Skylar.
His name is a tattoo in my veins. Jack and Sol are my family, by blood and by choice, but Skylar…he’s the gravity I don’t notice until I’m already falling. The blood in my mouth. I’m drowning by the time I feel the pull, but it’s a death I choose. It’slove, and he doesn’t deserve that. He doesn’t deserveme—the bitter, serrated edges I’ve never learned to dull. The ghosts that come for me harder with every passing day, spiked boots in a glass-bottomed boat.
“Mal.”
I sense movement—imagined and real.
Folk is closer.
Cam’s gone.
Fuck.
Folk slides a mug towards me. “When did you last eat?”
The question stirs something in me. Something I’m not sharp enough to grasp right now, and that sudden fury claws at meagain, a feral beast I have to wrestle into submission before I can answer Folk. “I don’t know.”
“You hungry?”
“No.”
“Can you eat anyway?”
Of course I can. Food is fuel, no different to the petrol I pumped into the shit heap Sol calls a car—an old hatchback so beat-up he leaves the keys in the glove box—and it’sthisthat ticks in my brain as I clear the plate Folk sets in front of me.
I don’t realise what it is until I’m halfway through it. Toast and red jam—Jack’s favourite. “You really do know my brother.”
Folk wraps wise hands around a tea mug. “I never said I didn’t.”
I feed the last crust to the dog at my feet. She’s a silky pewter-grey lurcher, with heavy teats and eyes like a sad Bosanko. “Someone stole her pups.”
“Who?”
“Whatever fucker left her tied to a caravan in the woods down your way.”
Folk’s gaze flickers. “Which woods?”
I tell him, and he rises, going to the door of this weird fucking room and speaking to someone I can’t see. When he comes back, the patience he started with has gone.
“Talk.”
And so I do.
I tell him how I’ve spent the last day and a half of my life. How I’ve found Couch Senior’s house, his secret third property where he bones his mistress, and the strip club where he paid some dumbfuck a couple of grand to toss a lit petrol bomb through Skylar’s bedroom window. “The eejit’s in the wind. I let him keep the cash.”
“Why?”
“Because he didn’t target Skylar on purpose.”
“What about Couch?”
The dog lies down and licks my ankle, her nose nudging the water bowl Folk brought her. “Didn’t touch him.”
“Why not?”
I turn my head to the window. Outside, a little girl with long blonde hair is towing a biker across the yard. He’s as tall as Cam and his skin is as stained with ink as every man I’ve seen here except Whitlock. I tilt my head and the man looks like Jack, a thought that sends a shiver of déjà vu down my spine.He’s a soldier.“I’ve seen him before.”
“Yeah?” Folk sounds almost bored. “Where’s that then?”
