It was the last thing I saw before my knees buckled, and despite Nash’s hold on me, I fell to the dirt.

  28

  EMBRY

  Folk killed Lorenzo. It was the only fact I absorbed outside that Mateo was alive, despite the fact that he seemed very dead.

  Locke had him on his back, a rough hand to his chest, shaking him. Calling his name.

  No response.

  Mateo was out cold, and real fear for him hit me. With him missing, it had been easier to pretend he was okay. Just somewhere else. Seeing him so battered and laid out in front of me, it was harder to deny how close we were to the other side.

  “He breathing?” Nash gruffed.

  Locke nodded. “Pulse is strong too, but I don’t know how long that’s gonna last. We need to get him out of here.”

  We’d left trusted brothers with our bikes and the SUV.

  Nash made the call. “They’re coming.”

  It should’ve eased me, but it didn’t. Mateo was hurt. He needed medical attention beyond whatever skills Locke seemed to have, but where the fuck were we going to take him? Even if we cleaned him up first, A&E docs would call the feds in a heartbeat.

  Locke was still trying to rouse him.

  I took over, cupped his jaw, and pressed hard against his chest. “Mateo. Mateo. Wake up for me, man.”

  I love you.

  But Mateo remained unconscious, holding my heart hostage as brothers arrived with the SUV Saint had driven here.

  Cam was still dealing with Viktor. He caught Nash’s eye and nodded, passing authority to him.

  Nash acted fast. “Em and Locke, take him. Drive north until we tell you where to go. Everyone else clear the scene and follow me home. Folk and Saint, stay with Cam.”

  We moved out. Locke was bigger than me. He lifted Mateo into the SUV and laid him on the back seat. “I’ll drive. Keep checking him, yeah?”

  I crawled in after Mateo and slipped beneath him, pillowing his upper body with mine, while Locke climbed behind the wheel and reversed to the remote lane, spinning the car before he sped away from the scene.

  One moment soon, I’d want to know how he’d come to be a single dad biker who drove like a rally driver and had enough medical knowledge that Saint had trusted him to work on Mateo alone.

  But that moment wasn’t now. Mateo’s rattly breathing consumed me. The steady thump of his pulse. I didn’t care about anything else.

  We left the scrapyard behind. Locke followed Nash’s instructions and headed north.

  I held Mateo, trying not to catalogue the injuries Juana’s father had inflicted on him in the short space of time he’d been missing. The welts and bruising. The dried blood around his mouth.

  The black footprints on his torso, because fuck me, he was shirtless as he’d been when they took him.

  “Mateo. Mateo.” I expected silence, but this time I got a groan, shallow and wheezy in his chest. He moved his head, tipping it from one side to the other, mouth twisted in a grimace.

  That’s when I noticed the slash mark on his throat, half hidden by his glorious scruff. It wasn’t deep, but the sight of it derailed my pulse. If we’d been a minute later.

  “How are you doing back there?” Locke met my gaze in the rear-view mirror. “He waking up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Keep talking to him. He can probably hear you—”

  Locke’s phone cut him off, buzzing with a message. With one eye on the road and keeping watch for passing feds, he glanced at the screen and punched a postcode into the SUV’s GPS screen. “Private clinic. Alexei’s gonna meet us there.”

  Relief washed over me, but it was short-lived. Because Mateo wasn’t awake. While I’d been distracted by Locke, he’d stilled again and felt further from me than ever.

  The rest of the journey passed in a haze. Locke drove all the way up to the back door of a swanky clinic and Alexei was waiting with a grim-faced doctor.

  They took Mateo away.

  Locke gripped my shoulders and guided me to a seat in an empty corridor. He forced a bottle of water on me and a bag of posh nuts from a vending machine. “I think he’s okay,” he said with a confidence I needed to hear. “Vitals were good and he didn’t look concussed when he crawled out of that death barn.”

  “You saw that?”

  “It was all we could see from where we were. Kinda pissed off I missed the Folkster taking Sambini out.”

