1. Viktor

[ 1 ]

VIKTOR

THEN

I was fifteen when I found myself alone in a windowless room with nothing but an unfinished book for company.

A French novel.

I did not speak French. Not then. And without the sun, the room had been too dark for me to see the words. But it still bothered me more often than was logical what could’ve happened if I’d read that book instead of burning it for warmth.

“I thought Russians liked the cold.”

Back in the present, I turned my head in the direction of the gruff voice, gifting myself a face-on view of my companion in the dank dirt. He’d been by my side for barely an hour and I was already, as always, entranced by this piercing contradiction of a man.

Onyx eyes.

Raven hair.

A mouth as coarse as the concrete beneath my knees, and yet his beauty was as clear as the crystal waters I could see from my bedroom a thousand miles away.

Beauty.A strange thing to contemplate in the grimy cold of the industrial port. In a world as ugly as this. But this man, this outlaw biker by the name of Ranger, he made it easy. A phenomenal distraction that was nothing new. He had caught my eye a year ago, maybe two, and this was the fourth night in a row we had manned this look-out post together.

“I do not like the cold.” I answered a question that was likely rhetorical. “I am used to it. There is a difference.”

Ranger blew on his hands, ink as dark as his eyes staining his skin. As dark as the sky above us and the shadows drowning this damp concrete pit. “Why do these fucked-up wars always happen in winter?”

“Wars happen in the sunshine too.”

“Not up here, they don’t.” He slid me a glance that turned dry as I returned it with a ready smile, his stare laced with bemusement. As if he expected me to be someone else.

He expects me to be Ivanov.

Of course he did. Discord gripped my chest. Ranger was not the only one who looked at me and saw the man that had come before, but somehow, it lanced deeper coming from him.

Because you like him. I did. He was easy to like. Easy to look at when the target that demanded my attention was over the wall and across the port. “This is the last night.” I broke the silence that had stretched between us. “Tomorrow we strike.”

Ranger paused in the act of lighting a cigarette, the filter caught between teeth that were remarkably straight and white for a man who did not seem to take much care of himself.

A lock of his inky hair fell into his face and I itched to brush it back.

I took his cigarette instead. Ranger did not like to share. Get your own was his response to most people who tried. With me, he did not seem to mind, and I exploited it almost as much as I wanted to know how his hair would feel between my fingers.

He bewitches you.

I shut Jake out. Shh, brother. Mostly because he was right, and I did not need his smugness tonight. I needed my own for when I told him the cartel responsible for the murder of his father had been removed—for now—from the ports we controlled in northern England, obliterating a trafficking route we had targeted for a long time. Bringing us breathing space we desperately needed. And I needed this to be over, so I could eat, sleep, and take my dog for a walk in the mountains.

We are a long way from that.

Ranger didn’t answer my decree for tomorrow. He hunkered down again, not lighting another cigarette, trusting that I’d give the first one back.

I did. And knowing that his lips were somewhere mine had already been helped keep out the cold.

So did his nearness in the narrow space we’d commandeered. The smoke and sandalwood scent that clung to him, reminding me of the crystal shop across the street from the closest thing I had to a home in this country. Reminding me that I had not been there in weeks.

I would like to sleep soon.

And perhaps the only thing stopping me was an unwillingness to leave the body heat radiating from the man beside me.

He finished our shared cigarette.

I offered him a chocolate bar from my pocket, devouring the light that flared in his obsidian eyes. The belligerent grin still hiding behind his menacing features.

“Cheers, Vik. You’re more fun to sit in a hole with than that other mad bastard.”

Ivanov. Alexei. He had been everywhere I turned for the last decade.

He’s not here now. “You think I am fun?”

Ranger unwrapped the chocolate and shoved half of it in his mouth, passing the rest back to me. “Don’t get too excited. I think you’re more fun than a dude who made me sit behind a motorway bridge for a week and not smoke. And he definitely didn’t feed me Lion bars.”

