Nash was my brother and I loved him, but there was nothing on this earth that came close to Folk’s gentle touch and ocean scent.
Folk embraced me. He kissed my temple, saying nothing, but saying everything with the warmth and empathy I’d come to rely on.
“You need to wait for the doctor,” he murmured eventually. “I know you want to hightail it out of here, but you can’t, okay? You need this evidence to back you up.”
“I’m fine.”
“You still need to stay. Mateo is going to get Ivy from school and take her home with him and Liliana.”
It was the most sensible option. The school knew Mateo. He’d picked Ivy up before. But it still burned that I couldn’t be there for her and that I was putting on a brother who already had enough to worry about.
I nodded and closed my eyes, leaning against Folk, fighting the drop as adrenaline drained from me. Maybe I dozed off. No clue. All I knew was that he was still rock solid and warm next to me when the doctor showed up sometime later.
“No signs of concussion and no fractures on your X-rays. You’ve been very lucky, Mr Greene. I’ve seen the footage. If that telephone pole hadn’t been there, I don’t think we’d be having a conversation right now.”
I took him at his word. I didn’t need the details that were still binding Folk’s muscles so tight. Or the prescription the doctor waved my way. “Nah, you’re all right.”
Folk squeezed my hand. “Don’t be a hero.”
“I’m not. I need to leave.”
The doctor took his cue and disappeared.
I found my boots and stepped into them, crouching to tie them with bumps and bruises that were going to give me hell later.
Folk helped me upright again, and honestly, I saw more stress in his gaze than I felt in myself.
“Are you okay?”
His tawny brows ticked up. “Can you worry about yourself for more than a minute?”
He’s not okay. The Folk I’d come to know wasn’t combative. He answered questions with solid answers, not deflections. And if he couldn’t answer for whatever reason, he’d tell me. “Come on.” I kept hold of his hand. “Let’s go.”
We escaped the hospital and I stepped outside with no real idea of how I was getting home.
My bike was at the yard, and my car was still at Lauren’s.
Except, it wasn’t. It was idling on double yellow lines, Locke leaning against it, smoking a cigarette.
He didn’t seem to notice me clutching Folk’s hand. “You’ve got me all night. I’ll follow you wherever you want to go, brother.”
I didn’t compute what he meant until I was in the passenger seat of my car.
Then I remembered. Folk was leaving tonight to do something dangerous as fuck, and he didn’t know when he’d be coming back. Also, my drama had made him late, a fact underlined by the angry buzz of his phone—a vibration I now recognised as belonging to Alexei. “You don’t have to drive me home. I need to pick Ivy up from Mateo’s house anyway.”
Folk made eye contact with Locke in the rear-view mirror before he glanced my way. “I’m not going anywhere until you two are safe at home, and even then it’s going to just about kill me.”
His voice had lost some of the edge he’d brought into the hospital, but there was enough of it left that I reached for him without question.
I squeezed his muscular thigh, still, even now, kind of awed that it was a regular thing for me to touch a man who felt so damn good beneath my palm. “We’ll be here when you get back.”
Folk sighed. “I know that. I’m just... angry, I guess, that you had to jump in front of a car to feel like your life is worth living.”
“I jumped in front of the car because I saw the feds coming, and I knew they’d see me. Not because I wanted to die.”
We reached a set of traffic lights. They hit red and Folk eased the car to a stop. “You didn’t know you weren’t going to die when you did it. Are you telling me there wasn’t a part of you that didn’t care either way?”
Thinking about it made my head ache. But for him, I’d do anything, and he deserved an honest answer. “I didn’t want to die. I’m not saying I’ve never felt that way, or that there haven’t been days where I didn’t care if I got struck by fucking lightning, but today wasn’t one of those days. All I cared about was getting through it so I could get back to you and Ivy—to both of you. You’re as much my fucking world as she is.”
