Page 9 of Love Thy Brother
Alexei melted away. In my peripheral, I saw him go outside and cross the yard to the chapel. Cam’s gaze would usually follow him, but it was fixed on me, still raw with grief, distracting me from Alexei’s insinuation that whatever he wanted to talk about somehow involved River.
Cam reached for me. “Rubes...”
I shook him off. “Motherfucker,no. I’ve heard it from your soul a thousand times. I can’t hear it again, okay? Just fucking leave it.”
“You don’t know what I was gonna say.”
“I don’t care. I’m over it.” I strode away before he could answer, leaving him and Nash behind, guilt and heartache following me like a pernicious rash. I should’ve put Nash out of his misery. Hit him with a truth bomb that destroyed our friendship but relieved him of terminal blue balls. But like a gutless, lazy piece of shit, I’d let my rage for Cam overcome all else. Rage Cam didn’t deserve. Not all of it anyway, because it wasn’t Cam who’d done the one thing River had been so afraid of.
It wasn’tCamwho’d broken River’s heart.
Nope. That was all me, and now River hated me. Game over. And whatever Alexei wanted to talk about, that was never going to change.
3
RIVER
The black Transporter lurked at the end of the road, hidden among the SUVs and people carriers, blending in with the school run. I strolled past it and spun around, walking backwards to flip the goon behind the wheel the fucking bird.
He stone-faced me and I let my grin turn manic, like I always did, rinse and repeat, before I turned and continued on my merry way.
Away from spying eyes my smile died, brittle and unsupported by actual humour. I reached O’Brian’s Garage—myfucking garage—and let myself in, bracing myself for whatever carnage I’d find on the doorstep. Months ago, when the van had first appeared at the end of the road, I’d come in to a crude mock-up of the building and land redeveloped into holiday flats.
Last week it was my head on a spike.
Ho hum. Let them fucking try.
What if they do, though?I’d been fighting since the day I was born, but none of that mattered if I got jumped by more dudes than I could handle. I’d go down and I’d lose the one thing I had in the world that was all mine.
I unlocked the garage door and slipped inside, hand gripping the spanner I carried in my back pocket, gaze darting to every shadow and shape. Every murky corner of the cluttered space. Instinct told me I was alone, but my gut had been wrong in the past, and where had that got me?
Creeping into my own business like Burglar Bill, that’s where.
Satisfied there was no kill squad lying in wait, I dropped the spanner and drifted to the kettle. Naturally, I’d forgotten to buy milk for three days straight, so it was black tea all round. But I had sugar, and fuck me, after an all-nighter on mandy, I needed a hit of that.
I put the kettle on and picked up the solitary part of my life that was in order—the overflowing bookings diary. Jobs coming out of my ears. I could work day and night and still not catch up, and that’s how I liked it. Idle hands got me in trouble and Ineededto stay out of trouble.
Don’t want big brother taking the family business back.
As fate would have it, the next page of the diary contained the paperwork Cam had brought me a few months ago, signing the garage and surrounding land into my sole name, giving up the leverage he’d held over me since our parents had died. It was everything I wanted. Freedom. Disassociation from the club that had claimed so much from me.
The empty sensation in my belly every time I saw that document was un-fucking-fair. Maybe that was why I hadn’t buried it yet. Why I made myself look at it each and every day, still waiting for the reaction I’d counted on all these years.
Or maybe I was just coming down from the MDMA I’d boshed around midnight to cheer myself up. It made more sense than anything profound.
I wasn’t a profound kind of dude.
Rubi is.
Fucking hell. Comedowns usually left me cold as shit. Scratchy from the inside out. But everything about Rubi was hot, even the anger still burning bright in my heart.
I hate him.
Trouble was, I loved him too.
The kettle boiled. I poured water over a dusty teabag and dumped sugar into the chipped and cracked mug. It was old, like everything else. There was plenty of money rolling into the business, but somehow I never got round to the simplest things.
I shut the diary, abandoning the ownership documents for another day, and took my tea to the bay where I worked, tucked away at the back, leaving the front area for the other mechanics, Axel and Bear. They wouldn’t be in for a while yet, but I was an early bird. Always had been. No matter what had gone down overnight, I was always up with the sun.
