Distant.
I’d experienced trauma as an out-of-body experience before. Fuck, I lived through it every time I fell asleep with the stress of this fucking life weighing me down. But this... it was different—itfeltdifferent. As if I wouldn’t survive it without Saint gripping my elbow.
Saint tugged me away from the tree and into the shadows of the endless woodland we seemed to be surrounded by tonight.
We’d been friends a long time. Brothers even longer. But he’d never looked at me the way he was right now—with such sharp-edged concern. The empathy was nothing new, though. Saint was a good man. One of the best. And he loved me. This mess inside me. Thisache. On some level, he felt it too, and his hard-fought words underlined that. “Horrible things happened to Alexei. If I didn’t love them enough to live, it would kill me.”
“That your life advice to me? Don’t die?”
Saint nodded and I wanted to hug him, but I knew better. He wasn’t as touch adverse as he used to be, with me, with Rubes. Sometimes Mateo. But timing was everything, and I was too fucked up to even contemplate it. “How do you know I love him like you love Alexei? How do you know it’s the same?”
That earned me a head tilt. A deep stare that withered any desire I had to argue with him. What was the point? Saint was too clever for me, and I didn’t fucking care. I loved Locke, and I wasproudto love him. My woman had seen to that.
Tell him. Tell him. Tell him.
The inexplicable sense that I was running out of time almost choked me.
I wiped my mouth. “We need to check that place out.”
Saint pointed at the bikes.You should wait here.
“No.”
He shrugged, letting it go, and we moved away from the safety of the trees.
Ranger waited for us. “Saint on point?”
Of course. It didn’t matter how hard I looked at something, he always saw more. And I acknowledged the words he hadn’t said out loud. I wasn’t gonna hide with the bikes, but my head was still twisted enough that I knew I had to let Ranger go ahead of me too.
We got our shit together and moved out, tooled up with radios in our ears, moving in synch. Fuck, sometimes I figured we could invade a small country with the discipline we’d honed over the years. Even Ranger who resented authority as much as Saint’s cat despised Cam’s sofa cushions.
The building was a sprawled-out prefab. Cheap to build and ugly as fuck, all concrete and cladding.
There were two entrances, plus a fire escape at the rear.
Saint crept around the side. I tracked his every move until I lost sight of him, a new wave of tension flooding my nerves. I tightened my grip on the hammer in my hand, hypervigilance heightening my senses, waiting for the whistling static of Saint’s radio, the hiss he blew between his teeth when words failed him.
It came quicker than I was prepared for, three sharp exhales, the message in his own brand of morse code crystal clear:get back.
I retraced my steps, beating a hasty retreat from the building, bolting to our rally point fifty metres back, Ranger a heartbeat behind me.
We ducked down, still at the mercy of the pelting rain. Ranger took a breath to say who the fuck knew what, but Saint was on us before he could speak, sliding into the ditch like a footless fucking ghost.
He was out of breath in a way he wouldn’t have been before the warehouse fire.
I gave him a second.
Two.
Three.
Saint jabbed his thumb at the building. “Bikes.”
“How many?”
“Four.”
“Other vehicles?”
