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I didn't have a bike. Or a phone. One was on purpose, the other was because I'd been too blitzed to ride the untracked hog I'd been burning around on all week, and now I wasn't altogether sure where I'd left it.

You didn't walk from Derby to Devon .

No. But that was about all I was sure of, apart from the fact that being this sick made me want to stick my head in a wood chipper, and that the feverish heat simmering in my blood wasn't a fucking hangover.

I coughed into my elbow and vaulted a fence onto a path that took me closer to Decoy's house than Cam's, an instinct I fought only because I wasn't in the mood to deal with Folk's mellow wisdom. I didn't want to be seen. Or understood. I wanted to sleep long enough that the anger burning my hollow gut went away and I didn't have to contemplate that Cam had lied to my face for fucking months and I hadn't seen it.

Worse, that he'd manipulated me to do it, and I hated him now as much as I loved him.

You don't hate him .

Maybe not. But I couldn't think about him without this wild fucking fury tearing me up, and I needed it to stop. I needed it gone before I laid eyes on him again, and I was running out of ideas to make that happen.

I bypassed Decoy's house and wound up at my van. It was late enough that the campsite was quiet, but the sense of people around me meant I didn't stick around longer than it took to realise someone—probably Rubi or Decoy—had been by to feed the birds.

It started to rain. Then it stopped and the summer breeze from the ocean dried my hair and let me know that I was getting close to the cottage on Beach Road.

I stuck to the shadows and approached from the front, something I rarely did if I was alone. Cam's hog was outside. There was no sign of Alexei, but that meant nothing. He was there. I felt it, and that was usually enough to prod me forward. To lure me indoors when my skin felt too tight for my body and I needed to climb a mountain or jump in the river to survive.

But my steps slowed, and I loitered by a neighbour's garage instead, avoiding the security cameras Alexei regularly hacked, wiped, and pointed in the opposite direction to record the ocean instead of any glimpse of us. I didn't look to see where they pointed tonight.

Even without a phone or a bike, this close to the house, there was little chance Alexei didn't know I was here.

It's why I didn't blink when the front door of the cottage opened a heartbeat later and Cam strode out. Though I relaxed when he headed for the bins instead of me, hauling them in from the street like a regular citizen. As angry as I still was with him—if that was even how I felt—I loved watching him do something so ordinary. Until the recycling bin caught on the kerb and he lost his shit, booting it across the road.

He stormed back inside and slammed the front door, loud and obnoxious. I cringed. Alexei hated mess and disorder, but with the neighbours watching, drawn in by Cam's commotion, I knew he wouldn't come out and fix it.

My skin itched and I balled my hands into fists, my pulse thrumming in time with the headache battering my skull—a pain that made sense now I'd had the time and space to think about it.

Karma .

I'd hurt Ranger.

Now fate was hurting me.

That bin, though.

For fuck's sake.

It irritated me that it took something so simple to break down the wall I'd been slamming against since that fucking night up north. Deep down, I knew it wasn't the stray bin that had got under my skin—that it was seeing Cam so frayed. But I felt like kicking the bin too.

I didn't; I wasn't in the mood for the noise. I picked it up, carrying it silently down the side of the house—where Alexei would definitely see me—and slipped in the back door.

By now, it was early morning, sea mist beginning to give way to golden sunshine. I expected to find Cam in the kitchen, staring moodily into a coffee mug if he was too pissed off to cook breakfast, but he wasn't there, and the house was eerily still enough that doubt crept into my rattled brain. I'd smoked a lot of weed over the past few days and I was out of practice. Maybe I'd hallucinated him kicking the bins across the street.

Or, more likely, he was upstairs wrapped up in Alexei, and whatever they were doing was enough to distract Alexei from my presence.

I wasn't in the mood for that either. I took my boots off and climbed the stairs, listening for the telltale signs of wild monkey sex happening in Cam's bed.

It's your bed too .

I didn't acknowledge that thought. I reached the landing and moved to the open bedroom door, and the first thing that occurred to me was that there was only one man in the bed I'd built six years ago for Cam to fuck other people in.

The other was that Alexei hadn't heard me coming because he was asleep.

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