Those thoughts weren’t mine. My brain didn’t think in those patterns. Delirious?
Maybe.
I’d never been so tired.
A mile out, the nausea came back. My brain slowed to the base functionality of survival. One foot in front of the other. Slow breaths to stay conscious.
A death grip on Alexei to keep upright, but I was losing that battle by the second.
We stumbled.
We fell. But I didn’t feel a thing. I felt like a dying tourist in my own life, and all I could think of was Decoy. His shy smile and warm arms. His soft eyes. The way he’d stared at me in disbelief when I told him I loved him.
You left him after he got hit by a car. What if he’s not okay?
I had no way of knowing unless we made it home, and the thought drove me to my feet again.
Alexei was still on the ground.
I hauled him up and made him face the horizon. “It’s there. I can see the compound.” The lit gates. The builder’s yard. The clubhouse. “Come on. Keep going.”
Muffled Russian words reached me, but that part of my brain was dead.
One foot in front of the other.
Breathe.
It was all I had.
It started to get light. Melodies played in my head, disjointed and loud. Decoy didn’t care much about music, but there was this one electronica song about road tripping that he played for Ivy all the time. A seven-inch single on the old O’Brian turntable. In the car through his phone. She liked the seraphic vocals. Maybe because she was an angel.
Or maybe Decoy was the angel.
If angels had beards and big dicks.
I fell over again. This time, I didn’t get up. I lay on my back, the rain in my face, concrete against my aching bones. I heard more Russian words, but they didn’t reach me over the vibration of the earth beneath me.
The rumble of pipes.
The rough voice of a soldier calling my name.
30
DECOY
They were dead. Both of them.
Alexei was face down in the dirt.
Folk was next to him, on his back, clutching Alexei’s wrist as if he’d died trying to save him.
That’s what my heart saw.
What itfeltas I skidded my bike to a stop and hurled my body from it, boots pounding the ground. Sprinting in the rain with my entire fucking being in the pit of my stomach.
Saint was behind me. Because it was me who’d left first.Mewho’d defied Cam’s orders and fled the compound the second we’d brought the kids back there to get ready for school, too restless to contain my sanity. So out of my mind with worry that I’d left my daughter for this. To find the love of my life dead at the side of the road.
I reached him, falling to my knees as Saint hurtled past me and Alexei disappeared from my conscience. Saint had him. I didn’t have to think about him—Icouldn’tthink about him.
