None of this was fucking fair. But Nash was wrong. I had to vote, or none of this meant anything. “What if he already left? While we’re all in here shouting and crying, he could’ve taken his girls and been long gone by now.”
“We’d have heard them,” Cam said.
“Not if they slipped through the fence and took whatever vehicle Juana and Liliana used to get here.”
“They ran from the coach station,” Rubi said. “Unless Liliana lied to me.”
“You think she would?”
Rubi picked up his joint again, snuffed it, then tossed it over his shoulder. “She’s a magical kid, so I want to say no, but she’s got that thing, you know? Like Mats. That edge. If anything, I think she’d kill me in my sleep to save her parents.”
Parents. And there it was. The reminder I didn’t need that however I felt about Mateo, the man he was to all of us was forever changed.
“Maybe you should put Locke and Folk on the door,” Cam said to Nash.
Rubi scoffed. “That won’t stop him if he wants to go. Em’s right. If that’s how it is, they’re already long gone and none of this matters.”
“Okay.” Cam shrugged his big shoulders and refocused on me. “What say you, father?”
It was a phrase that usually made me smile, but I couldn’t unlock my jaw. Unstrap my muscles from the rigid lines that made my bones ache.
I didn’t know what to say.
What Ifelt. The others had spoken from the heart, but the organ in my chest was a decapitated ghost, flailing around, life blood leaking from it.
Calm the fuck down. He hid his daughter from the entire world. None of this happened because he wanted to hurtyou.
Sound logic. But... shit. I’d told him everything, man.Everything. I’d ripped those old wounds open because I thought I knew him better than anyone ever could. Because he loved me and he deserved to know who that was.
But I didn’t know him at all.
And then I’d let him fuck me.
There was movement to my right. Rubi dropped into the seat Decoy had vacated. His huge frame was simmering with all the things he wanted to say, but he dropped a hand on my forearm instead and twisted it to face the ceiling, exposing the underside of my fairground tattoo.
He traced the number with his inked finger. “Forty. Sixty-six. Twenty-nine.” He moved higher, to the underside of my bicep, and recited the numbers he found there too.
Irritated, I wrenched my arm out of his grasp. “If that’s your idea of an intervention, it’s shite.”
“Nah, bro. Look.” He pulled his T-shirt up, revealing the black and blue expanse of his abs, not an inch of skin un-inked. It took me a second to follow where he was pointing to the Viking design on his sternum.
I didn’t spend a lot of time studying Rubi’s torso. However many hours he spent with his shirt off, it would’ve taken me a hundred years to map every etching on his skin. I’d never noticed the numbers hidden among the runes and bearded warriors.Forty. Sixty-six. Twenty-nine.
Fuck. They were the same.
Rubi let his shirt fall. “When I was upstairs with Liliana, she saw the sketch of the old V-Rod engines on the wall. She found these numbers hidden in there. Then she told me she knew I had them tattooed on my body. That you did too, and him.” He pointed across the table to Saint. “Obviously, that blew my tiny mind, so I asked her how she knew that and what it meant.”
A silence gripped the table. Rubi spoke to me, but my brothers hung on every word, their collective breath a crackling current as I stared Rubi down.
“Go on then.” I waved a hand. “Tell me what she said.”
“It’s a bank account, Em. For her and her mum. They were too scared to write it on paper, so he wrote it on everything else—onus—so if they ever came running and he was already dead, we could help them find every penny he’s ever earned.”
We. Us. His brothers. Fuck, why did that hurt so much when all it did was make me love him more?
I was so fucking angry I couldn’t breathe.
So in love with him I didn’t want to until we made this right.
