I eased back, fighting the protest that screamed in every fibre of my body. I was breathless and spinning, but Mateo grounded me, bending his legs for me to lean on while he brought his hands back to my hips.

  His dick was rock hard, straining to escape from his jeans. I traced the bulging denim with my fingertip, just once. “This has really never happened for anyone else?”

  “It’s happened for lots of people.”

  “I meant dudes.”

  “I know.”

  “Answer the question then.” I ghosted the length of him again.

  Mateo shivered, catching my hand in his. “You know the answer. It was just women for me until I saw you.”

  “Lots of women?”

  He shrugged, a non-answer Saint would’ve been proud of. But it was an answer I didn’t need. The diehard bisexual in me found the notion of Mateo banging women hotter than sin. But let’s be honest, I was jealous of him fucking his hand.

  We were still so wrapped up in each other it was hard to think. I rubbed the back of my head. “I don’t know what this means.”

  This. Us. Whatever it was.

  Mateo’s gaze darkened, dread shadowing his amber gaze before he blanked it out, smoothing his rough edges just for me. “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

  “I don’t think we get to decide that.”

  “Stop thinking then.” His gruff voice belied his fingers, tracing patterns on my hips. “Pretend it never fucking happened if you need to.”

  I didn’t, and I was on him before I made the conscious decision to kiss him again. No fear. I kissed him as if we did it all the time. As if our three-year friendship wasn’t tainted by hopeless longing and a million things unsaid.

  It was easy. Too easy, perhaps. But the moment consumed me, and everything was liquid heat until Mateo pulled back, breathless.

  I grinned at his bemusement. “You think I could forget that?”

  His only answer was a low, rumbling sound.

  An ominous sound. It was hard not to wonder what he’d do to me if things were different, and he wasn’t afraid of detonating the monster in me. Because there was a monster in him too. In our messed-up world, a man’s magic number had nothing to do with where he put his dick, and Mateo’s was high. Mother of Christ, he’d killed a man six months ago.

  The man who’d put a blade in my gut.

  He killed for you.

  I’d always known he would.

  “We need to go,” he said around a deep sigh. “Got shit to do before we head out tonight.”

  He was right. We’d been gone too long already. But I didn’t want to let go. Not yet.

  “Oi.” Mateo sat up, bringing me upright for good measure. “Promise me something.”

  His arms came around me on instinct.

  He didn’t reclaim them, distracted by the severity of whatever he was thinking.

  His gaze was potent.

  His embrace? Man, it was everything. An out of body experience, which made no fucking sense at all when it was my body calling the shots.

  Legitimately. I was welded to him. We were gonna have to stay here forever.

  I brushed my lips over the scarred flesh on his cheekbone.

  He shuddered, eyes fluttering shut. “Em.”

  I’m sorry.

  Nah. That was a lie.

  I wasn’t.

  Not even a little bit.

  I did owe him a promise, though. “Tell me what you need.”

  His eyes flew open again, fixed on me, pinning me in place. “Don’t freak out while I’m gone. If you want a deep and meaningful when I get back, we can do that. But don’t hate on this moment while I’m not there to talk you out of it.”

  His unassuming eloquence made my stomach burn, twisting me up inside because I knew he was right. But I had a solution to the vortex of overthinking I’d fallen into when I’d been too fucked up to do anything else. Prevention was better than cure, right? “I won’t have time. Nash asked me to jump on the bricky van and I’m gonna do it.”

  Mateo’s dark brows jumped into his hairline. “You’re going back to work?”

  “You don’t think it’s time? Saint was back on his hog two months after surgery.”

  “Saint’s insane,” Mateo snapped.

  “Dedicated, more like.” To the club.

  To Cam, and to Alexei, who’d fought him every step of the way to take care of himself a little longer.

  But as much as I knew Mateo’s motivations were the same as the fierce Russian third who stood beside Cam and Saint, on this, he’d run out of time. I wasn’t hurting for cash, but I was done waiting for the person I’d been before to come back.