I laughed, low and dark, in keeping with our surroundings. Again, it seemed to confuse Ranger, and I derailed my obsession with the way he sucked chocolate from his thumb by casting my thoughts back over every interaction we’d ever had. Granted, most had been when he was a soldier of the Dog Crows, but had I never laughed or smiled then?

Maybe not.

The men we were watching called it a night and left the port. I tapped orders into an encrypted burner phone, saving myself the task of following them for now, though I would catch up with them later.

Ranger sensed the shift in the air and dug out his own phone, swiping at the screen.

I did not pretend to not look, and the artwork on his music app caught my eye. “The third album is better.”

His brows ticked up. “How do you know?”

“How do you think?”

Ranger regarded me, curiosity dancing through his coal-dark gaze. “You don’t seem like a music bloke.”

“No?” I powered off the burner phone and tucked it in my pocket. Tomorrow I would crush it and drop it in the sea, but for now it was my most treasured possession. “What kind of bloke do I seem like then? To you?”

“One who slots people for a good time.”

He said it like it was nothing. And to me it was. It had to be or I would not walk this earth. “This is my job, not my hobby. You understand the difference, no?”

“How old are you?”

I had dirt on my clothes. Stones embedded in my knees and elbows. Shifting onto my side, I brushed them off. “That is not an answer.”

It was a moment when Ranger could’ve unfurled his long body from the ground, but he stayed where he was, facing me. “I’m trying to figure you out.”

“Why?”

“There’s a lot of fighting to do up here. If we don’t get killed, we’ll be around each other a lot.”

“You already think I’m fun.”

“We’ve been over that.”

“We have, but your definition of fun concerns me.”

His gaze intensified. I was used to staring down the barrel of a gun—metaphorically and literally. But his depthless stare gripped me. His rough voice, as it wrapped around a single syllable. “Yeah?”

“Smoking and snacks?” I clarified. “This is your bar?”

“Sounds all right to me.”

“That is my point.”

Again, Ranger could’ve moved. Again, he didn’t. He leaned closer, a challenge rising in his eyes. “You’re only gonna win this if you tell me what you get up to in your spare time.”

Sandalwood flooded my senses. “I do not have much spare time.”

“But you like EDM?”

“I do.”

“What else?”

“I like it to sound good.”

“You have a flashy system, don’t you?”

Chuckling, I named the one thing in my English home that I actually cared about.

Ranger groaned and covered his face with his arms, rolling onto his back as if we were in bed together, not still huddled on the cold ground. “Stop. That shit’s like porn to me.”

I took a breath—don’t. Clamped my mouth shut, glad Ranger didn’t seem the type to hang on anyone’s every word, let alone mine. Searched out Jake and found him with plenty to say. Not where you sleep, brother.

He was right and I knew it. And in any case, I had no plans to go home anytime soon, but the urge to take Ranger with me when I did was sudden and sharp, hooking into me deep enough to leave marks when the feeling faded.

This man. I did not know him.

But I wanted to.

Ranger let his arms drop and sat up. His hair fell into his face again. He shoved it back with a careless hand and rose to his feet, leaving me where I lay. “Tomorrow, yeah?”

“Tomorrow.” I mourned the loss of him as he moved away from me, heading in the direction I assumed he’d left his bike. “I will let you know when.” Because I had his number. Or at least one for a phone he carried. In our world, sometimes that was as good as it got.

Ranger was still walking.

I called his name. In Russian.

He turned, walking backwards beneath the fading light of the stars, brow cocked, and it made me wonder if it mattered what language I spoke. If he’d hear me regardless.

Don’t.

I caged a sigh. “Be careful where you sleep tonight.”

What was left of it, anyway, a point Ranger raised by tipping his gaze to the sky and back again in the time it took for a beat to pass.

Heavy.

Complex.

For reasons I did not quite understand, I felt compelled to fill the silence. “This city is not safe.”

Ranger grinned, a slow, wonderful, and terrible thing. “Worried about me?”

“No.” I finally rolled to my feet but made myself stay where I stood, maintaining the distance between us. “But I need you well rested tomorrow. I need you to fight.”

