Saint
Cam was hanging by a thread. Alexei saw it too. Trouble was, I didn’t know why. Club stress was nothing new. It was the good shit that seemed to unnerve him.
It’s you. If he just had Alexei to worry about, he could chill.
Right. I snorted, causing Nash to shoot me a strange look from behind the wheel of the van. Even before tonight had imploded, I’d known there was nothing chill about loving Alexei, even for a man as big-hearted as Cam.
“Can I ask you something?”
I flicked my gaze to Nash. His eyes were on the road again, his profile serious, but my gut told me he wasn’t about to strike up a conversation about the bound and gagged men behind us.He wants to know something weird.My skin crawled. I loved Nash—he was honest, loyal, and kind, with a better left hook than Floyd Patterson—but I had no fucking desire to talk to him about anything that didn’t involve dumping Cracker’s Swindon clique at Rocco St John’s feet.
I had no desire to be a dick to him either, though. Nash was hard as nails when he needed to be, but he was sweet too. Upsetting him was like kicking a dog, and I fucking liked dogs. “What do you want?”
Nash navigated a tight bend on the coastal road. “How did you know? That something had changed with Cam? I knew you had it bad for each other, but you seemed like you’d never face up to it.”
Cam. Of course. My council brothers had been as discreet as I could ever expect them to be, helped along by the distraction of a million other things to worry about, but I’d felt their curiosity like ants on my skin. Cam and Alexei made sense to them. Me and Cam? The two of usandAlexei? They didn’t get it.
Some days, neither did I. I’d loved Cam forever, but it came with spiked fences I couldn’t always navigate, and it fucked with my head that how I felt about Alexei—that confusing, exhilarating zip in my blood—was easier to take. “That’s a lot of questions,” I said into the silence Nash had allowed me to think. “I agreed to one.”
“Those words never left your mouth.”
“You trying to be clever, brother?”
“Cleverer than you? No. I’m throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.”
“Why?”
Nash rubbed a hand over the golden-blond scruff that had covered his face in recent weeks and checked the wing-mirrors for Mateo, tail-gunning behind us on his bike, a police scanner connected to his handlebars. “Dude, I’m not asking who fucks who. I’m just trying to navigate whatever in hell is going on here so I can have your backs. All of you, not just Cam.”
“Liar.”
“What?”
I checked on Mateo too, then sat back in my seat. “You’re looking for a reason that makes it okay for you to fuck his sister.”
The van swerved. Nash jerked his whole body, anger and outrage flooding him too fast to catch his primal reaction. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
I gave him a flat stare. “Not consciously, maybe. But this isn’t about me, is it? What the fuck do you care about my personal life?”
“We haven’t got personal lives. That’s the point.”
“It’s your point because you need to know how it affectsyou.”
“You think I’m that selfish? That I’d push you into this conversation because I want to—shit.” Nash got a hold of himself. “Sorry.”
I took pity on him. And on myself, because there was no fucking way I could answer his question without falling into the kind of soul-searching I wasn’t ready for when I’d just watched Alexei break down and half kill four people.I should’ve stayed with them. Fuck, I’d wanted to. But I had a job to do, a job that let Cam be there for Alexei instead of worrying at the gates for Nash and Mateo to come home. “Cam’s not going to stop you being with Orla if that’s what you both want. The only shit he’d never stand for is you banging her like a club whore.”
Nash flinched. “I—”
“I know.” I didn’t need to hear it. I fuckingknewwhat Orla meant to Nash. In a world where women threw themselves at him on the daily, the dude was damn near celibate. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d hooked up.
Actually, I could. It had been a handjob outside a gay bar on a run up north because he’d been too fucking depressed to have a wank by himself.
How do you know this shit?
I don’t. I see what’s there,I replied to the version of Cam that lived rent free in my head.
Needing a distraction, I stole Nash’s smokes and lit up, turning my attention back to the real time conversation. “It’s not you who needs to worry about Cam and how he feels about your love life.”
