MATEO - Part One

MATEO - PART ONE

This is set some time after the previous scene when Embry has been recovering for a while and is starting to feel himself again.

"What does this cunt want now?"

I meant to grumble it in my head, but because I was the worst parent in the history of parents, I cursed it aloud. Loudly , actually, at Liliana's classroom door.

The cunt in question was her form teacher. And she wasn't that big of a cunt, but I was, and I was sick of the sight of this bird barrelling in my direction to tell me my kid had done something else I was supposed to tell her off for, when all I wanted was for her to come out of school a cleverer little shit than I'd ever be.

Mrs Evans reached the door too soon for me to hope that she hadn't heard. She blinked at me from behind her massive glasses. "Do you have a moment?"

No. I had to get to Ivy's classroom and Embry was home alone. This conversation had thirty seconds of my time before I tapped out. "Can it wait? I have to be somewhere."

"I could call you in the morning? Around eight?"

Fuck my life. If there was one thing I hated more than getting chewed out at the classroom door, it was the half-hour phone calls from hell if I couldn't get to a face-to-face meeting. "I can do it now, but I need to get Ivy Greene from year one first."

That shit was non-negotiable.

Mrs Evans let me go. I left her to round up Liliana and dashed to Ivy's classroom.

She came out with one shoe on, bag half open and dropping shit everywhere, a world away from her organised as fuck old man. Men. There's two of them now . Folk wasn't as obviously put together as Decoy, but I'd have bet my left nut he knew where he'd left a pair of socks twenty years ago.

I crouched to gather Ivy's reading books. "Didn't want these, eh?"

She tossed a handful glitter in my face.

"Oi, squirt." I waved it away. "Not in my eyes."

She laughed. "I'm trying to get it in your scar, silly. Like the pavement by the trees."

Pavement by the...

Fuck's sake. She meant the paving slabs Rubi had re-laid after Embry had almost bled to death on them. He'd poured glitter into the cement so it wouldn't become a place we all fucking hated. So the kids would play there instead, and his grand plan had worked on everyone except me.

Glitter. Diamonds. Blood. It made no difference. Nearly losing Embry had happened too many times for me to ever forget it. It was on my mind every minute of every fucking day, even now as I swiped gold and lilac from my face and tried to channel better men than me to face Liliana's stern-faced teacher.

"Asystole."

"Starting compressions."

"No pulse."

"Keep going."

Sometimes I dreamt that they'd stopped.

"Mat-Mat." Ivy got in my face, tracing the scar from my temple to my jaw, pushing glitter into the fucked-up skin without giving a single shit how ugly it was. "There. Now you're even prettier."

"I was pretty before?"

"Of course. You're almost as pretty as both my dads."

I'd take that. Decoy and Folk weren't Embry, no one was, but I couldn't deny those wholesome fuckers were hot.

"Come on." I rose, holding out my hand. "Let's go get Lili."

I led Ivy back to Liliana's classroom. Set her up at a table with her glitter pot, some glue, and mountain of sugar paper to fuck shit up with.

Liliana's teacher pointed at the other room.

I cemented my boots to the floor. "They both stay where I can see them."

Mrs Evans frowned as if I was the most unreasonable parent she'd ever had the misfortune of dealing with.

Twenty minutes later, I knew why.

I buckled Ivy into her car seat and rounded on my kid. "You called Mr Fitzgibbons a fucking incel? Do you even know what that means?"

Liliana treated me to the coolest of cool stares, a trait she'd learned from Alexei. "Of course I know what it means. I looked it up on the phone."

"Whose phone?"

"Yours."

Amazing. "Get in the car."

She shrugged. "Ok aaa y."

Her tone set my teeth on edge, but there was a part of me, a big part, that totally got off on her giving me sass. I loved that she was in my life to disrespect me. That I was around to endure it, and Embry was alive to listen to me complain about it. After all these years of carnage and chaos, it turned out that boring domestic shit made me happier than anything.

Decoy would understand. At least once he'd got over his five-year-old overhearing Liliana's teacher ream me about the incel thing.

I drove the kids back to his place.

Decoy wasn't there.

Folk was. He took one look at my face—my glittery fucking face—and laughed, and if I hadn't spent a good while worrying he'd die or some shit, I'd have been annoyed.

As it was, I let him make me coffee in the kitchen while the girls piled upstairs, enjoying the company of the man who'd taught my scared-of-the-water kid to swim like a fish, while Locke napped on the couch.

"Thought he was looking after you?"

Folk shrugged. "I'm boring company right now."

"You think he'd rather jump in the fucking sea with you?"

"I don't think Locke much minds what anyone does as long as they're nice about it."

I absorbed that, searching for whatever deeper meaning was passing me on by.

Didn't find it, and in my distraction, I left myself open to the penetrating stare of a brother every bit as perceptive as Saint, and as unafraid to voice what he saw as Embry.

"Want to talk about it?"

"Talk about what?" I sipped the coffee—the first one I'd had time for since the arse-crack of dawn. "If you mean Em, fuck no. I'm all right with waking up to him in the morning. I don't need to relive him fucking dying six times a day to get over it."

