Alexei pulled out his phone. “I have a list.”
I shot him an incredulous glare. “On your phone?”
“I am texting Cam.”
“About this?”
“No. About sex. You would like to read?”
My mind was in bits. Maybe reading Alexei’s sexts to my boss/brother-in-law/other best friend would clear it, but I didn’t want to take the risk of inflicting an apocalypse on my synapses.
I waved Alexei’s phone away. “Where’s this list?”
“In my head.”
“Care to share?”
“Not now. First, we have to make a plan to keep Locke safe, and I would suggest, though it pains me to force this on you, that we do not tell him yet that he is at risk. He is a noble man, no? I would not want him to do something stupid.”
Rubi frowned. “Like what?”
“Like whatever it is that kept him with the Crows so long. Locke is a strong man, and a clever one. There is no reality where he could not have escaped for so many years. So what, old one, do you think made him stay? Why wouldyoustay?”
Rubi thought about it for less than a second. “To protect someone else.”
“Indeed. And we know for ourselves that is something Mishka is remarkably good at.”
Mishka.I’d long ago given up trying to make sense of the less obvious nicknames Alexei forced on us, but this one felt important. Tome, if no one else. “What does it mean?”
“What?”
“Mishka.”
“What it says.” Alexei gave me nothing. Then whatever he saw in my face seemed to move him. “Where I come from, it meansbear.Strong, no? With a big heart.”
It was probably the nicest thing Alexei had said about anyone since Christmas, leaving aside his newfound bromance with Folk, but as my slower brain caught up, the implications of what he was saying sank in. Locke had kids. A twin brother. At one time, when this had all started for him, he’d had a wife. And the scars on his back?
There was no doubt in my mind that every single one was for them.
I’d been quiet long enough that Rubi hauled himself out of Orla’s bed and gave me a hug. “Breathe, Nashie. Crows are shit at everything. We’ll run ’em down before they get to him.”
“They put a gun in his face, Rubes.”
“In broad daylight. Stoopid, remember?”
“What if they get that close at night?”
“He ain’t gonna be on the road at night. Not often, anyway. We’re keeping him on Orla.”
Protest rose in me. If Locke was the target, he couldn’t be anywhere near Orla. Then I saw the sense in what Rubi and Alexei had clearly cooked up before they got here. We had a ring of steel around Orla, and Locke was the inner circle. By her side was the safest place for him to be. “What about the kids?”
Alexei drifted into my eye-line again. “Saint is already watching the girl, and I put a tracker in her car the day you brought it home. The boy... Nicky, yes? He does not go out much, and I do not think even Crows would attack a child at school.”
“You put a tracker in Willow’s car?”
“Unactivated,” Alexei clarified. “That decision would have to be Locke’s.”
Couldn’t argue with that. “What about when Locke sees them? It’s the only time he leaves Orla.”
