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“Tell me,” I snap. “Along with who the hell these belong to. Do that, I might help you. If you don’t…I’m calling Saint.”

The guns belonged to the long-disbanded Dog Crows MC. And Dav was going to hide them in my barn. What’s left of them anyway.

I make him dig them up, one by one, and pile them in the shadows of an old tree as the sun begins to rise. Somehow we manage to smooth the earth and load them into my truck before dawn hits for real.

Then we hit the road, tossing tiny pieces of firearms off cliffs all along the southwest coast until we have none left. No gun touches my hands, I make sure of it. And I loiter in a clifftop car park while Dav burns the club patch we found with the weapons in a remote cave somewhere too far away for me to see him.

The Dog Crows MC.

I didn’t tell Dav, but I’ve heard the name before. My brother’s best friend rode with them for years—Folk rode with them for a hot minute before he wound up with the Kings, and all I really know about them is that those years made my brother sadder than any war overseas ever did.

It’s late.

Well past midnight.

We’ve lost a whole day on the farm. But as I stand alone on a shingle beach in the middle of nowhere, I can’t find many regrets, save that I left Oscar in bed without saying goodbye, and the long hours I’ve spent with Dav today feel like poison beside what I feel when I’m with him.

We slept together.

Literally.

And we have before. But last night felt different. So different. Not because we didn’t fuck around, but because we didn’t need to, and the distinction feels significant, as if I’ve fallen headfirst into something I’ve been missing my whole life. I lost my virginity a month before I got sick. No one warned me that one day, years later, someone might steal another kind of it entirely. Or that sleeping beside someone could change a man as much as sleeping beside Oscar has changed me.

“Okay, lad.”

I don’t blink as Dav appears in front of me.

I don’t speak either, but he doesn’t squirm. He’s stopped doing that over the past few hours, as though he’s shifted a weight from his shoulders with every drop. He even looks taller. Younger. It’s annoying, but I don’t begrudge him it. “All done?”

He nods, sticking to the unspoken agreement not to talk to each other too much on this shady as hell side quest. But now it’s over, I’m not feeling the silence anymore.

“Why dig them up now?”

Dav shrugs. “Didn’t feel right leaving ‘em there when you were working so hard to bring the place back to life.”

Sweet. But I’m not a fool. “What’s the real reason?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Not really.”

Dav sighs and takes his hat off, scrubbing a weathered hand through his scruffy hair. “I ain’t lying, but it was for my boys too. I’m trying not to be a man they hate, and I couldn’t do that knowing I’d left something so wicked on your land. They wouldn’t like that.”

I’m confused. Far as I know, the Bosanko family have no connection to my farm beyond the nightmare today has turned into. “I don’t mean anything to your boys.”

Dav’s eyes gleam bronze in the dark. “Not yet, maybe. But keep up with Oscar and you will. He’s kin to them.”

“That would make him kin to you too.”

“Yeah, it would.”

An understanding I can’t decipher yet expands between us. The kind of moment that lasts forever. But I don’t have that long tonight. I need to get home and lock the chicken house—if the foxes haven’t got them already. And…

I need to see Oscar. Need to be close to him. Even if I just walk past his house and breathe the same damn air.

Because you love him.

Do I?