It came out rantier than I'd intended.

Folk eased onto a kitchen stool. Like Em, he was still moving like his joints were made of rusted tin, but his demeanour was pure chill. "I meant whatever you were fighting with Liliana about in the car."

"Oh."

"But we can talk about whatever you want. Or nothing at all."

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him I hadn't come here for a chat, but the lie gave me pause. I didn't have to be here. I could've dropped Ivy and tootled on home. To Em, who was currently alone. But here I was, scowling up a storm in Decoy's kitchen while Folk brothered me.

"Lili called her teacher an incel."

Folk's brows twitched. "Mrs Evans?"

"No. Fitzgibbons. The one with the animal-print ties and crocodile boots."

"Any context?"

"Another kid asked if he had a wife. He said no. Liliana had thoughts on why."

"And you don't entirely disagree with her?"

I scowled into my mug. "I said it sounded like a him problem and Mrs Evans told me to watch my tone."

Folk was better at hiding his amusement than most of my brothers. He wasn't Rubi or Nash. And maybe that's why I was talking to him instead of someone who'd flat out agree with me and vindicate my poor behaviour.

Then again, Folk knew this Fitzgibbons bloke. He'd seen him with his own eyes. Maybe he thought he was an incel too. Fuck, maybe Lili had heard it from him first…

No, that wasn't it. Folk had been a little fucked up this past month, but he had decorum in spades. Discretion . He didn't even swear, whether the kids were around or not.

That left just about everyone I'd ever met.

Except Decoy.

And probably Locke. He was the uber daddy. There was no way it was him.

Or Saint.

Fuck. Was it me? I thought back to the last time I'd had a few beers, but it was months ago. Before Em had got sick again, and I remembered nothing about that night except losing at darts to Nash and falling asleep in the bathroom.

Folk nudged me. "What are you thinking so hard about?"

"I'm trying to figure out where Liliana got the term incel from. I'm shit at most things, but I don't let her watch adult TV, and she doesn't have a phone. I'm thinking she must've heard someone say it, but who? And who were they talking about?"

Folk sipped his tea. I couldn't tell if he was contemplating the magic answer, or he already knew. This dude was tougher to read than Saint. And he was so fucking level-headed it was hard to reconcile that with the man who'd snipered Lorenzo Sambini and bombed the rest of his family into smithereens in the middle of the North Sea.

Then again, Nash was like that too. A sweetheart with a guitar who could twat a man's jaw clean off his face without breaking a sweat. Fuck me, I'd seen Nash kill a man and mean it, and I still knew he was the nicest bloke in the world.

So why are you worrying about who said a fucked-up word around your kid? It doesn't matter.

"You know, she could've heard it from another pupil."

My coffee mug was empty. I set it down and rubbed my jaw. I was too lazy to shave on the best of days, but recently I hadn't had time to even think about it and I was currently sporting enough scruff to be considered an actual fucking beard. "I know. I'm trying to work out why I even give a shit."

"Maybe you don't."

"Don't get clever with me, mate. I'm too dumb for the likes of you."

Folk rotated his wrists, flexing his fingers. "Do you want comfort or solutions?"

"Eh?"

"All right." He turned to face me a little more. "How about this for a counterargument: that you're worried about this because you think you should be, because your self-esteem as a parent is still a work-in-progress, when perhaps you're okay with Liliana picking out sketchy males for herself. It's a life skill, right? Like learning how to use language at the appropriate time?"

I gave it some thought. "So that's the bit I've fucked up? Teaching her to keep her opinions to herself at school?"

"I didn't say that." Folk finished his tea. "Let's think about what Mrs Evans actually told you off for. Was it that Liliana had formed a view she didn't like? Or that she used a word to express it that wasn't appropriate for her environment?"

"You think he's an incel too, don't you?"

Folk grinned. "Not relevant."

I disagreed, and it would probably take me all afternoon to unpick whatever simple lesson he was trying to teach me. But I appreciated the effort. I appreciated everything about Folk. "I should go."

I spoke around a hard yawn.

Folk eyed me. "Why don't you leave Liliana here for a bit? She can stay the night, or we can drop her off later."

I hesitated for no other reason than I was so lucky to have my daughter in my life that leaving her anywhere, even a place she considered a second home, felt like sacrilege. Then giggling reached me from the top of the stairs, and I knew if I gave her the choice she'd stay. And that's what this new life was all about. Choices. We didn't always have them, but this one was all hers.

Under Folk's knowing gaze, I moved to the bottom of the stairs. "Liliana?"

She popped up with as much glitter on her face as me. "What?"

"Rude."

"No, it isn't. It's a question."

"It—never mind. Do you want to stay here and play with Ivy for a bit? You can stay over if you want, and I'll take you both to school in the morning?"

"Is Dad okay?"

Dad. Embry . "He's fine. You can call him from Folk's phone if you're worried. Or I can come back and get you anytime."

"Nonono, I want to stay." Lilliana bounced on the balls of her feet. "Can you bring my other shoes tomorrow?"

"What other shoes?"

"The ones with the buckles. It's assembly tomorrow so I have to wear all the proper stuff."