“I’m gonna fucking fight. You think I’m here for the view?”

Honestly, I did not know why he was here, save that he was the only soldier the Rebel Kings would vouch for this far north of their founding chapter. That he’d willingly answered their call to arms was an intrigue I’d yet to puzzle out. “Tomorrow, Ranger. Wait for my call.”

Ranger’s voice was as affecting over the phone as it was in person. And I knew it would be. It was my reason for calling him when a simple text message would’ve done. Why I rode into a fight to the death with a shadowed smile on my face, buoyed by the one-word grunt he’d allowed me before he’d hung up.

It was a shame my good humour could not last.

“That cunt’s got a gun.”

“He does,” I agreed. “He did not have one yesterday.”

Beside me, already grimy and bloodied from the guards we’d taken out to get this far, Ranger curled his lip, discontent radiating from him. “Let me guess. You’ve got one too, right? Hidden up your fucking arse?”

Not quite. It was strapped to my leg, but I didn’t want to use it. The silencer had broken and the port wasn’t a remote field in the Devonshire countryside. Around here, a firefight would be heard, and I lacked enthusiasm for the complications that would bring. In and out. I had told Jake this would be simple, saving our energy and resources for the wider conflict bearing down on us, and it would be so.

I took a breath, tempering the adrenaline pumping my blood. Slowing it with practised ease. I was a mercenary, not a soldier, but I was built for war. My whole life, I’d known nothing else. Sweat and rain dripped from my brow. Blood too, if I thought about it enough.

I didn’t.

I swiped it with my forearm and gave orders to the men around us to fan out and block the exits, keeping Ranger with me.

To protect him?

No. Ranger was a strong fighter. Fast and furious, with a penchant for kicking hard enough to puncture a man’s kidney. He needed nothing from me, unless the target in my sights got the chance to raise his weapon. Bullets did not care how well a man fought. Or that I did not want Ranger to die.

“Get down,” I murmured, leaving his crude question unanswered. “And stay down until we reach him.”

Ranger nodded. “Left leg?”

“On my signal.”

There was no time to hold his gaze. I pushed away that I wanted to. I pushed everything away except the target before me, and we hit the ground, crawling through gritty puddles, avoiding the surveillance cameras Jake had glitched before we’d engaged. Up here, our enemies were not illiterate Crows. It was not unthinkable that someone inside would notice. That they already had.

They could shoot him where he lies.

On weathered tarmac, following my orders.

I could not name the emotion that spurred me to crawl faster. It was not fear—the ability to be truly afraid had left me a long time ago. But this feeling, it resonated the same and I moved with a sharper focus.

We were metres from the target, the man with the gun now closer to me than Ranger.

Slowing, I raised my hand.

In sync, Ranger eased to a stop, his savage stare a beacon in the dark, locked on me. Intense. Profound. And of course, in perfect contradiction with the smirk twisting his lips.

I tipped my head. Ready?

He bared his whiter-than-white teeth, his face more visible to me with his hair tied back. It’s time. Let’s go.

Indeed. I dropped my hand and we struck together, rising from the ground so fast that the guard did not hear us coming. He did not see us, and he felt nothing but the disarming sensation of his legs giving way beneath him, powerless to the impact of our silent assault.

He crumpled.

I killed him, and I did not feel bad about it. These men had trafficked children. Exploited and discarded them. Murdered them. They deserved to die more painfully than I had time for. So we killed them all, moving swiftly through the port outbuilding, my gloved hands and Ranger’s fast feet more than enough as my fears of detection proved unfounded.

A dead man sprawled before me. A Sambini soldier, like the others, despite the trafficking routes through the port falling into the hands of a cartel alliance six months ago.

Interesting.

But not unexpected. The Sambini clan were snakes. Disloyal. Dishonest. Opportunistic. If my suspicions of them courting the Eastern European mobs had been baseless before, they were not now.

Smells like Aldea.

We collected the bodies and loaded them to be delivered to a place our enemy would find them. A warning. A message: the port was ours. For now, at least, but that was a problem for another day.

