He frowned, reading me too well for comfort.
I jabbed a finger at the road.Go.
It wasn’t my place to give orders, but we rode out all the same, Nash up front, me at the rear. The air temp dropped. A vicious wind kicked up and I regretted not bringing a jacket. Heard Logan’s voice in my head as he reminded me of every crash I’d attended as a firefighter. Every biker I’d seen shredded by the road.
But as loud as my brother was, crashing was the last thing on my mind. I darted a thousand gazes in my mirrors, still searching for light. For shadow. For any tangible sign that the crawling sensation in my veins was something real.
Someone’s out there.
But who?
Andwhy?
Were they after Nash? He was the only top-level King on the road right now. The rest of us were fuckin’ nobodies.
Halfway home, with my belly still roiling up a storm, Nash veered off the coastal roads and headed inland again. He took a route that made no sense, then raised his arm, pointing at the sign for the motorway slip road.
Confusion reigned in my tired brain. We were at the junction before it clicked, and a long-ago security meeting returned to me.“If you think some cunt is following you, get the fuck off the back roads. Go where the people are, where cameras are, and ride like motherfuckers for as long as you damn have to.”
Cam’s voice this time, as stern as Logan’s, but without the intimacy that came from sharing your entire fuckin’ existence with someone.
Nash burned onto the M5, zipping across to the fast lane as the soldiers we’d brought with us fanned out around him, guarding him, while I kept my place at the rear, eating up the miles as his promise to Orla became a distant memory.
Wasting fuel.
Wastingtime. As I got older, I’d realised how much that mattered. That life wasn’t infinite, and before you knew it, twenty years had slipped by and you had fuck all to show for it.
Moody git.
Not really. But lonely night rides always put me in a stinker, especially without a brother in my ear, chatting shit over the radio, and tonight my only comfort was that whatever the fuck was prickling my skin, Nash felt it too.
It was dawn by the time we left the motorway, following a random panda car to the A-road before hugging the sharp turn into the compound.
We’d been gone a long time.
Pretty sure Nash had a tracker on his hog or in his phone, but Saint and Folk waited for us all the same.
Saint, Folk, andOrla.
I pulled into a spot next to her car and shut my engine down, blissful silence washing over me. I loved my bike, but I’d been awake so fuckin’ long I couldn’t take the racket anymore.
My legs were stiff. Folk steadied me as I staggered from my hog and tugged my helmet off.
“What happened? You hurt?”
“Nah, just knackered.”
The master of calm, Folk rubbed my arms and let it go, lapsing into an easy quiet as I put myself back together.
In my peripheral, Saint and Nash came together, the low murmur of Nash’s voice reaching me. No words, just that rock-star rumble that soothed me with whatever the fuck he was saying.
In my treacherous soul, I felt Orla reach him, her voice as low and smoky as his. Her touch as—
No.
I turned away from it, fromthem, ignoring Folk’s quizzical stare. I was a weirdo who got hornier than ever when I was tired, and right now I felt too fuckin’ frayed to control myself.
Go to bed.