  I nodded slowly, taking it all in while I hunched over, threading my shaky fingers together. “I don’t get how he made that shot from the river. Is he a fucking sniper or some shit?”

  Locke shrugged. “You’d have to ask him.”

  “What about you? I never got round to asking you what you were before you became a Dog Crow.”

  Locke’s easy expression flattened. He glanced up and down the corridor, perhaps hoping Alexei would come to his rescue, but nothing happened. For now, Mateo was gone and we were alone, so I needed him to talk before I kicked a hole in the wall.

  “I was a firefighter,” he said eventually. “Fresh out of school until I was twenty-six.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Life. None of us woke up one day and chose this, right?”

  The philosopher in me was dead. I didn’t have an answer for him, and I didn’t even try. I put my head in my hands and waited until sometime aeons later when Alexei called my name.

  “Come.” He beckoned me forward. “This way.”

  I shot to my feet, joining Alexei at the end of the corridor in a split second. “Is he okay?”

  “No.” Alexei shook his head. “Or we would not be here. But he is going to be, and I think he will wake up soon.”

  He led me to a closed door and ushered me through it and two more until we came to a full-on hospital room, equipped with everything I could remember from Saint’s time in ICU.

  Mateo was on the bed, only an IV hooked up to his arm and an oxygen mask already discarded beside him. He wasn’t awake, but there was colour in his cheeks and a million times less blood and dirt smearing his bruised face.

  “What’s wrong with his wrist?”

  “Broken. That is why you had to wait. For the X-ray. The doctor will cast it before we leave.”

  “What is this place?”

  “That, chaplain, is a question for another day. Right now, Mateo must look better than this before we take him home for his daughter, no?”

  There was no disguising the ugly marks all over Mateo’s body, but I took Alexei’s point and set to work while he watched over us. Alexei seemed to be waiting for something, but for what, he kept to himself.

  I fell into a trance, cleaning Mateo’s skin with a damp cloth. His warmth seeped into me. His tattoos sucked me in. I traced the horses and fairies with new eyes, totally hooked. Obsessed. Wake up and tell me all about them.

  “He is not dying, Embry. I promise you.”

  I glanced up. Alexei’s gaze speared me, as kind as it ever was. “I know.”

  “Are you sure? I should have told you that everything you see is all there is.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That his ribs and internal organs are intact. So is his brain. The bruising will hurt, but it will heal. Right now, he is weak from dehydration and displaced from the blows to his head, but he will be okay.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.” The moment when any other brother, even Saint, might’ve touched me stretched between us, but Alexei stayed on his side of the bed and I stayed on mine, and the predictability of it was more comforting than he’d likely ever know.

  I went back to fixating on Mateo’s ink, meandering to how his heart thumped beneath my palm. He didn’t look dead anymore, but that steady beat was the life force keeping me upright.

  “Embry?”

  I glanced up.

  Locke hovered in the doorway, keeping his gaze off Mateo. “Sorry, mate. Just thought you’d want to know Rubi just landed back at the compound, cargo all present and correct.”

  “They’re home?”

  Locke flashed a peace sign. “Safe and sound, father.”

  He melted away.

  I took a second to absorb his words, picturing Liliana outside for the first time in more than a month, the wind in her hair, her little face turned to the sky. Loving her was so fucking easy—

  The flesh and bone beneath me moved.

  Halfway to a fitful doze, I jerked up.

  Movement came again, from behind me this time as Alexei slipped away, and I thought for a moment I’d imagined it.

  Then I heard it.

  “Em?”

  I looked down to find bloodshot amber eyes staring right back at me.

  “Hey.” I leaned over the bed again and cupped Mateo’s jaw. “There you are.”

  Mateo slow-blinked. Then snatched a breath, stress flooding him, but I kept him down with a finger to his lips.

  “They’re safe at the compound. I don’t know shit about what that means, but they’re okay. I promise.”

  Fifty percent of the tension left Mateo’s body. Still unhappy, he batted my finger away and started to speak.