The adrenaline of the vicious fight began to fade. Battle wounds made themselves known, but I paid them no heed. What was a little pain? A bruise. A scrape. It was nothing to me. Ranger concerned me more.

He’s bleeding.

From a wound somewhere on his head, blood streaking his face, staining his skin and unshaven jaw. A macabre sight that captivated me, but he did not seem to notice the injury as he moved through the cramped building, sweeping every corner with an efficiency I had not asked of him.

My men had already cleared the scene. There was no one left to kill⁠—

Ranger spun around. His gaze had been fierce all night, but it blazed now, violence spilling from every limb as he sprang forward in the small space, the pipe he’d chosen as a weapon lifted to bear.

He was fast, his tall frame unimpeded by the lean, wiry muscle that clung to his bones. The men around me—my men—were too slow to catch him as he charged me, the pipe already high enough to bring down on my skull if I did not react with a lethal strike of my own.

Instinct.

Perception.

Those split-second decisions that kept you alive or ended your life. That I was here to face the heady streak of aggression blurring across the room was testament to the fact that I’d always been good at them.

Or lucky.

Regardless, though logic implored me to reach for my gun, my blade, to bunch my fists and fight, I did not move. I held firm. I held still, not bracing for impact but for the moment.

Ranger hurtled closer. I smelled sandalwood and brutal fury. I smelled fear, but not his. Not mine. I smelled fresh blood as I ducked and his pipe made contact with a faceless soul behind me.

The man was dead before he hit the ground, Ranger’s aim strong and true. An incursion that lasted less than the time it took for the men around us to realise it was happening.

I rounded on them, furious Russian expletives puncturing the quiet. We were not like the Rebel Kings. With Pavel Sidorov dead, most of our bonds were forged of fear and money, not love. And perhaps it was starting to show.

Ranger stepped away, the outsider in the force I’d brought to bear against the men occupying the port. He lit a cigarette and went back to scouting the building. This time I did not question it. And I believed him when he returned to tell me the site was clear.

By then it was time to move out. The vehicle transporting the dead men rumbled away. I assigned a crew to hold the location. Directed the rest to vehicles and sent them home.

All but one.

Ranger loitered under the damp sky, blood still dripping down his face. It wasn’t a lot, but I was drawn to him all the same. As if I could not take another breath without taking a closer look, my pulse thumping louder than it had the multiple times a man had tried to kill me tonight. “You are okay?”

“I’ll live.” The rain heavied. “Not sure your bodyguards should.”

“I do not have bodyguards.”

He exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke. “That explains how some mope was two seconds from shanking you and no fucker noticed.”

“I noticed.”

Ranger snorted. “No, you didn’t.”

“Perhaps not,” I conceded. “But I would have.”

I had to believe it. The alternative was that Jake had been right about Ranger’s effect on me, and I had not heard my would-be assassin coming because I was fixated on him.

You would have heard him. You’ve survived too much to be caught off guard like that.

True. But I was starting to realise that I had not felt the things I felt when I looked at Ranger at any point in my life, and it was . . . distracting. It was dangerous. And I liked it too much to move aside and let him leave. “You are hurt.”

Impatience flared in his midnight gaze. “Is this a thing?”

“Is what a thing?”

“Having every conversation twice. I already told you I’m fucking fine.”

“You can be fine and hurt, no?” I reached for him, ignoring the rain soaking us to the skin, angling his head so I could see the injury better, but in this light it was impossible to see. “You might need stitches.”

“Doubt it.”

But still, he did not pull away and I took advantage of it, forgetting, again, that we were not in a place where I could lose myself in the warmth seeping into my palms where they touched his shoulders. The way his neck arched as he angled his head to give me a better view.

The scent that dizzied me.

“We should leave.” I reluctantly let him go, trusting the wound was not that serious. “To somewhere dry.”

“Only place I’m going is to fucked-up town and, trust me, that place isn’t dry.”

