EMBRY

EMbrY

The next few days were awful. Full of grief and lies, by omission as we told Folk and Decoy nothing—they weren't here, there was nothing they could do—and literal as it was left to me to bullshit Liliana that Cam, Saint, and Alexei had gone on holiday and left her Saint's cat to look after.

Jonah. The name meant something, but Saint had never told me what. And as the days slipped by with no word, it became more and more clear that he hadn't told me, or anyone else, lots of fucking things.

"It's got to be that clusterfuck going down at the ports." Mateo glared at the horizon from the compound roof, frustration seeping out of him after a fruitless search of The Elder's favourite haunts, collective and individual. "But why? We're supposed to be done with that shit."

"Is it ever really over, though?"

Mateo turned to Nash, who'd braved his discomfort with heights to crawl out of the window and join us. "What do you mean?"

Nash eased himself off the ledge, his leg holding with barely a limp, the physio he'd been cracking through with my cousin's husband slowly working its magic. "When you give a shit like Cam does, there's always a reason to fight."

"Fight who?"

Nash spared me a glance. "Now that, I don't know. And we shouldn't talk about it here. Without Alexei or Folk here to run bug checks, I'm fucking nervous."

"I did the checks." Mateo lit a cigarette. "Alexei took me back to school a few weeks back. Like the motherfucker thought I'd be taking a test at the end. You think this was why?"

Honestly? Who knew. Alexei did baffling shit at the best of times. Saint too. Cam, though. I usually knew when something was up, even if I didn't know what. But lately, aside from him working out more, I hadn't noticed anything different.

Saint's been training more too . With me. I had the bruises to prove it, and I wondered now if he'd been kicking the shit out of me for the past month for a reason.

I had a sherbet lemon in my pocket. I unwrapped it and stuck it in my mouth, rolling it around with my tongue.

It was a move that often distracted Mateo from just about anything, but not today. He remained deep in thought, and the conversation dried up, leaving me to sift through memories, still searching for any little thing that could've led us here. But apart from Cam and Saint sparring a lot, what the fuck was there?

Alexei .

I thought back to the last time I'd seen him. At Juana's house. He'd come by to help Liliana with her homework, and my presence, chilling in the living room after story time with Hope had seemed to surprise him. As if he'd expected me to be anywhere but hanging out with my husband's ex and their kids.

Plausible on paper, but our lived reality was a world away from that. Some days I spent more hours with Juana than I did Mateo, and Alexei knew that. Everyone fucking did.

He was off his game.

More than that, he'd smelt weird.

To me, at least.

"Why do you smell like Tropicana?"

"I do not know what that is." Alexei barely glanced up from Liliana's French book. "If I smell of anything it is the grass Saint likes to roll around in, no?"

That had thrown me. By the time I'd figured out it was a deflection, not a rare sex joke about Saint, he'd gone, and no one else noticed the citrus scent that had followed him out.

Bike engines pierced the air. I moved closer to the roof edge, tracking the rattle of Rubi's bobber and the smoother rumble of Locke behind him as they swept through the gates and into the yard.

Rubi's face was almost as familiar to me as Mateo's. But the sinking sun cast a shadow over his features, hiding his mood, and Locke was harder to read as he ditched his helmet and spotted the huddle we'd formed on the roof.

Rubi wasn't much of a climber. He took the indoor route.

Locke shimmied up the drainpipe with ease, stronger than ever in so many ways, and as drawn to Nash as I was to Mateo.

Rubi stood alone, a deep frown creasing his face. "Cam's house was clean. Saint's van too."

"What about Alexei's place?"

Rubi shook his head, hair escaping from the mess of a knot at the nape of his neck. "Locked down, unless he left me a clue I'm not seeing."

"What did he leave you?"

Rubi shuffled closer to me and took a seat, leaning against the wall with a heavy sigh. "That patch he's never worn and the password to the company Quickbooks."

"You didn't have that already?"

"I lose track. Fucking lunatic changes it every eight seconds. Or at least, he did until a few days ago."

When The Elders had disappeared in the night, leaving their bikes and phones at Cam's beachfront cottage, Cam's car in the yard, and three envelopes in the hands of the brothers they'd chosen to fill their shoes.

Nash for Cam. Mateo for Saint.

Rubi for Alexei.

"I thought he'd pick Folk." Mateo unwittingly tagged on to my train of thought. "He's a thousand times better at everything than I am."

Rubi flicked a clump of moss across the roof. "Oi. None of that."

"True though, innit?" Mateo lit yet another smoke. "Folk's forgotten more than I'll ever know. If I was gonna pick someone big enough to fill Saint's shoes, it could only be him."

Nash hadn't spoken in a while—a new trait I'd noticed in him since Orla had revealed her pregnancy and the dangers she faced carrying it to term. For the first time in the years I'd known him, the club wasn't anywhere close to being Nash's priority. Which made me ponder why Cam had left the president's patch for him. Whether he hadn't seen what I'd seen, or he'd simply had no better choices.

The other possibility was that Cam had every intention of coming home and relieving Nash of the temporary responsibility, but as the radio silence stretched on and on, it became harder and harder to believe.

My phone rang.

Joe.

My cousin.

He never called me, but that had changed since we'd started work building the new stable block on his farm—a job entirely conceived and financed by Cam, Saint, and Alexei. Had they known they wouldn't be here to see it?

