Locke was still trying to rouse him.
I took over, cupped his jaw, and pressed hard against his chest. “Mateo.Mateo.Wake up for me, man.”
I love you.
But Mateo remained unconscious, holding my heart hostage as brothers arrived with the SUV Saint had driven here.
Cam was still dealing with Viktor. He caught Nash’s eye and nodded, passing authority to him.
Nash acted fast. “Em and Locke, take him. Drive north until we tell you where to go. Everyone else clear the scene and follow me home. Folk and Saint, stay with Cam.”
We moved out. Locke was bigger than me. He lifted Mateo into the SUV and laid him on the back seat. “I’ll drive. Keep checking him, yeah?”
I crawled in after Mateo and slipped beneath him, pillowing his upper body with mine, while Locke climbed behind the wheel and reversed to the remote lane, spinning the car before he sped away from the scene.
One moment soon, I’d want to know how he’d come to be a single dad biker who drove like a rally driver and had enough medical knowledge that Saint had trusted him to work on Mateo alone.
But that moment wasn’t now. Mateo’s rattly breathing consumed me. The steady thump of his pulse. I didn’t care about anything else.
We left the scrapyard behind. Locke followed Nash’s instructions and headed north.
I held Mateo, trying not to catalogue the injuries Juana’s father had inflicted on him in the short space of time he’d been missing. The welts and bruising. The dried blood around his mouth.
The black footprints on his torso, because fuck me, he was shirtless as he’d been when they took him.
“Mateo.Mateo.” I expected silence, but this time I got a groan, shallow and wheezy in his chest. He moved his head, tipping it from one side to the other, mouth twisted in a grimace.
That’s when I noticed the slash mark on his throat, half hidden by his glorious scruff. It wasn’t deep, but the sight of it derailed my pulse.If we’d been a minute later.
“How are you doing back there?” Locke met my gaze in the rear-view mirror. “He waking up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Keep talking to him. He can probably hear you—”
Locke’s phone cut him off, buzzing with a message. With one eye on the road and keeping watch for passing feds, he glanced at the screen and punched a postcode into the SUV’s GPS screen. “Private clinic. Alexei’s gonna meet us there.”
Relief washed over me, but it was short-lived. Because Mateo wasn’t awake. While I’d been distracted by Locke, he’d stilled again and felt further from me than ever.
The rest of the journey passed in a haze. Locke drove all the way up to the back door of a swanky clinic and Alexei was waiting with a grim-faced doctor.
They took Mateo away.
Locke gripped my shoulders and guided me to a seat in an empty corridor. He forced a bottle of water on me and a bag of posh nuts from a vending machine. “I think he’s okay,” he said with a confidence I needed to hear. “Vitals were good and he didn’t look concussed when he crawled out of that death barn.”
“You saw that?”
“It was all we could see from where we were. Kinda pissed off I missed the Folkster taking Sambini out.”
I nodded slowly, taking it all in while I hunched over, threading my shaky fingers together. “I don’t get how he made that shot from the river. Is he a fucking sniper or some shit?”
Locke shrugged. “You’d have to ask him.”
“What about you? I never got round to asking you what you were before you became a Dog Crow.”
Locke’s easy expression flattened. He glanced up and down the corridor, perhaps hoping Alexei would come to his rescue, but nothing happened. For now, Mateo was gone and we were alone, so I needed him to talk before I kicked a hole in the wall.
“I was a firefighter,” he said eventually. “Fresh out of school until I was twenty-six.”