I’d been around enough English people to discern that he wanted to lose himself. To leave this night behind with whatever vice came his way.

Drink.

Drugs.

Sex.

Whichever it was, he could not do it in the rain where he stood, and it did not take much more looking at him wet and bloodied to give in to the reckless urge I’d felt yesterday, tuning Jake out before he could talk me down with logic and sense.

Ranger and I had not travelled in the vehicles with the other men. We’d left our bikes together—his Harley in the same ditch as the Ducati I rode in England. It made sense that we slipped away from the port and tugged them free of the undergrowth together.

Less so what came out of my mouth as he tossed a long leg over his V-Rod. “Follow me, friend. Your idea of fun is starting to grow on me.”

The flat I called home was a loft-style apartment a hundred miles from the port. I expected Ranger to ditch me, but he rode behind me the whole way until we reached a different city. Then he surged ahead, leading me to a place he’d supposedly never been before, rumbling to a stop mere yards from my building.

He laughed at whatever he saw in my face. “This is my manor, Vik. You think I don’t know where all the bad men lay their heads?”

“We are that obvious?”

“To me? Yeah. I grew up here, on the shithole estate over there before my nanna took me south.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “These towers were always for the crooks.”

“I do not live in the towers. My home is in the conversion behind them.”

“Eh. Close enough. My great-grandad made shoes in that building.”

We left our bikes in the car park across the street. The city was well lit and already starting to wake, the night giving way to grey skies and more rain.

Ranger pulled his hood up, concealing his bloodied face. Before we stepped onto the street, he tugged mine up too. “You ain’t looking too clever either.”

What did that mean? I spoke many languages with varying fluency, but English was by far the most vexing. Full of nonsense and nuance.

I waited for him to elaborate.

He did not. He trailed me through the rain to the entrance to my building. To the lift that took us to the fourth floor and my front door.

I typed the code into the concealed combination lock.

Ranger watched, propped against the wall. “Too posh for a key?”

“I have a key. Just not with me.”

“Let me explain how locks work, luv.”

The door clicked open. My lips curled in a smirk, but the pressing need to check my home for death traps and assassins swallowed the joke, along with the reality that the true threat might’ve been the man at my side.

Unlikely. He’s had all week to kill you.

And try as I might, I couldn’t think of a reason why he would want to.

I ushered him forward. “Wait here.”

Ranger nodded, understanding, propping the door with his boot. “Shout. I’ll hear ya.”

“You might not.”

“I will.”

As ever, I lacked the time to drown in the menacing intensity he bestowed with a single glance. But I believed him, even as it dawned on me that on top of the sharper than average hearing I already knew he possessed, Ranger knew this routine because of the Rebel Kings. Their threat level wasn’t as constant as mine, but for a back street motorcycle club, their stamp on the underworld was remarkably vast, and perhaps Ranger was in as much danger as I was.

A thought I carried through my compact apartment as I checked every inch of it with the insistent buzz of my phone for company.

Jake.

I knew better than to keep him waiting. In the kitchen, I dug the phone from my pocket, setting it on the counter to keep my hands free. “Bratan.”

“Bratan.” Jake returned the dry Russian greeting, then switched to Spanish to irritate me. “You brought him home.”

“Stop spying on me.”

“I’m not spying. I am the eyes in the back of your head.”

Knowing he was right—that I needed his protection as much as he needed mine—didn’t stop the noise of discontent rumbling from my throat. “No incursions to the system?”

“All clear,” Jake confirmed. “The flat is as you left it a month ago, but don’t take my word for it.”

“I never do.”

Harsh, but true. Jake was a top-tier hacker. Not even Ivanov could get past him in the shadowy arena he inhabited when the rest of us were sleeping. But that was his world, and this was mine. The exposed brick walls and wood floors at my feet. The flesh and bone of the man guarding my front door. I could not find peace until I’d seen for myself that my home was safe. “How’s my girl?”

“She ate my shoes.”

“That will be your fault.”

“Always is.”

I smiled, not disagreeing. “The others?”