I accepted the phone and turned my face to the wind. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, unless you've been dumping bikes on my land."

"What?"

" Bikes, " Joe repeated. "I just found a Ducati in the ditch around Shadow's field. Looks like it's been there a while."

"What kind of Ducati?"

Nash tuned back into the world as Joe's exasperation growled down the line. "How the fuck would I know? It's got two wheels—that's all I've got. Now come and get the fucking thing before I light it on fire and tip the ashes on your doorstep."

Joe hung up before I could tell him that no one I knew rode a Ducati, and even if they had, they wouldn't possess the audacity to set foot on Carter family land. Even the Crows had never done that. On brand for my big-hearted, short-tempered kin. And I knew better than to ignore him.

I relayed the information to the brothers around me.

Locke rose without missing a beat. "I'll come with you."

"No." Nash finally spoke. "You've been out already."

" You haven't slept."

"No one has." Nash moved to Locke's side and kissed him. "But I could do with the ride, and I'll feel better about leaving if I know you're with her."

Orla. She was in the sales building, choosing to keep busy while River guarded her, like he had since he'd absorbed the news that Cam had gone. He only left her side at night, and he'd been…quiet. They both had, and it made me nervous. The last time I hadn't known what any of the O'Brians had been thinking, they'd choked Priest to death with his own sick cock.

He deserved it .

Couldn't disagree, and in the time it took to think my way through that, Nash had moved to my side. It was time to go.

I kissed my husband goodbye and jumped off the roof, landing on the picnic table below as Nash emerged from the clubhouse and moved to the recovery pick-up.

We rumbled out of the yard, darkness closing in as we headed south and into Cornwall, following my roots home.

My cousin's farm lay inland from the coast. I knew every twist and turn in the roads and lanes like the back of my hand, and I led Nash to the ditch Joe had complained about with little conscious thought.

He was waiting on me—Joe, sitting on the fence, glaring in the dark.

"It's not one of ours," I told him before he could take my head off.

"How'd you know?"

"We ride Harleys."

"You don't."

"I don't ride a Ducati either." I slid out of the truck. "And you fucking know that. Why are you up my arse about some heap of junk in your ditch?"

Joe put the super in superstitious. He hopped off the fence and reached me as Nash approached from where he'd parked the noisy truck further down the lane.

He sniffed the air—Joe, not Nash. "Smells like trouble."

"Since when?"

"I don't fucking know."

"Thought you said it had been here a while?"

"I said it looked like it had." Joe pointed at the far corner of Shadow's field. "But the truth is it could've been there a year. That's how long it's been since I've found the time to clear the ditches."

"No one else has?"

Joe fired a glare at Nash—one he didn't really mean. Gorger Nash might've been, but Joe liked him. Most people did. "No one else can . Unless they want to get trampled to death."

The alternative was an intruder shot Joe's rowdy stallion for getting in their way, but I kept that to myself and gestured for him to show me the offending Ducati. To an outsider, Joe was a moody bastard, but I knew him better than that. He was my family—my blood, and for whatever reason, this bike had got under his skin. He wanted it gone, and even with every other fucking thing going on in my life right now, I'd do everything I could to make that happen.

He led us across the field, a feat only possible because Shadow was stabled for the night, a rare occurrence for the wild horse, especially over the summer. "It's by the sycamore, all smashed up. Like some cunt chucked it down from the road."

Nash moved to descend the gnarly slope to the trickle of a stream. I stopped him. "I'll go."

"It'll take both of us to haul it up."

"Joe can help me."

Joe grunted, but slipped ahead anyway. He knew how badly Nash had been injured last year. How hard he'd worked with Harry to heal his shattered bones and pulverised muscles. Also, he knew the land better than God. Following him down made more sense.

He had a torch. Under the canopy of the trees—bark-less, thanks to Shadow—he showed me the mangled Ducati. Black and too messed up for me to see the model, but I knew enough about high end sport bikes to tell it was a good one. The kind Alexei would ride, which gave me pause. He'd never replaced or repaired his smashed-up Yamaha, sticking with the matte-black Ninja that he rode like a demon. And he'd never mentioned a Ducati. But he hadn't mentioned lots of things, and the narrowest possibility that this was connected to him made my skin crawl. Had something happened to him that he'd never told us? Had he been in danger this whole time?

Logic told me that it made more sense that Alexei had come for the rider of this bike, not the other way round. But…not here. He knew Joe's farm. He knew Joe—he knew Shadow. He'd never dump a bike here unless he'd wanted Joe to find it, and I couldn't think of a single reason for that to be true.

My brain didn't often slip into overdrive. I was a thinker, I knew that, but over the past few years, my mind had settled, content to be loved. To be in love, and alive to appreciate it. I had a husband. I had kids. I was an only child with brothers and sisters I loved more than blood.

But this bike…I put my hands on it to haul it from its grave and it sparked a reaction I couldn't name. A connection, however fucking tenuous.

We heaved it to where Nash waited with the torch. He swept the light over it, his face unreadable. Then it wasn't, and I knew he felt it too—more than that, he saw it, he had it, the knowledge I lacked. "What is it, brother?"

Nash turned to me with hollow eyes. "It's Viktor's bike."