I reached over Ivy and caught his hand. “Lay down? Please?”
Folk blinked, back in the room. He slid down the bed, lacing our fingers together. “You should go and see your solicitor tomorrow.”
“I have an appointment in the afternoon.”
Folk turned his head, the thin strip of light filtering through the curtains casting shadow on his face. “You want me to come with you?”
More than anything. But admitting it felt like the worst fucking thing.
Folk squeezed my fingers. “I can, if that’s what you want. We can figure it out in the morning.”
He sat up again and reached for his phone, firing out another text. To the curiosity I failed to hide, he explained, “Alexei. We were going to leave at lunchtime. That was me telling him I’m going to be late.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“That’s not why I do anything.”
Okay then. I watched him lie down again. Lost myself in his profile, wishing his rugged jaw and smiley eyes were enough to pull me out of the despair settling into my bones. Him being here had changed everything. I hadn’t parented Ivy into the peaceful sleep she was snoring her way through. Folk had.AndFinch.I hadn’t seen her, but Ivy spent enough time with Orla and Juana that she had high standards when it came to prettiness. It made me fairly sure that Folk’s sister was as knockdown beautiful as he was.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Finch.”
Folk snorted. “Story of my life.”
“What is?”
He rolled to face me. “She’s two years younger than me, so we were at school together most of the time, and every lad I looked at wanted to bang her instead.”
“I don’t want to bang your sister.”
He laughed. “I know. I’m just saying, asking a hot dude what he’s thinking and having him say her name isn’t a new thing for me.”
“Is she married?”
“Finch? No. She went out with Ranger for a while when she worked at the hospital in Truro—she’s a doctor—but he’s not the settling down type either.”
I tried to picture Ranger, the third stray Crow who’d joined the Kings last year. Failed. It had been a while since he’d been around, and my brain felt like a swamp. “Are you worried about him?”
Folk took a slow breath before he answered. “I shouldn’t be. Dude likes chaos. Any mess he gets himself into is gonna be his idea of a good day out.”
“He likes to fight?”
“It’s more that he likes adventure. Pushing his luck, never taking anything seriously. Rocco always said he’d die laughing.”
“Like Rubi?”
“Maybe. But Ranger could never spend his whole life in one place. Rocco gave him that name for a reason.”
Road names. Bizarrely, I was the only high-level King who had one, unless you counted the nicknames Alexei doled out on the regular, but I didn’t know what half of those meant—I didn’t know whatFolk’smeant.
I opened my mouth to ask him, but in the time it had taken me to string another sentence together, he’d closed his eyes, breaths deep and low. Was he asleep? Sometimes with Folk it was hard to tell. He liked sunbathing with his feet in the sand and tilting his face to the moon while he scrunched dirt between his fingers. He liked to shut the world out from time to time, and talking about Rocco always hit him some type of way.
Whether he’d knocked out or not, eventually, I passed out too, emotional exhaustion dragging me into the kind of sleep that was more torture than respite.
I woke up at some ungodly hour with Ivy’s foot in my face. It made me laugh, and I reached for her, sitting up on autopilot to take her back to her own bed. I forgot about her hair until I was tucking her in and my fingers grazed the savaged locks.
Sometimes when something hit you a second time, it was easier, blunted by the shock you’d already absorbed.
