Page 55 of Love Thy Brother
Was I? My ribs and knee throbbed something holy, but everything else seemed to work. “I’m okay.”
“Are you lying?”
“Not this time.” I flopped onto my back, taking him along for the ride, pulling him on top of me. “Areyouhurt?”
River searched my gaze, hair dripping, blood oozing slowly from a graze on his cheekbone. “I’m good.”
I held his jaw, turning his face side to side. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s nothing.”
There wasn’t a single thing about this that wasnothing. But his agitated stare was perversely steady. However he felt about our unscheduled swim, physically, he seemed okay.
“We should get out of here,” he said. “In case they come back.”
If they came back, they needed to face an army of brothers. I patted my pockets for my phone.
River read me and rasped out a laugh. “Whoever you’re thinking of calling, it’s not gonna happen. You think your phone survived that?”
He had a point, but what he’d forgotten was that I was the undisputed champion of being prepared for every eventuality. Even surprise drownings.
I fished my phone from my sodden jeans. Sea water dripped from the case, but it didn’t worry me. See, that case, thanks to Folksie, was dive proof. We’d stayed up one night and he’d built it after I’d bet him anything like it would make my phone the size of a motherfucking Gameboy.
At the time, the joke had been on me. Right now, I was grateful that drunk Rubi was a pugnacious idiot who argued with everything until it smacked him in the face.
I pressed the side button and tapped my code in. To River’s obvious surprise and mydelight, the screen lit up, bright and unscathed. “It survived. Whatever cunt was in that car ain’t gonna be so lucky.”
River knocked the phone out of my hand. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
“What?”
“If you call my brother, we’re done here.”
I sat up, leaving my heroic phone where it lay. “I have to call him. Someone tried to kill you.”
“You don’t know that. It could’ve been an accident.”
“Oh yeah? Where’s the sirens then? The lifeboats? If that cunt drove at you by accident, you don’t think he’d be wondering where the hell you went?”
In the soggy dark, River glowered at me. “Don’t be a sarcastic prick.”
“I’m not being sarcastic. They’re genuine questions to counter your fucked-up theory.”
Questions River was only prepared to answer with a violent shiver. A body-shaking convulsion I felt inmybones.
Fuck me, it was too cold to be having an argument no fucker was gonna win without plain facts. Withoutproofthat someone had planned the disaster we were currently living to be a thousand times worse.
They tried to kill him.
And Cam needed to know.
But maybe not quite this second.
“All right.” I nudged the phone with my foot. “Confiscate it. Silence me. Whatever makes you happy.”
River narrowed his glare but swept the phone from the ground anyway and stood to shove it in his wet pocket.
It took me longer to get up.
