“I’m not on my own. My mum’s over there.”
She pointed vaguely behind her, and sure enough, Decoy’s ex-wife stood by the school gate, smoking a cigarette, her back to her kid.
Take her. It was tempting. With Alexei’s help, Decoy and Ivy could have new lives on the other side of the world. But... no. This was real life.Their life. And I was nothing more than a spectator.
I crouched to Ivy’s height and gestured for her to turn around so I could get a look at her hair. The band was halfway down her pony but deeply knotted in, like she’d slept in it. I unpicked it and pried it free. “You want a fresh one?”
“Can I have two?”
“Only got one band, bug.”
“Can I have it like Rubi’s then?”
“I can try.” I twisted her long hair into my best approximation of a man bun. And you know what? It didn’t look half bad on the prettiest five-year-old I’d ever seen. “What do you think? That do you?”
Ivy ran a hand over her hair and shrugged. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Sensing attention on me, I rose in time to meetLauren’sapproach. I braced myself for hostility, but she gave me a skeevy smile instead and held out her hand.
“Are you Hayley’s dad?”
Ivy spoke before I could. “No, silly. This is Folk. Daddy’s friend.”
“Oh.” Lauren’s smile froze on her face, her hand hanging awkwardly in the air. “From the motorbike club?”
She saidmotorbikelike someone else might’ve said paedophile. So I messed with her head and shook her hand, grinning like she was my new BFF. “We’ve met before, actually. At the gate. I let you in.”
Lauren snatched her hand back. “I don’t remember you. Are you one of the president’s little pets? That’s what goes on at that place, isn’t it? You all sleep with each other?”
“No one sleeps with Daddy,” Ivy piped up. “And Folk doesn’t have a bed.”
All true. “I work nights, bug. I don’t need a bed.”
To Lauren, I widened my grin, so falsely cheerful my face almost fractured. “Anyway, it was nice to see you again. Ivy has your pretty hair.”
I walked away before I was sick in my mouth.
Back at the car, Embry was impressed. “I love Decoy and it’d kill me to do anything to make his life harder, but I can never find the strength to be nice to that woman.”
“You should. It annoys her more.”
“Yousound annoyed.”
“Do I?”
“You’re a placid man, brother. Makes it more noticeable when something gets to you.”
“All right then, father. Tell me this: is Ivy always that messy when her mum brings her to school?”
Embry shifted in his seat, gritting down on something that looked painful. I gave him a sec, but I needed his answer more than I was ready to accept.
“It’s definitely a thing,” Embry admitted. “Rubi was here last week, and I had to lock him in the car to stop him marching out there and saying something.”
“Does Seth—does Decoy know?”
Embry raised a brow and tipped his head against the cool glass of the window. “He’s aware, but I can’t get him to talk about it. He’s pretty closed off about stuff with Ivy sometimes, and I think he has to be to get through it.”
I nodded, taking it all in as my phone vibrated in my pocket and my pulse skipped. “You want me to take you home?”
