RUBI

RUBI

"Hold the phone." I stilled the punch-bag Cam had been beating the shit out of in my basement for the past hour, working up a bucket of rage sweat before he'd deigned to tell me why he'd sought me out at home instead of the compound where we'd both been due ten minutes ago. " That's why Ranger went postal on the Douchey Doherty clan?"

Cam nailed the bag, the force of the hit rocking my balance. "Yep."

"And you didn't tell any of the dads?"

"Nope."

"That was fucking stupid."

Cam glared.

I didn't give a shiny shit. "Deeky will understand. He'll be grateful you didn't put him in that position. Em will figure that out too—eventually. Folksie, though? He's gonna have your arse as a hat before that conversation's done."

Cam opened his mouth?—

"Metaphorically," I amended.

Cam made his favourite angry bear noise anyway and thumped the bag again. "Folk's not going to fight me."

"He might. Is that why you've been training so much recently? Getting in shape for the pasting he's gonna give you?"

I was joking. Mostly. Folk was a legitimate trained killer. A sniper. A bomber. A fucking special forces commando with decades of combat experience and a mind sharp enough that Alexei ceded to him. The ability to punch through a brick wall wasn't going to save Cam if Folk got the proper hump.

Cam kept punching. I let the bag go and retrieved my phone from the weight bench, thumbing through the outrageous messages from River about my lateness. Loved him, but honestly, the fucking cheek of it.

Rubi: I'm with Cam. Is Folk in yet?

River: How the fuck would I know?

Rubi: You could look, with your eyes, and find out

River: No

I waited, and another message fired through a minute later.

River: He just got in

I couldn't decide if that was a good thing or not, but if there was one thing I did know, it was that leaving shit like this hanging was a bad idea. Besides, Cam was right about Liliana. She was a kid, not a vault, and she spent a lot of time with Folk—the legit don of holistic childcare. Making her keep this from him was a fucking crime. "You should talk to Liliana."

Cam stilled his fists and ditched his fighting stance. "You think?"

"For sure." I tapped out a reply to my one true love. "If it's okay with the parents, she should hear it from you that we don't let this shit fly."

"She already knows that. She saw what Ranger did to the old man and figured out the rest on her own."

"Fucking lizard brain."

"What?"

"She's like Saint," I theorised. "All the trauma she's been through, it's given her preternatural senses."

"The fuck does that have to do with lizards?"

I sighed. "Never mind. Are you going to tell me where Ranger's fucked off to?"

"No."

"Fair enough."

We spent another hour working out in my basement before our fearless leader deemed his brain civilised enough to face the music.

Then we rode out, together, a circumstance that didn't come round all that often. I loved Cam almost as much as I loved Riv, but we wound each other up. Always had, always would. Tradition, innit?

At the compound, River waited for me in the yard, gaze narrowing with suspicion as me and Cam rode in together and parked.

I blew him a kiss.

He flipped me off and stomped into the garage.

Bless. "How are we doing this? Church?"

Cam hung his helmet, sweeping the yard with his gaze, taking note of where every brother was—all except Locke, who'd stayed home with the queen. "Yeah. Give me ten minutes with Nash first. I'll catch him up."

As he spoke, Lord Nashie limped from the clubhouse, his features wiped clean of the discomfort he'd endured every waking hour and beyond since the accident. Like impending fatherhood had erected an iron curtain in his brain and his own pain didn't matter anymore.

Also, he looked annoyed, which didn't suit his cute little face at all. "Thought we were meeting at nine?"

Cam swung his leg over his hog, fresh as a daisy, even after the two-hour slog he'd treated me to in the basement. "Got held up."

"That right?" Nashie was unconvinced. "Did you two fuck off for breakfast while I've been sat here like a twat?"

I intervened before Cam could engage peak O'Brian mode. "No breakfast was had. I just needed a minute with the King. Come with me, I'll butter your toast."

Despite Nash's easy-going temperament, he wasn't easily moved on the rare occasions he really did have the hump. He cemented his boots to the ground and ignored me, glaring at Cam. "I don't want to be here."

