Page 107 of Love Thy Brother
Cam lit another cigarette. “I’m hoping you have a better one for yourself.”
“Porth Luckwasmy plan, and here we are, five years later, still buried in the same toxic mess.”
For once in my life, I spoke without rage and resentment, but Cam winced in the same moment I sensed Rubi in the doorway.
“I messaged your other lover,” he told Cam flatly. “Told him to bring himself and the troops for their dinner.”
He melted back into the kitchen without looking at me.
Cam grimaced. “Thought you were doing better at not being an arsehole to him?”
“I am. I was talking about the club.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is that grunt speak for okay?”
“If you like.”
“It’ll do. Hey, if the intel is right about the unconnected county lines boys, does that mean Alexei’s off the hook with his overlord?”
“Ex-overlord.” Cam’s glower deepened to almost comical proportions. “And it’s complicated. Not sure even Saint understands it half the time, let alone me. But it’s whatever as far as this is concerned. We can handle our own shit.”
“He’s okay, though?”
“Alexei?” Cam sighed. “I don’t know. He has the same inbuilt need to fix everything as the rest of us, so sitting back on this one is as likely to kill him as anything else. But it has to happen. We can’t fall on him every time something fucks up. We’re stronger than that. We have to be, or everything we’ve lost was for nothing.”
I’d heard fragments of that speech before and hurled it back in Cam’s face, but the compulsion to do it now wasn’t in me. I wanted to help. “Wherever you need me, I’m there.”
“For real? You want back on the road?”
It was a fair question. I abandoned the weed pipe and ventured closer to where Cam stood by the window. “I’m not patching back in, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“You never patched out. You just left.”
“Cute.”
“It’s true. Rubi pays your dues.”
“He does not.”
For the first time, my brother truly smiled, a wicked grin splitting his face in half. “Course he does. I caught him doing it, soppy idiot.”
“He’s not an idiot.” The snap whipped out of me, instinctive and fierce. I loved my brother, but I wasn’t above chinning him if he disrespected Rubi again.
You do it all the time.
No.
Not anymore. Something else shifted inside me, and no matter what happened it wasn’t shifting back. “I’ll fucking pay them.”
Cam’s grin expanded into absolute wanker territory. “Talk to Decoy then. He’s the secretary.”
Then his humour faded and tension coiled around us like chlorine gas. Thick. Choking. Despite the weed buzz I clung to, panic crept up on me, eclipsing the warmth Rubi had left behind.
My pulse jumped.
Dark spots danced in my vision.
