I gave Cam a hard look. “You’re considering this, aren’t you?”
“I have to.” Cam tucked his spent cigarette back in the box. “If I don’t, they’re going to take you, me, or both of us away from the people who need us. You want that, Nash? You want to spend the years you should be having babies with my sister doing a decade-long bird?”
There were so many things wrong with that question. Unless a miracle happened, I wasn’t having babies with Orla. But ten years away from her? Rotting in prison while she and Locke—
“Hey.” Cam shook me. “It’s not going to happen, okay? If it comes to it, I’ll take the years.”
A humourless laugh burned my chest. “That’s sweet, but it’s not you in the picture with the money.”
“Then I’ll give them something else.”
“What? No—fuck. Justno. Cam, you can’t go down. We need you.”
“That’s why it has to be me,” Cam countered. “Anything you’ve done, you’ve done it on my orders. And this is my order too.No onetakes years for this shit except me. So if you don’t want that to happen, we need a better plan.”
“We needhelp. Are you bringing Alexei in on this?”
Conflict stormed in Cam’s dark gaze. “If I do, I don’t know how this ends.”
“Worried he’ll kill everyone?”
“Something like that, and a thousand other things.”
I didn’t want to know what that meant. I wanted to go back to the place where my only thoughts had centred around how good being with Locke had felt. Howright. To that bubble where my sole focus had been bringing that feeling home to my woman—toourwoman—and sharing it with her.
Gravity pulled me under. I lay down in the dirt and stared up at the sky. “They want us to name every bent copper we’ve ever paid.”
Cam grunted his affirmation.
“Then what?”
“They leave us alone, according to them.”
“Or they hold it over us. Use it to take us down anyway.”
“It’s not just that.” Cam lay down too. If I’d moved my hand a fraction, I’d have found his. “It’s where it leads. We’ve paid off coppers to cover up all sorts of shit. The Sambinis are gone, but the cartels are still out there. The Russians. Every heavy one we’ve left behind.”
Heavy ones.
Bodies.
Too many to count, and they were just mine. What about Saint? Mateo?
Folk.
Embry.
Goddamn. It couldn’t happen. None of it. I’d fuckingdiebefore it did.
“She can’t know,” Cam said suddenly. “Not this, not now, not ever.”
Orla. “I’m not going to tell her.”
“What if she gets in your face about where you went tonight?”
“She already knows something’s up with the Crow thing. She’ll just think it’s that.” I thought of the wild,evasivesex we’d had a few days ago and my heart skipped beats again, losing rhythm, aching with the weight of all I had to hide from the people I loved the most.
Cam sighed. “I told you not to fall in love with her.”