  That version of myself was dead and buried.

  Mateo knew that. He had to.

  Or he didn’t know me at all.

  His hot temper faded. We needed to separate and head home.

  Not before he’d dug that promise out of me, though. And he did it without saying a word. He was bewitching like that, and irresistible, his stare a dark and dangerous quicksand that held me hostage until he got what he wanted.

  I kissed his scarred cheek one last time. Then pressed my forehead to his and tapped two fingers to my temple. “I’ll be whole when you come home, I promise.”

  7

  MATEO

  I made Embry follow me back to the compound, ignoring him as he buzzed my rear wheel on the open road, urging me to go faster.

  Nope. Aside from the fact that I didn’t want to die in a collision with a half-blind OAP driving a motorhome, or get arrested and my fingerprints banked in the police database, riding harder meant a sooner end to the afternoon, and I wasn’t ready to let him go just yet.

  So I rode like a granny until the compound came into view and I admitted defeat.

  Folk opened the gate. I slowed as I passed him, flipping my visor to check him out.

  He dead-eyed me right back and I swerved, narrowly avoiding his feet on purpose. Prick. What was he even doing here? Sharing our fucking oxygen when their whack job leadership had tried to kill us all?

  Easy.

  Nah. That was a hard nope from me too, and even Embry’s voice in my head didn’t cool the fire I sent Folk’s way. Embry was broad-minded enough to believe the leftover Crows were a different breed to the old guard who’d conspired to kill us all, but I wasn’t. I wanted them dead to a man, and I didn’t care if they knew it. If it meant they came for me first when their game was up, so be it.

  Leaving Folk behind, we rolled into the compound. I shut my Dyna off and hung my helmet.

  Nash waited for me. “The fuck have you been?”

  “What do you care?”

  His gaze slid to Embry behind me. Then he brought his pretty boy baby blues back to me. “Okay, I’ll rephrase. Wherever the fuck you go half the time, don’t turn your phone off. I ain’t your secretary.”

  “What?”

  “Some bird called the yard asking for you. Third time she got Cam and he’s all stroppy that no one knew where you were.”

  Some bird. I never gave anyone my number, and truth be told, the woman could’ve been anyone. It wasn’t unheard of for hook-ups to track boys down to the yard when they got ghosted after a one-night wonder, chasing more biker dick. But as Nash frowned at me, my stomach roiled something rotten.

  Fuck. I needed to split away and deal with this shit, but with Nash all up in my face, there was no chance, and real fear dug into my soul. I couldn’t even worry about Embry’s gaze drilling into my back. Or his fading footsteps as he slid from his bike and walked away. However he really felt about me fucking other people paled in comparison to what he’d do if he ever found out what was making my blood run cold right now.

  I forced a flat, bored expression onto my face. “What did she say?”

  “Your name.” Nash eyed me. “Then she said please a lot in an accent like your ma’s. She your sister or something? Or you got a girl from the motherland on the hook?”

  “Shut the fuck up.” I swung my leg over my bike and made to stride away.

  Nash caught my arm. “If you don’t want the chaplain knowing you’re fucking around, you need to make better choices, man. Now let it go. We got shit to do.”

  In the cave, with Embry’s lips on mine, my heart had raced at light speed, banging against my eardrums. It slowed now, creeping towards death, and Nash’s voice seemed to come from another planet.

  I followed him into the clubhouse. Cam, Alexei, and Rubi were at the table, maps spread out in front of them, routes tracked with pencil marks and Post-its.

  Alexei was in my seat.

  I fell into Saint’s without comment, jaw clenched so hard it ached.

  “We don’t have up to date intel on the Sambini road purge,” Cam said. “So you’re going to have to wing it when you get past Nottingham.”

  For a long moment, his words meant nothing to me. They were just sounds, his face a blur of brown eyes and scruff three shades darker than mine. I felt sick, the primal kind that wrenched your guts in so many different directions you met a new kind of pain. A deep, black ache that made me think of Embry and every day he’d suffered so hard, then brought me back to the unanswered phone calls burning a hole in my heart.

