“You’re asking me?” Ranger finished his cigarette and tossed the butt. Cast a glance at Saint’s sodden back and stooped to retrieve it with a world-weary sigh. “Maybe we’re looking for the wrong people. Or you’ve already killed all these cunts. Ever think about that?”
I thought about it plenty, awake and asleep. But for Ranger to be right, that meant Alexei was wrong, and that never happened. Not about shit like this. “We can’t have killed them all. Go through the list again.”
Ranger wanted to deck me. I saw it in his soot-hued eyes. But he indulged me instead, reciting the names I knew by heart, and yet struggled to keep track of. Frank, Drummer, Butch. Half a dozen others I knew for sure were dead because I’d helped Saint dispose of their bodies.
Thinking about that made my temples throb.
I sank into a crouch, my shitty brain flailing to keep count as Ranger ticked more Crows off his fingers and Saint finally joined us beneath the trees.
Saint came close to me and stooped to my level, catching the tail end of the death list, a frown creasing his face. He took a breath, several abortive attempts to speak passing through his features. I gave him a minute to figure it out, but he’d had trouble all night, and eventually reached for his phone.
Saint:ranger gets fucked up every time he mentions priest
Priest. A low-level Crow enforcer, he was MIA, presumed dead at Alexei’s hand, but we couldn’t be sure. Alexei hadn’t cared enough to learn the names of every Crow he’d put down, and as hilarious as that had seemed way back when, it was a pain in my dick now.
Ranger didn’t know that, though. We’d kept Alexei’s exploits to ourselves.
I took a knee on the damp ground, twigs and stones digging into my skin, observing the nomad, trying to see him through Saint’s eyes. But I saw nothing but a man as pissed off and stressed as I was.
Ranger loved Locke.
Honestly, at this point, who didn’t?
“Tell me about Priest.”
Ranger snapped his eyes to me. “Why? He’s dead.”
“We don’t know that.” I watched him carefully, tracking the rage that flared in his dark gaze. The grief and pain. “We had some scrappy nights and cleaned house too fast to count heads.”
“What the fuck?” Ranger stood taller, advancing on me with heavy tread. “You’re saying that monster could still be out there and you’re only telling me now?”
I rose to meet him head-on.
Saint intercepted us, his hand out to ease me back. Not sure when he’d assumed my role as peacemaker or when I’d needed him to, but his silent approach to mediation was less annoying than being told to simmer the fuck down.
I returned to my position on the ground.
Ranger dead-eyed me, but there was no real malice in his glare. Just the same pain and trauma I’d seen in Locke’s in those rare moments he couldn’t hide it.
“Rocco told me.” I kept my voice as quiet as the deer I heard calling to each other beyond us. “About what Locke was to the Crows. I know what they did to him.”
Ranger scoffed. “Unless Locke’s morphed his personality in the last six months, you don’t know shit.”
He was so wrong. And yet... “You’re right. I don’t know everything. But I’ve seen the scars, man. I just don’t knowwho, but what happens to your face when I say Priest’s name... it means something.”
“It wouldn’t if you’d done your job and aced him already.”
I breathed hard through my nose, accepting the impact of a blow that I deserved. Welcoming it. Rounding up Crows hadn’t been my sole responsibility—hell, it hadn’t been anyone’s—but if we’d lost track of the cunt I needed to end with my bare hands, that was on me.
“We don’t know anything for sure,” Saint ground out, voice rough from neglect. “Even if we didn’t get him, someone else might’ve.”
“Viktor?” I hedged.
Ranger made a harsh sound I couldn’t decipher, shaking his head. “Priest didn’t roll with Butch and McGif. He was Drummer’s sidekick.”
My lip curled in distaste.Drummer. I’d hated that nasty bastard with the heat of a thousand suns. For years I’d seen his face at every scrap and brawl, lighting fires that didn’t need to be lit. We’d lost friends because of him.Brothers. Killing him was one of the first gifts Alexei had ever given us. “Was he a fighter?”
Ranger sneered. “Not a good one. An honest punch-up wasn’t his style.”