“Safe, I promise. You have nothing to worry about but yourself.”

Easy for him to say. Except, it wasn’t. I had no concerns and fears that he did not share. And I trusted Jake.

I loved him.

“Why is he there, Vitka?”

Scratch that. He was annoying. “I am not allowed company?”

“He is not the usual kind of company you keep.”

“Because he is a biker?”

“Because he is a man.” Jake switched to Russian. “Perhaps he is expecting something you only give to women.”

That wasn’t entirely true, and he knew it better than anyone. But I did not want to think about that right now. I wanted to think about Ranger and the vodka I had stashed in my freezer. “Perhaps he wants company too.”

A pause filtered into the call. I filled it, checking the refrigerator and freezer that contained nothing but frozen pizza and the vodka of my dreams, finding comfort in Jake’s concern as much as it grated on me. He loves you. One of few who ever had. “You do not have to worry about Ranger. He does not seem to expect anything from anyone.”

“What if he did? I think you would consider it, and maybe it is time.”

“Brother, goodbye.”

Jake laughed, fond and familiar. Then he hung up without further comment on the gruff northerner waiting on me, though I knew he would watch over us until I made a conscious effort to shut him out.

Out of necessity, he had eyes on every aspect of my life, but I had ways of ensuring privacy. Steps I took the moment my heart made peace with the integrity of the loft-style apartment I kept in the old shoe factory.

I moved back to the door, cranking the heat as I passed the thermostat. Igniting the fireplace so the false flames danced on the plain walls. I do not like the cold.

Ranger was exactly where I’d left him, muscles flexed, one foot still in the corridor. “Clear?”

I nodded, beckoning him inside.

For a brief second, it seemed he would not come, and the madness of this encounter struck me. We were not friends. We were not family. And this was one of the only places on earth I could sleep with both eyes shut.

But I had not survived this life without thriving on jeopardy, and the slow smirk that returned to Ranger’s face as he shut the door behind him was payoff enough for the risk.

He handed me the bag I’d left at his feet. “Let me guess, full of grenades?”

“Clean clothes. Supplies. This way . . .” I directed him into the apartment—a one-bedroom flat that nonsensically housed two bathrooms. “You would like to shower?”

Ranger shrugged. Unbothered. “I can wait.”

“You do not have to.” I opened the bathroom door. “There is another in the bedroom. Use anything you need.”

I left him before he could answer, to give him space to decide if he was comfortable being naked and vulnerable in the home of a virtual stranger. We had spent a week in a concrete hole together and tonight we had fought side by side.

He killed a man to save my life.

That did not mean he trusted me.

It was an odd feeling to know that despite Jake’s warnings, I trusted Ranger enough to turn my back on him.

I moved to my bedroom. The bed was unmade, fresh linens in the hamper beneath . . . maybe. I could not actually remember and it wasn’t something that troubled me as I stood beneath the hot spray of the walk-in shower. My palms to the tiles, head bowed. If Ranger wished to end me, this was his moment.

Apparently, he did not. I survived the shower and dressed in the few clean clothes that had lived through the last month. Black cargo trousers that were old enough to hang loose at my hips. No socks. A T-shirt my sister’s children had bought me from the market by the sea. It was old too—faded and with holes in the hem. But I liked it. In my life, old things were rare.

I pulled the shirt over my head and padded out of the bedroom, my feet still damp, leaving footprints on the floor, extraordinarily aware of Ranger’s presence in the flat. The steam from the other bathroom, the heat of it cloaking the air, and the sandalwood scent it left behind.

He’s in the living room.

I stepped through the archway.

He was lying on the rug, dressed in jeans—that was it—and rolling a joint with his tattooed fingers. “Can I smoke in here?”

“If you like.” I tossed him one of the oranges I had rescued from my bag. “I have pizza if you want more food.”

Ranger caught the orange. “Do I look like I’ve got fucking scurvy?”

He looked like many things. Strong. Masculine.

Beautiful.

He did not look sick or malnourished, but I assumed the question was not literal. “Is good for you.”

