“Saint still laid up?”
Cam hummed. “He’s better, though. If I can keep him down another day or so, he’ll be all right soon enough.”
“That’s good.”
“What about you? Am I on speaker?”
“Nope.”
“You doing okay? The two of you? Alexei reckoned you’d either be fucking by now or have killed each other.”
“We’re both still alive,” I deadpanned. I wasn’t a massive fan of hashing out my personal shit with an audience, but I let Cam do it for two reasons. One: he gave a fuck. Two: he was doing it to take a break from talking about his own. “We’re half an hour out from Stockport, though, so you might want to call back later.”
A discontented growl rumbled down the line. I pictured Cam at his compound bedroom window or pacing the chapel, rubbing his jaw and chain-smoking, tense and haunted, weighed down by more responsibility than the rest of us truly understood. His frustration resonated, though. I’d learned over the last six months that being left behind when my brothers went to war was the hardest fucking thing. “It’ll be okay, brother.”
“I know, father. Just sick of you having to tell me.”
He hung up. I set Mateo’s phone back on the dash, sensing his gaze on me. “You were right,” I admitted. “Cam reckons they might hit us at Stockport.”
“Fuck’s sake. We were gonna kip there.”
“Is there a plan B?”
“Yeah. We don’t.”
Mateo had a unique way of tipping from charming to surly in the blink of an eye, the light in his gaze dimming to a darker fire. I didn’t mind. He was a sight to see whatever his face was doing, and I let him stew while I snapped to, stepping into my boots and checking the tools Mateo had stashed all over the cab.
In addition to his hammer collection, I found crowbars, spanners, and seven screwdrivers. “You’re ready for this, eh?”
“Are you?”
I straightened, a hammer in one hand, a crowbar in the other. Mateo was pulling off the motorway and into a service station. Fuck. I’d forgotten we were stopping. I set the weapons down and faced him. “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t ready to fight.”
Mateo said nothing, just turned the wheel, manoeuvring the HGV into a truck stop that was four times the size of the last one. He reverse parked like he’d been a lorry driver his whole life, rolling to a stop before the others who’d reached their spots before us, anddamn,if that competence didn’t have the same effect on me as the easy skill he’d used on my dick.
The engine cut off. Our eyes locked.
Mateo’s brows rose in a dark wave. “What?”
If he didn’t know, I wasn’t going to tell him. “Go take a piss. If we’re going to hit trouble in Stockport, we need to be ready.”
Nash appeared as I finished my sentence.
Mateo cut him a scowl and slid out of the van. “I need coffee too.”
He stomped away, glaring harder as Rubi joined him for the trek across the lorry park.
Nash winced. “I told him to sleep yesterday, but he never does if you’re not home, even before he kinda moved into your room.”
“He doesn’t live in my room.”
“Not my business either way, mate.”
Nash wasn’t a brother who pried unless he had to. He left it at that, moving on to checking weapons and relaying rally plans if we got separated during whatever was coming.
It was still pretty dark out. “We’re coming off the main roads to make a delivery,” he said. “But they can’t know that.”
“They might.” Alexei appeared from nowhere, making Nash jump, but not me. I’d been expecting him since Cam had shared the Stockport intelligence. Alexei was a lone wolf. Unless he was Google Earthing this shit, it was sound logic that he was out there somewhere, the invisible guardian angel he’d been since he’d stolen Cam’s heart.
