Not Cam, though.
Or me.
OrFolk, and Nash saw. He vacated his seat and subtly signalled for me to take his place as he addressed the room. “That’s enough for now.” He pointed an unlit cigarette at Cam. “Brother, we have a call to make.”
“I’m not done.” Cam leaned back in his seat. “We need to talk about what the fuck every man in this room was thinking keeping so much crazy shit from me. Fuck’s sake.” He jabbed a thumb at Mateo. “This cunt took a bullet, and no one saw fit to tell me until yesterday.”
I felt my eyes widen, and I wasn’t the only one in the room.
Rubi.
Locke.
Embry.
Jesus Christ.
“You’re making it sound way worse than it was,” Mateo offered. “It was a Sambini potshot, not an assassination attempt.”
Embry spun his rickety office chair around. “What if they’d missed and shot you in the face instead?”
“Then I’d be twice as pretty, chaparrito.”
Mateo tried for a grin, but his scarred face made everything sinister, and Embry had the quickest temper in the room when he didn’t check himself.
Someone shooting his one true love? A grenade. It had to be, and I waited for him to explode.
But... it didn’t happen. Instead, the good father sighed and shook his head. “Fucking idiot.”
“You were sick, Em.” Nash lit his cigarette and pointed at Cam. “So were you. And that was the point of you not being here. That whatever happened, we’d handle it.”
Cam’s glare smouldered. “You call two of our brothers committing international terrorismwithoutyour knowledge fucking handling it?”
Nash exhaled a cloud of smoke, his shrug as easy as I’d ever seen it. “They got the job done. You might not have handled it that way, but that’s why you have brothers. Besides, what the fuck doyouthink would’ve happened if I’d run to you every time one of these fuckers came to me? They’d have stopped fucking coming to me, that’s what, because it woulda left you no better off than you were before.”
Cam shoved his chair back. For a second, I feared the worst. But Cam was a bigger man than that; we all were. He came to Nash and embraced him with one arm, pounding his gavel with the other.
It was over.
Finally.
The room emptied out until only Saint and Alexei remained.
I dropped into Nash’s chair and rubbed Folk’s back. Upstairs, his skin had been cold, but it felt hot now—too hot, blazing through his borrowed T-shirt. “Hey.” I pressed a little harder. “You doing okay? You’re burning up.”
Folk’s only answer was a groan as he slumped forward, elbows on his knees again, eyes screwed shut in pain.
Saint pushed away from the wall. “I’ll bring the car closer.”
He left the chapel. Alexei rolled his chair to Folk’s other side and touched the nape of Folk’s neck with the back of his hand. “Veles, are you dying?”
Folk shrugged him off. “Go away.”
“You have a fever.”
“You think?”
“You are a nice man,” Alexei retorted. “Sarcasm does not become you. Ithinkmaybe you have picked something up from the water?”