“I’ll take the pizza, thanks.”

He set the orange aside and went back to his joint. I retrieved the vodka from the freezer and turned on my neglected oven.

Back in the living room, I found Ranger smoking, tapping ash into an empty bottle as he lay on his stomach, studying the sound system built into the wall, the only truly personal touch to the apartment.

I handed him the vodka, eyeing the damp hair that was messily knotted at the nape of his neck, some locks already escaping to hang over a face that was now clean of blood. How was it possible that this man had grown more attractive in the five minutes we’d been apart? “There is a tablet on the shelf. It is connected to the music library.”

Ranger leaned forward, his curiosity natural. Instinctive. “Password?”

“There is none.”

“Not very gangster of you.”

“Gangster?” I sank onto the rug beside him, fighting an unwinnable battle to keep my gaze from his lean torso. “You think I am gopnik?”

Ranger dumped the tablet in front of him and pressed his thumb to the button, activating the screen. “I think you’re too badass to have unprotected electronics lying around your pad, so what’s the fucking catch?”

“There is no catch.” I reached over him to swipe the screen, navigating to the folder that held the music files I sporadically got round to updating. “Unless someone wants to waste their time investigating a device that holds nothing but the music I relax to.”

I found the track we’d discussed on the cold wet ground of the port. It was ambient. The mellow tones seeped out of the speakers like honey and something inside me gave way. Something that had been wound tight in my gut for weeks now.

Months, perhaps.

I rolled onto my back, closing my eyes, before I remembered the snack Ranger had disregarded.

The orange. I reached over him, again, and wrapped my fingers around it. Ranger, engrossed in my music files, didn’t seem to notice, and I enjoyed the ease of our closeness more than I had any right to.

Vitka.

I peeled the orange.

Ranger spared me a derisive glance. “You’re going to eat that?”

“You would not?”

“I like the smell. I’d rather die than put it in my mouth.”

He spoke with more gravity than he had all week.

I laughed and stole his joint. “You are a strange boy.”

“You promised me pizza.” Ranger swigged vodka. “I won’t forget.”

I did not expect him to. I ate my orange. Then I returned to the kitchen and cooked a frozen pizza for my surly guest.

He changed the album while I was gone. His pick surprised me. Despite what I’d seen at the port, he didn’t strike me as a man with such smooth taste.

I dumped the pizza on the only furniture in the room—a cluttered coffee table pushed against the wall. Lying beside Ranger again was too tempting to pass up, and despite his warning, he seemed to have forgotten about his dinner. Or was it breakfast? I had lost track of the time.

Regardless, my attention zeroed in on Ranger rummaging through his bag. A flash drive was already wedged between his fingers, a large purple crystal on the hardwood floor.

I picked it up. “What is this?”

“It’s from my nan’s house.”

“Your grandmother?”

“Nanna Jean.”

“She is dead?”

“Nah.” A fond grin twisted Ranger’s lips. “Right as rain down south. Bollocks . . . where the fuck is it?”

I did not know what he was looking for until he produced a bag of beige powder.

“Just a bit of mandy.” He dropped it on the floor in front of us. “I need out of my head proper, you know?”

I knew it. And I wasn’t averse to a little chemical help from time to time. “It is good?”

He shrugged. “It’s all right. I don’t do it much, so I’ve been burying that fucker and digging it up for the last six months.”

“Burying it?”

“Kings don’t do drugs. Not the top boys, anyway. And I never carry shit where there are kids around.”

“You have children?”

“Fuck, no.”

He made the same face he had to the orange. It was perversely endearing.

“What is on the flash drive?”

“Better music than yours.”

Ranger tossed it the way of the MDMA bag on the floor.

I snatched it up. “I do not believe you.”

“Give a shit.”

“And what kind of name is Ranger anyway?”

The man in question smirked. “Road name.”

“Is not your given name?”

“What do you think?”

“I think English people are strange, and bikers are even stranger. Your name could be anything. Folk is not a road name after all.”