  They need me.

  “Hey.” Cam snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Wake the fuck up. You’re leaving when Decoy gets here, and I don’t want to waste time going over this again.”

  Someone placed a coffee in front of me.

  Saint.

  I hadn’t heard him come in and he was good at fading into the background. Too good. His gaze snared me before I could hide from it, and he tilted his head, like him, Cam, and Alexei all did now they were in each other’s pockets enough to become one fucking person.

  Fuck me. If there was one brother I didn’t want up my arse, it was him. On top of his own legit superpowers, he was the worst combination of Alexei’s intelligence and Cam’s empathy. If I fucked up, he’d see it. And Saint . . . he was unpredictable.

  I leaned forward, gripping the mug hard enough to sear my palm, and forced my gaze to the maps. The routes were still blurry, and I was too fucking stressed to read Rubi’s notes, but I’d studied the maps enough over the past few days to know what I was talking about without needing much brain power. “These are toll roads. Don’t mean much when it’s a one-off payment, but it’ll fuck us over in the long run, especially when it’s eighty miles in each direction out of our way.”

  “Agreed,” Cam said. “But we don’t have much option right now. I could live with pissing Sambini off, but we can’t guarantee that’s who we’d be fighting. Best I can do is mobilise the charters we have up that way to give you an escort.”

  Alexei made a soft, derisive sound. “Not on noisy bikes in club colours. Your police will be all over your legitimate business if you make such a spectacle.”

  “My police?”

  “English police, biker boy.”

  “I’m Irish,” Cam rumbled before he looked to me again. “Fuck’s sake. Anyway, he’s right. So no escort. Which means it’s even more important you stay out of trouble. It’s just the two of you and a couple of brothers in the Transit on the road. I can’t think why anyone would want to pop you, but there’s no guarantees.”

  Course there wasn’t. That was the life. We couldn’t ship timber up north without crossing a minefield of territorial politics—other MCs, cartels, fucking mafia—and I was here for that. It was my job to keep Decoy safe. But fuck if it didn’t feel like a secondary concern right now.

  Focus. I glanced at Rubi, quiet until now. And my attention seemed to surprise him. I’d been a dick to him from the very first night he’d kept Embry company, and I wasn’t bored of it yet. Still, he was the logistics man. The road captain. The best answer to this bullshit would surely be his. “What say you?”

  Rubi considered me for a second. Then tapped his tattooed middle finger on a route I’d discounted for running through sixty miles of hardcore roadworks. “This one. It’s going to be boring as fuck when you get snarled in stop-start traffic, but there’s cameras all over that shit. Feds with speed guns on every bridge. You do this run out in the open, it shows we have nothing to hide.”

  “Wishful thinking, ain’t it?” I dug cigarettes out of my pocket and lit up. “If we’re on the wrong roads, we’re gonna end up paying somehow.”

  Cam stood and ventured closer to me, helping himself to my smokes. “Eventually. But the message is clear we’re not looking for a fight and we need to stick to that. Don’t know about you, mate, but I haven’t got it in me to see another brother hurt for the rest of my fucking life.”

  I almost felt bad for him, but the teeny sliver of goodness in my heart belonged to other people. As it was, I took the common sense from his words and agreed with him. Without muling drugs and amping up our protection rackets, the club was counting on the haulage business to fill the gap. Which it was, but it was new money. Unstable. And we couldn’t pay brothers to fight a war for us with magic beans.

  The chapel door opened. Embry strode in and claimed his seat, spinning it around and straddling it. Despite the pressure in my chest, it made me think of his weight on my legs. The sensation as he’d held me in place with his strong thighs, and the way I’d never questioned for a moment having a dude touch me like that.

  Because it was him.

  Forever and a day, it would always be him.

  “I let Ranger go,” he said. “Gave him some nomad contacts up north.”

