It’s late evening. Golden hour. Sunshine dapples the old wood and makes me think of the grass by the lagoon, but the warmth in my chest is fleeting.
He didn’t pick up.
Skylar.
He’s probably working.
Or asleep, if such a thing ever fucking happens. But my hands itch to call again. To keep calling until he answers and the faulty organ skipping beats in my chest finally calms the fuck down.
Something’s wrong.
Fuck’s sake.
I dig the heel of my hand into my chest and reach for the phone, but a door creaks opens and more sunshine floods the room before I can even look up.
Folk Whitlock steps in as if he’s bathed in it, tanned skin and kind blue eyes, contentment rolling off him. He has grass in his hair and a child’s drawing scrawled on his hand.
I kinda hate him.
Not because he’s happy.
Mostly because he’s not alone.
Cam O’Brian fills the space behind him. Tall. Hot. Annoying in the appraising way he seems to look at me, before his gaze drops to the package I’ve picked up in the lost eighteen hours it’s taken me to stop roaming the South West like a homicidal maniac. “Whose dog is that?”
“Some cunt.”
“A dead cunt?”
I glance around the space. It feels safe to talk, but those same instincts drove me to leave Jack and Sol while Skylar’s bedroom carpet was still smoking from a petrol bomb, so I’m not sure they’re worth shit right now.
Reading me, Folk comes closer and folds his lithe body into a chair. “You can talk here.”
“About what?”
“About whether you’ve been on the rampage I smell all over you.”
He says it with a grin, but the question is real, and it gets my tired mind pondering what he’d say if my answer was an unequivocalyes.
What Cam would say.
The Rebel Kings’ president has claimed the chair opposite, but he seems more interested in the stolen dog at my side than the possibility I might’ve murdered her owner.
“I haven’t killed anyone.”
“Why not?”
That does come from Cam. I glance at him in time to see hardness flash in his gaze, and I realise he knows. About the petrol bomb and whose bed it fucking landed on.
“Your pal told me not to,” I tell him honestly. “At least, I figure that’s what he meant when he said my one-man plan would have flaws.”
“Saint,” Folk supplies.
Cam almost smiles. “He’s usually right. So what is this fucking plan?”
An hour ago, it had been the same one I’d left the Joker with. Then I’d retrieved my phone from a hole in the ground to see Skylar’s name on the screen and something inside me had given way.
Still don’t know what. Just that I’ve wound up here and I’m not altogether sure how.
