“Somewhere good.”
“How do you know this?”
“You woke up smiling.” Ranger brandished the blood orange I had brought in from the groves. He had already peeled and broken it into segments. How things had changed.
We shared the fruit.
He remained quiet, still thinking. It gave me time to study him without him noticing, but as much as his hair and eyes, his lean muscles and inked skin bewitched me, the fading knife wound to his torso drew me in.
I traced it with my fingertip. “Will you tell me about this fight?”
Ranger shivered at the touch. “You told me not to.”
“That waswho. I would still like to know why.”
He rolled over, giving me his back for a moment, digging in his bag. He came back with a vape I had not seen him use and took a lungful of menthol steam. “Some cunt raised a hand to Folk’s kid. I saw it and got there first.”
“Someone... hitFolk’schild?” I tried to fill the gaps in my knowledge of Folk Whitlock.
I did not succeed.
Ranger shrugged around another exhale of vapour. “He thought about it. Dunno if he would’ve followed through. I didn’t wait to ask.”
“And this man put a blade to you in defence?”
“Nah.” Ranger snorted. “I put him down. Then his three sons came for me in the ring and I put them down too. Get Jakey to tell you all about it—he was there.”
That was new information too. But it did not mean much now. It made sense that Jake had travelled to the heart of King territory to recruit Ranger. He liked it there, drawn to men who shared bonds that reminded him of our own.
I traced the scar again. “Folk did not want to fight these men himself?”
Ranger smothered a yawn with his hand. “He doesn’t know what their old man did. I put Doherty—I puthimdown too fast for anyone else to notice. Cam only knows cos Alexei saw it on the surveillance cameras.”
I caught the slip. Filed the information.Doherty. Four of them. I would not forget, but a dark flicker in Ranger’s gaze distracted me. “This fight upset you?”
“Hmm?”
“It upset you,” I repeated, waiting for him to look at me. “But not because you regret it.”
“I don’t regret shit.”
“You wish you had acted quicker? Before he got close enough to the child... Ivy, yes? She belongs to the other soldier... to Decoy?”
The quiet man with the kind hands. I remembered him.
Ranger did not answer me. He got out of bed and left the room. To smoke, I presumed. The vape lay abandoned on the bed.
I sat up.
But he reappeared as suddenly as he’d gone, still naked. “How did you know? I didn’t fucking know. How didyouknow?”
That a fight before he had come here had unsettled him. That he was unsettled by it now. “I felt it.” I rubbed my chest. “You are like a seed that grew there from the moment we met.”
“And now what? I’m a giant tree of bullshit?”
“No—”
He walked away again. This time I scooped some clothes from the floor and followed him outside. He wore sweats by the time I caught him up, smoking as if it was his last cigarette on earth.
