Locke joined us before I could respond, slipping quietly into the kitchen and close enough to Nash to kiss the top of his head.
It was sweet, and Locke deserved the way Nash looked at him in return.
“How is your back?”
Locke faced me. “Shite. How’s yours?”
“I do not really think about it.”
“Can I see?”
It was nothing to me to pull my shirt off to show Locke the healed wounds on my torso. He had seen them fresh and helped me keep them clean.
Nash, though. It upset him; I could tell. To look at the marks on me and know that Locke had far more and far worse.
A new dark bruise stained my ribs. Locke opened a medical bag and rubbed ointment into it. Treatment I did not need, but I let him do it. “You live upstairs too?”
Locke smiled. “I do.”
“That is nice.”
“It is.” He screwed the cap back onto the ointment and drifted closer to Nash again. “I’m a blessed man.”
Nash snorted. “We’re the blessed ones.”
They shared a deep stare that was intimate enough that I should have looked elsewhere, but my thoughts were slow. The adrenaline of the past few days a distant memory as the food settled in my stomach and did God’s work.
“You can stay as long as you like.”
Nash’s words felt sudden. As did the realisation that Orla had left the room.
I blinked. “Pardon?”
He refilled my tea mug. “Ranger doesn’t have a house. But he’s not going anywhere for a while, and I want you to know you’re welcome here too.”
A while. How long was that? But the truth was, whether he had a bricks-and-mortar home in this place or not, I had always expected Ranger to come back to Devon. His grandmother was here, his friends—his brothers. The sanctuary we’d carved out on the island had always been temporary. “Thank you. I will stay as long as I can.”
“You have somewhere else to be?”
Locke. And he stared at me as if daring me to say that I had.
“There is nowhere else Iwantto be,” I amended. “But time will tell if that is enough, no?”
Locke had the air of a man with more to say, but he let it go as Nash slid a burner phone across the counter to me.
“You can reach us with this. Or bang on the ceiling, we’ll hear you.”
The implication that they were leaving relieved and unsettled me in equal measure. I was tired. What if I fell asleep and didn’t hear Ranger? What if the pain relief he’d been given for his head pushed me over the edge?
I hadn’t looked at it. Did not know what it was. But I knewwhereit was, and as the reality that I would be in this flat for the foreseeable future sank in, that bothered me.
“There’s a message from Jakov on there too.”
I glanced at the phone. Sure enough, a message lit up the screen. I opened it, scanning the vernacular that was familiar enough for me to know it was definitely Jake.
It was written in code, telling me the island was secure. That Katya was safe—thatLidawas safe—and Jake would be with them soon.
Relief physically rocked me.