Cam held his hands up. "I know. I'm sorry, okay?"

Five, four, three, two ? —

Nash sighed, exhaling his annoyance until it was all gone. "You want church now?"

"No." Cam jabbed a thumb at the chapel. "You need to hear this first."

He strode away without waiting for a response, already halfway through a conversation that Nash hadn't started yet. But that was our Cammie, and Nash was used to it. He let Cam go and sidled closer to me.

"Why do you look like you ran six marathons on the way here?"

"The King had his Weetabix this morning." I stretched my aching arms over my head. "Mr Motivator's got nothing on this prick."

Nash's brows gave an adorable little twitch. "That's funny."

"As in hilarious or weird?"

"Weird. Saint blew through here a while ago and scooped up Embry to go wrestling in the woods."

"He always trains with the good father. Ranger's gone, and the rest of us ain't quick enough to keep up."

Nash conceded my point, but his frown remained, which gave me pause. Chattypants was an odd little Rebel, inexplicable at the best of times. But sometimes he did shit like he wanted us mere mortals to notice and break our brains trying to figure it out.

Was this one of those times?

I had no fucking idea, and as Folk crossed the yard to go smooch Decoy in the sales building, it left my head, pushed out by the prospect of an awkward sit down with the dads.

And awkward it fucking was. Cam told the story to a pared down table—no Alexei, no Locke, no River. He told all of it, even the part where he admitted he'd had no intention of sharing it until Mateo had called him out, and the existing security footage I'd yet to see.

That I didn't want to see.

Decoy declined it too. So did Embry.

Mateo and Folk watched it in stony silence and I braced myself. Not for Mats, but for the wrath of a man Alexei had seen fit to nickname after an ancient god.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you before." Cam tested the waters.

Folk didn't take the bait. He watched the footage again, before he set the phone down on the table. No force. No slam. No hurling it across the table into Cam's face. "It explains Ranger's behaviour." He dead-eyed Cam with lethal calm. "Not sure about yours."

Cam spread his hands, coming in peace, addressing all the dads, but mainly Folk. "I'm not making excuses, but I didn't find out myself until halfway through the fight. And by then, Ranger had it handled. I knew he wasn't going to kill anyone—I wasn't so sure about the rest of you."

Embry accepted that. Mateo already had before we'd sat down.

Decoy nodded.

Folk, though…

He slid the phone across the table. "Why were they still here?"

Cam frowned. "What do you mean?"

"All of you…" Folk speared his even gaze at me, Nash, Cam, and Saint. "…all of you said they had it coming. That you'd hated them for years. So why were they still here?"

Against my better judgement, I piped up with some utter brilliance. "There's lots of brothers I don't much care for. We can't kick them all out."

"Why not? There's still men out there who call Orla club snatch . What are their sons going to say to our daughters when they're older?"

Nash shifted in seat, clearly picturing Willow—eighteen and beautiful, and completely oblivious to the worst things in the world.

Mateo bristled too. Liliana was still young, but she wouldn't be much longer.

"Doherty's always been a cunt," Cam admitted. "But I didn't know he was capable of what he did that night. You're right about everything else, and it's a work-in-progress, but you have to believe I wouldn't keep anyone around who'd hit a kid."

"It's not a work-in-progress," Folk said flatly. "It's a failure."

Ouch. And it hurt Cam, I could tell. But the thing was, Folk wasn't entirely wrong. We still shared a club with a bunch of bigots I wouldn't choose to share oxygen with, and we had for years now, since Cam had taken the gavel from his dead dad and realised he needed to keep these arseholes around for no other reason than they were loyal soldiers. That we needed them to fight.

That need, though—I wasn't naive enough to believe it no longer existed, but the dark old days of scrapping with Crows and Sambinis…they were over, right?