  Stopped and tried again. “Blood.” He lifted a hand, the uninjured one attached to the IVs and made a clumsy swipe for my face. “They hurt you.”

  I’d forgotten the tape at the back of my head. I had no clue what it looked like now or how bad it had been in the first place. But I looked him in the eye and told him the truth. “I’m fine.”

  Because I was. “I love you.”

  Mateo stilled. He was sharper and cleverer than he ever gave himself credit for, but processing those three little words seemed to take a thousand years.

  He frowned. “Huh?”

  I laughed with burning eyes. “I love you. I always have, and I’m so fucking sorry it took me so long to tell you.”

  Dazed, Mateo stared, his fingers wrapping around my wrist, head bobbing in a slow nod. “I knew.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think so.”

  It was all he had. And was enough. Of course it was. He’d loved me through every violent, horrible facet of who I was. Through every bright day and dark night. And I’d love him through this.

  I’d love him forever.

  Mateo settled. He didn’t ask where he was, which was just as well. Beyond a clinic buried somewhere near Bath, I had no idea. He didn’t ask about his wrist either. Or seem to notice when the dodgy doctor came in and set a cast around the broken bones.

  “Who else is here?”

  His sudden question startled me. For the last hour, he’d seemed asleep.

  I waited for the doctor to disappear, then I leaned close and spoke softly. “Alexei. Locke.”

  “Locke?”

  “He’s good, I promise. Folk too. He got Lorenzo.”

  “That was Folk?”

  I nodded. “For Rocco.”

  Any doubt or suspicion in Mateo’s eyes faded. At some point, like the rest of us, he’d want to know how Folk had made that crazy shot, but his motivation was something, even dazed and confused, that Mateo understood.

  It seemed to jolt something in him, though. His good hand had been loosely entwined with mine. As his gaze sharpened, his grip on me tightened to the point of pain, and he lurched upright, wrenching his casted wrist from the side table the doctor had used to treat it. “It was you. I saw you— Em, no. You—”

  I slapped a hand over his mouth, using all my weight to wrestle him back down. “Shh.”

  He fought me, and without my bastard temper fuelling me, on an ordinary day, he might’ve won. But his depleted strength betrayed him and I kept him on the bed. “Don’t say it. Not here. Remember who we are.”

  He gave in, physically at least. His eyes remained horror struck and tortured, a mirror image of how I’d felt when I’d learned he’d shot a man in the face in my name.

  I didn’t feel like that anymore. I didn’t feel much at all about killing someone for the second time in my life. At least, not for my own sake. Esteban. Sambini. Sidorov. This mess ran deeper than I’d ever understand, but Esteban had held a hot poker to Mateo’s throat his whole life. He’d cut his face. Mother of God, he’d tried to trade Mateo’s daughter for who the fuck knew what. He had to die, and I could live with pulling the trigger.

  With my hand still pressed to Mateo’s mouth, I brought my lips to his ear. “This is how it is, baby. How it’s always been. You kill for me, I kill for you. You love me, I love you. As long as we’re both alive, there’s nothing else.”

  29

  MATEO

  I woke up in Embry’s bed, the smell of him grounding me the second I cracked my eyes, even though my gut knew he wasn’t there.

  It was the first thing I’d been certain of in however long it had been since I’d watched him empty a converted pistol into Carlos Esteban’s head.

  The second was that despite his absence, I wasn’t alone. Mixed with the lemon and mint scent filling my senses, I smelt charcoal and bubble gum.

  Lili. I forced my eyes all the way open. My daughter sat beside me, drawing on the blue fibreglass cast on my wrist with a gold Sharpie.

  Her face was a study in concentration, tongue caught between her teeth, button eyes laser focused.

  She was so beautiful.

  I tucked a wayward lock of hair behind her tiny ear. She didn’t blink, and my heart turned over, a sickening thud that brought tears to my eyes, veins icing over, body heavy with grief.

  Then she glanced up. She smiled. And the weight left me floating on motherfucking air.

  “Papá.”

