his hands from my face and coaxed him back to where we’d started, me leaning against the headboard while he used my lap as a pillow. He watched the film for a while—a western with gruesome death scenes and beautiful horses. Helped along by the Vicodin, the blood and gunfire seemed to lull him to sleep, and I wondered if he was so conditioned to violence that he found comfort in the normality of it. I applied the theory to myself and decided not to think about it again.
Cam’s hair, his soft breaths, and the hand he’d clamped around my thigh made the present a nicer place to be.
15
Cam
“What do you want?”
River’s hostile growl was a dagger to my heart. I gouged my eyes with my finger and thumb, rocking forward on the edge of Alexei’s bed, still groggy from the monster painkillers he’d given me. “I already told you. I’m just letting you know Rubi’s gonna be late with your cheque from the yard.”
Aggressive, metallic sounds made my ears bleed before my little brother spoke again. “I don’t care if he’s a fucking year late. Your cheques go on the fire.”
I knew that. River hadn’t taken a penny from a family business since he’d walked away from me five years ago. But I sent the cheques anyway; his fierce rejection was better than stone-cold silence. “Whatever, man. I just wanted you to know he’s laid up, so he’ll be a few days late. I didn’t call to fight you.”
River muttered something. Then his surroundings quieted and he expelled a pissed-off sigh. “What’s up with Rubi?”