  Nash glanced up from the phone he’d been tapping at while the rest of us had wrangled the maps. “Will he be safe up there? What about the Crow nomads? Locke said they aren’t worth much without Butch and McGif, but he might catch heat for switching alliances.”

  “It’s a possibility,” Cam admitted. “But nomads ride to different rules. Chances are no one gives a fuck.”

  Nash set his phone down. “That’s if we’re classing Butch’s crew as nomads, but it sounds more like they were a certified charter. A Crow charter. What if Ranger riding with our nomads starts a war up there?”

  Cam drilled his VP with a hard stare. “You really think that could happen?”

  “You think it’s impossible?”

  “I reckon it’s a shit-covered bridge I can’t contemplate crossing right now, but thanks for giving me something else to worry about.” Cam stubbed out his stolen cigarette and met Saint’s gaze. “Can you feel it out without putting ideas in any thick fucker’s head?”

  Saint nodded. That was it. But I wasn’t immune to the heat that passed between them.

  No one was.

  Cam disappeared into the small kitchen at the back of the chapel. A few minutes later, he came back with dinner and our fearless leader could fucking cook, but as church broke off around me, the sick sensation in my bones returned. I needed out, right now, so I could get to the hidden compartment in my bike before—

  “Here.” Rubi slid a bowl of chilli across the table to me. “You want rice?”

  I snapped a glare at him, reflex more than anything. “Fuck off.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He went back to dishing up. No one else noticed me growling at him save Embry—of course—and Saint, damnit. His gaze was unreadable, but Embry’s was loud and clear: what the hell is wrong with you?

  Everything.

  But nothing I could ever tell him.

  I flattened my expression and reached for the chilli. Rubi came around the table and dumped rice into my bowl without comment and I couldn’t for the fucking life of me understand why he chose now, of all moments, not to run his smart mouth.

  Focusing on him gave me a moment to calm the fuck down. Then I turned back to Embry and he was eating for the first time since I’d got back from fake fucking that girl in Porth Luck. Which meant he wasn’t agitated or in pain. He was happy.

  He was safe.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  I tore my gaze from him and found Cam, Alexei, and Saint instead. Alexei wasn’t eating, but it wasn’t my job to worry about that. And Cam didn’t seem worried either. He was smiling, curling his leg around Saint’s under the table as Alexei stood behind him, absently playing with Cam’s hair.

  It was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen Alexei do, but I found no joy in it, and the need to be somewhere else started to drown me.

  Nash asked Embry a question. It distracted him and I took my chance, rising and ghosting from the chapel without looking back.

  Outside, it was just starting to get dark. The yard was busy with drinkers and firepits, but no one bothered me. Like Saint, I had a rep for rarely inviting conversation and I’d never appreciated it more than I did right now.

  I made it to my bike and crouched by the hidden compartment in the Dyna. It faced the exit. Only the stray Crows could see, and I doubted they were looking. As much as I rode them for existing, I couldn’t deny they were sharp as fuck on the gate.

  Sharper than me. Nash had clued me in an hour ago and it had taken me this long to get here. Fuck. What if—

  Don’t. I’d learned the hard way that picturing the worst things I could think of slowed my brain to a tortured crawl.

  I fumbled the compartment and found the phone inside, identical to the one I carried in my pocket, except this one was an untraceable burner, the black case marked with the tiniest speck of sparkly pink nail varnish.

  Shoving it in my jacket, I started across the yard again, aiming for the clubhouse under the guise of packing a bag for the haulage run.

  Rubi blocked my path. “Can we talk?”

  I wanted to throat punch him.

  Badly.

  I settled for pushing past him with an impatient grunt. “I got shit to do.”

  “Mats. Don’t be a cunt.”

  “Why not?”

  I kept walking, hoping he’d take the hint. But he either missed it or didn’t give a shit, and I’d have bet on the second if I’d had time to think about it.

  True to form, Rubi trailed his tenacious dickhead self after me and all the way upstairs to the bedroom he’d given me when I’d first patched in as a council member. His bedroom. Because I’d been a desperate, sad sack of shit with nowhere else to go.