  “Lili.”

  “You’ve been asleep for ages.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” Her gaze darted between her drawing and my messed-up face. “Embry said it was better for you to sleep while your bruises hurt.”

  “When did he say that?”

  “When you came back and went to sleep on the stairs.”

  I pursed my lips, torn between a laugh and a grimace. I didn’t remember much about coming home. Just Embry’s arm beneath my shoulders, holding me up, Liliana’s hair soft against my nose as I’d buried my face there, and Juana’s watery smile that said the simplest thing. We made it.

  After that, it was a blur of my closest brothers and a fatigue so harsh I thought I was dying.

  “Let it happen.” Saint crouched beside me. “It goes away quicker.”

  Huh. Maybe I remembered more than I thought. “Where’s your mum?”

  “In the big room. She was sleeping too.”

  “What time is it?”

  Liliana shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m still learning how to read it, remember?”

  The bizarre decade she’d lived through suddenly hit home. She was sketching like fucking Banksy on my arm, but there were so many things she’d missed out on. School. Friends. A father who wasn’t an absent, broken mess. Fuck, we’d never done this. Hung out without counting the hours under the threat of certain death. How many times had I dreamt of moments like these? Waking up to find her right there?

  It blew my mind. I couldn’t fucking speak.

  Liliana went back to drawing—Skeletor? Damn you, Rubi—while I fought a slow-rising panic in my chest, the sharp ache I’d carried for months back with a vengeance. Man, I really was fucking crocked. Carlos was dead. Juana was safe. Liliana was drawing freaky pictures beside me. All my dreams had come true, so why did it hurt so much?

  And why the fuck couldn’t I catch my damn breath?

  “Morning.” Embry’s voice came from the doorway, but he was in front of me before I could blink. He ruffled Liliana’s hair. “Rubi’s making your Papá a sandwich. Can you help him? He’s doing it wrong.”

  My kid was as happy to see Embry as I was. She bounced off the bed to get to him and gave him a hug that made my bruised bones ache in sympathy.

  “Did he put cucumber in them again?”

  “I don’t know, squid. But he said something about red sauce, so you need to hustle down there.”

  Liliana tossed her Sharpie at me and skipped out of the room. It was so fucking normal my head spun off my shoulders.

  I sat up, swinging my legs out of the bed and bracing my elbows on my knees. “Fuckfuckfuck.”

  “Breathe,” Embry said from somewhere miles away. “She’s okay.”

  “I know.”

  “Then what is it?” Embry gripped my jaw, coaxing me to look at him, his stormy eyes for once a serene blue lagoon while a tornado blew through me. “Bad dreams?”

  “No.” I brought my hands to my head. “I don’t know. I just—fuck!” Frustration exploded out of me. I smacked my head, making my ears ring, and I’d have smacked it a hundred times more if Embry hadn’t grabbed my hands.

  “Stop. It’s okay.”

  It wasn’t. It really fucking wasn’t. My daughter needed me, and for the first time in her life, I was here, but I was losing my mind. My heart raced, my lungs screamed for oxygen, and I couldn’t make it stop.

  Embry said something.

  Missed it.

  I missed him. “Em.”

  “I’m here. Just opening the window.”

  Cool air hit my face.

  Then the bed dipped beside me.

  Embry flicked on his Bluetooth speaker. A dubstep track he only tolerated when he was stoned to kingdom come filtered out, and he rubbed my back. “You know, you’ve got nothing you need to worry about right now except breathing.”

  A strangled sound escaped me.

  “It’s true. Juana’s asleep. Liliana’s with Rubi, and nothing else really matters.”

  You matter. But Embry knew that. For every fucked-up thing in our lives, I’d never hidden that he was more than everything to me.

  “I love you. You know that, right? You remember?”

  My head jerked up of its own accord. “What?”

  Embry brought my hand to his chest, splaying it over his heart. “I told you in the clinic, but you were pretty out of it, so I’m telling you again. I love you, and I’m sorry it took me so long to fucking say it.”