You have to. You have Ivy. My gaze drifted to her again. She was painting her whole toe with black nail varnish while Liliana looked on with a diplomaticwhat-the-fuckface. Her shorter hair was a wavy mess, but she had clean clothes and a smile on her face, and it should’ve been enough to know she was coming home with me every night for as long as she ever wanted to. But as I watched her smear black across her foot with her elbow, something wicked crept over me.
Foreboding.
Fear.
Not for her, but forhim. For Folk. The only man I’d ever loved.
The only man—the only soul besides Ivy—who’d ever lovedme.
Calm down. Nothing’s changed in the last five minutes.But it had. As I sat in silence next to Embry, something tangible came loose inside me and I couldn’t jam it back in.
I glanced at the brother beside me, expecting to find him asleep like I had so many times over the last few months. But Embry was wide awake, watching me with a gaze that made me want to slide down the sofa and disappear. “Something on your mind?”
Embry arched a brow. “Something on yours?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“Just wondering what I’m missing. You look terrified, dude, and you don’t need to be. Not anymore.”
It dawned on me then that Embry wasn’t entirely caught up on club business. That he didn’t know Folk and Alexei had left us to do something that would take an unspecified time frame and possibly kill them.
“Daddy?” Ivy crawled into my lap, holding her varnish sticky fingers over her head. “Can me and Lili have a sleepover?”
I was so used to saying no that it almost bubbled out of my stupid mouth on autopilot. Then I remembered that I didn’t have to refuse all the normal little girl shit anymore. I just had to handle the logistics.
“Tomorrow,” I promised. “We’ll figure it out after school.”
In the meantime, it was time to go. I gathered Ivy’s chaos together and drove her home. Saint’s bike was gone, but there was a note on the kitchen counter telling me he’d be back before dark.
I put Ivy to bed and caught up with the 1,001 things I hadn’t got done while she’d been at school. Out of habit, I found myself checking my phone to see if Folk had been online since he’d disappeared four days ago, but he hadn’t, and neither had any of the random numbers Alexei used.
The pit in my stomach expanded. I tried to keep busy, keep my mind blank, but I’d grown too used to constant company. Fuck, even Saint’s edgy silence would’ve been welcome, but it was late by the time I spotted my quiet brother standing at the bottom of my garden, alone in the dark, staring up at the moon.
I left my boots at the door and stepped outside. A light drizzle was blowing in from the sea, the kind that got you really wet with the tiniest drops. Sometimes, when being around Folk left me so hot I was bursting out of my body, I craved this kind of rain. But tonight it felt cold against my stressed skin and I wrapped my arms around myself. “Hey.”
Nothing.
“Saint.”
He brought his gaze to mine like he was dragging it through quicksand. “Cam and Rubi are an hour away.”
“Okay.” They were already a couple of days late. Their wagon had let them down and they’d got caught in every traffic disaster humanly possible. Worse than that, they hadn’t beenhere, and I’d realised how much the whole club relied on Rubi for just about everything. It was good that they were coming home. Necessary. So why did Saint look like a landslide was about to hit this town and bury us all?
I stepped closer to him. “What’s wrong?”
Saint stared, throat working, hands balled into fists, gaze tight with the same emotion binding my chest. “Alexei and Folk,” he said finally. “They’ve been gone too long.”
* * *
It wasn’t just Embry who wasn’t clued into the matrix. Somehow I’d forgotten that Cam was out of the loop too.
“Tell me again,” he growled, leaning hard on Orla’s kitchen table, dark eyes as furious as I’d ever seen them. “They just fucked off in the night and you have no damn idea where? Or what the fuck for?”
Saint faced his lover’s anger with an expression so flat it terrified me. “He doesn’t tell me everything.”
Cam rounded on Nash. “What about you?”
Nash snorted. “Alexei doesn’t tellmeanything.”