"You're not wearing the proper stuff now?"

That earned me an eye-roll in place of a goodbye. She disappeared into the depths of Decoy's second floor, and I took my cue to fuck off.

The shoes she wanted were at Juana's house.

Or so I thought.

She sent me to Cam's.

Who sent me to Rubi's.

I told him the incel story and that fucker confessed immediately.

"I was talking about Bear." He spread his hands as if that explained everything. And…yeah. It did.

"When are we getting rid of him?"

Rubi grumbled into his protein shake, skin flushed from a workout in his basement. "He works for Riv. Has done for years."

"How many years?"

"Two? Three? I try not to think about it. Gives me a fucking rash."

"He's a good mechanic, though?"

Rubi legit pouted. Irritated, while I tried to keep my gaze off his couch—the one I'd fucked Embry on more times than I could count. "I liked Axel better."

"Which one was he?"

"The one who didn't act like Ser Meryn Trant's rapetastic second-cousin."

If there was a pop culture reference there, it was lost on me. I didn't read books or watch TV. I didn't know shit about shit unless it was real life. I felt Rubi's frustration, though. No one liked Bear. But we loved River—we loved Cam, and Rubi, and Orla, and we knew how much having him around meant to them. Which meant we had an unspoken pact not to thump Bear, based on the reality that he hadn't done anything to deserve it except exist.

Still, I couldn't shake the instinct to murder him, an urge validated by every emotion Rubi was trying so hard to push down. Rubi. The brother who spent most of his time trying to tame the rest of us.

I gave him a hug, took Liliana's shoes, and drove home, my craving for Embry at an all-time high, even with the fear I couldn't shift that I'd walk into our house to find him dead on the bathroom floor. Or, you know, staring into the fridge as if he was thinking of cooking something.

"Whatcha doing there, chaparrito? Searching for the meaning of life?"

"I'm searching for dinner." Embry shut the fridge, revealing himself in all his shirtless glory, inked skin and scars fighting for dominance. "Kids need to eat at regular times."

"Lili's staying at Ivy's."

"Thank fuck for that. We have potatoes and that giant cauliflower Rubi left on the doorstep."

"You don't want to eat that?"

Embry pushed his messy hair out of his face, somehow he'd escaped International Haircut Day. "I'd eat it if I had a fucking clue how to cook it."

Good enough for me. I could count on one hand the edible meals I knew how to make, but I'd smash them out eight times a day if it spared us the long year I'd spent trying to get Embry—a dude who'd lived for his fucking dinner before he'd taken that blade—to eat more than two mouthfuls of just about anything.

Wasn't sure about the mutant-sized cauliflower thing, though. I hacked it up and threw it in a tray, pretending it was a potato.

Embry pressed up against my back, brandishing a tin of hot-smoked paprika. "Put this on it."

"How much?"

"Lots."

I obliged and hurled the tray in the oven, instantly forgetting about it.

Embry.

No shirt.

Faded joggers hanging low on his hips.

Fuck dinner. I wanted to eat every inch of him .

Not a new feeling, but one I'd spent so long repressing way back when, falling back into it while he'd been at death's door had become autopilot. "I need a shower."

Embry stared. Then he shrugged and left the kitchen, leaving me knowing I'd fucked up, but too emotionally stunted to work out how.

I ditched my boots and trudged upstairs. The bathroom messed with my head, but I was learning, slowly, to accept the hot rush in my heart and the suffocating sensation that came with it. To live with it in the hope that it would get bored and fuck off.

That wasn't anywhere near close to happening, but it was getting better.

Maybe.

It wasn't getting worse.

I dressed in the dead silence of the house. Me and Em, we weren't used to living like this, and unless Lili was here, he didn't watch TV either.

Which meant he was asleep, rummaging through one of the book boxes he'd unearthed from who-the-fuck knew where, or—or—actually, I had no idea what else he could be doing. This house, man. It was so far removed from anything we were used to. So quiet when Liliana and our brothers weren't here.

It's no different to Rubi's house.

Fuck. Had we forgotten how to be alone together?

The thought drove me downstairs. It was early evening and the setting sun was streaming though the living room windows, casting light and shadows over Embry's face as he lay on the rug, scowling at the ceiling.

That glare…I'd never tell him, but I almost preferred it to his smile. The way it set his jaw and hollowed his cheekbones, and set off the motherfucking storm in his eyes.

I lay down beside him, on my belly, dumping my chin on my folded arms. "What's up?"

Embry swung his gaze to me. "Up?"

"Or down. Whatever. You seem ragey."

"If I was ragey, I'd have punched something."

True story, but there was still time. "I'm not a fucking mindreader, Em. If I'm pissing you off, just tell me."

Embry rolled sideways, bringing his face so close to mine that I could've kissed him if I wasn't distracted by other things. "What would that change?"

"Um. Me? Whatever it is I'm doing."

"You're not doing anything."

"Is that the problem then? Am I not giving you something you need?"

"Say those words again. In your head."

I licked my lips, his mouth drawing me in. "What?"

"Just do it."

"No."

Embry leaned closer. " Yes ."