I waited for Cam to say so. To make a commitment to do better. But Cam rolled his lips, saying nothing, and Folk's disgust cloaked the air like a mushroom cloud of parental disappointment. And he wasn't the kind of brother to walk away from that. He stayed in his seat, forcing Cam to face him. Forcing all of us who bore responsibility for the fact that cunts still walked among us.

It was a moment where Nash would usually play peacemaker, but he was on his phone, his mind elsewhere, and Embry didn't step up either.

That left me, but I couldn't find the will to spout some bullshit that Folk wouldn't accept anyway, because that amphibious motherfucker had made solid points, and it irked me beyond belief that we'd done nothing to make that right.

The meeting broke up, Nash straight on his hog to roar home to his beefcake lover and pregnant missus. Everyone else naffed off too. Only Embry lingered, stretching as he levered himself out of his seat.

"Put your back out, old man?"

The good father grinned. "Not yet. I just got battered by Saint."

Nashie's words came back to me. "Wrestling in the woods?"

"Something like that." Embry rubbed the base of his spine, then let his hands drop. "I thought I was getting sharper, then he unleashed that on me and I realised he's been going easy on me for months."

Sounded like Saint—to take care of our brothers even while fighting us. But the timing of his change of heart pinged my dragon senses. Why now, on the same morning Cam had switched to He-Man mode, when they both should've showed up to church with flushed cheeks and sex hair?

"What are you thinking?"

I zoned back in to Embry dissecting me from a distance far narrower than I was prepared for. "If you want to sit in my lap, just say."

Embry leaned against the table instead. "Deflecting, brother?"

"Yes." I wasn't a liar unless it was life and death. "I don't want to give voice to the devil in my head."

"Why not?"

"Cos it needs to stay there and die."

"Maybe it won't die until you say it."

And listening to me spout speculative nonsense was Embry's job. But still…

"Do you know where Ranger went?"

I shook my head. "Not for sure. It's probably up north, though. Shit's getting wild up there."

"So? Ranger doesn't give a fuck about any of that now Viktor's not there."

"Viktor?"

Embry cocked his head. "They're friends…or something. Why do you think he was so unhinged when Viktor was missing?"

"We were all unhinged then."

"Because of Locke."

"Maybe to start with. But I saw what they did to Viktor. He was freakishly chill about it, but I see that shit in my sleep sometimes."

Embry gave me a shrewd look. He hadn't mentioned the whacko silent migraine I'd treated Riv to a few days ago, but I knew he'd been told. By River , most likely, and wasn't that a fucking treat. "You're not the only one struggling with the idea of giving a fuck about Viktor."

"Eh?"

"Never mind." Embry's phone buzzed. He peered at a message that made his lips twitch, and probably something else, lucky little fucker. "Come find me if you need to talk, okay?"

"Six minutes do ya?"

"Seven and a half."

The good father grinned and wandered off. I got a fresh cuppa and went back to my yearly dose of brooding, praying I didn't pull the migraine muscle, all the while unable to curb the rising sensation of something brewing that had the potential to fuck us all up the arse again.

I didn't spend much time alone in the chapel unless I was cooking. Sometimes I let myself forget the history of the place. The hands that had built it.

My dad's hands.

I got up and moved to the window, conjuring a daydream where I heard Lark, Orla, and River running about screeching while me and Cam played football around them, and I wondered if our parents had ever imagined how hard we'd have to fight to still be here long after they'd gone.

It wasn't my favourite trip down memory lane, and I let myself search for a distraction.

I found it in Cam, up on the roof, phone pressed to his ear in the dead zone. Not an unheard of sight, but one I'd seen more of in recent weeks than made sense, even with my limited knowledge of gangster drama.

Who the fuck was he talking to?

And why the hell was Saint punching the code into the storage locker that hid an underground weapons cache? Unless he'd suddenly developed an interest in old TVs and broken snooker tables, that is.

I sipped my tea, letting my gaze drift between Cam and Saint as it began to rain, the wind picking up as if it brought mischief— brought trouble —ashore from the fucking sea. Couldn't put my finger on it, but there was zero doubt in my mind.

The Elders were up to something.