“Don’t judge me by that hippie bastard.” Ranger spoke with affection in his voice—with the love that underlined why the Rebel Kings Motorcycle Club had been a safe place for him to land when the Dog Crows had imploded. “Why don’t you guess my name?”

“Guess?”

Ranger drank more vodka and reclaimed the joint, brushing his fingers against mine. “If my name could be anything, where would you start?”

“Michael.”

I spoke without thinking.

Ranger laughed. Hard. “No.”

Of course it wasn’t. He did not look like a Michael. Or a Daniel. Or any of the English names I tried to recall. This game would be hard. “This is unbalanced. You already know my name.”

“Do I?” Ranger glanced up from opening his bag of MDMA. “You and your mate call each other all kinds of shite. How am I supposed to know what’s real?”

My mate. He did not mean in the animal sense, he meant my friend. He meant Jake. Jakov. Jacob. Maybe he had a point. “My name is Viktor. Anything else is affection or insult. Though, your big friend with the hair calls me Vicky, and I cannot tell what he means by that.”

Ranger laughed more, the gravelly sound hitting my blood faster than the drugs he offered ever would. “Rubi. Can’t make that dude up.”

“I like him.”

“Yeah?” Ranger stuck a powder-loaded finger into his mouth and held out the bag to me. “Not sure the feeling’s mutual. You want some of this dizzle?”

With him at my side, the low and mellow music pumping through the dimly lit room, it was hard not to feel high already. But it had been a long month and my brain was congested. Escaping it for a few hours was as irresistible as he was.

I took the molly. Mandy, as Ranger called it. Dizzle. Whatever. His vernacular was like nothing I’d ever heard, and perhaps by the time this was over, I would be a different person because of it.

The music morphed into a track I did not know. Not mine. My eyes had fallen shut. I opened them to Ranger propped on his elbow beside me, watching me.

My gaze locked with his, terminally so. I could not look away, and I did not want to. From a distance, his eyes held no colour. Up close, they were a kaleidoscope of dark things. Shades of sable and soot swirling around an obsidian core. Like his heart? No. This man was warm—he was alive, and he loved. I’d seen it when he’d spoken of his grandmother.

“You need to take this off.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Take it off.” Ranger tugged at the hem of my T-shirt. “You’re dressed. I’m not. It’s not fucking fair. Unbalanced, remember? Besides, it’s hotter than a runner’s ball bag in here. I don’t want you to bake yourself into a bad trip.”

It was sweet that he cared, but I could handle a bump of molly. His stare sweltered me more.

I sat up, reaching past my shoulder to pull the shirt over my head, chucking it aside.

Ranger didn’t move, but his gaze tracked me, and I found myself lost in it again the moment I was done. “You have ink.”

It took me a second to compute what he meant. Then I remembered the old tattoos on my skin. “They are small.”

Ranger leaned closer, studying my ribcage and my abdomen. “Then they mean something. That’s the rule.”

“The rule?”

He shrugged, taking a sharper breath as something seemed to hit him, his jet eyes hazing for a second, his balance wavering. “If they were for show, they’d be bigger. So that bird and that flower . . . they mean something.”

I caught him before he toppled over, easing him onto his back. “So your tattoos mean nothing?”

Ranger scoffed, eyes still fluttering. “They mean I can’t be trusted with two hundred quid in my pocket.”

The music shifted, a deeper base thrumming in the heated air. It seemed to draw us together, Ranger on his back, gazing up at me as his stare settled. Me beside him, once again unable to look away. Unable to resist the pull to his lean torso.

I traced his rib with my fingertip. “The blossom is chamomile. It reminds me of a teacher I once had and the flower shops in Moscow that are open day and night.”

“That’s where you’re from? Moscow?”

“Once upon a time. I have not been there since I was a boy.”

Ranger closed his eyes to my touch, a low hum escaping him before he forced his lids up and repeated a question he’d asked me days ago. “How old are you?”

“How old do I look?”

“Younger than me, but you sound older than Folk, so who the fuck knows?”

I did not know how old Folk Whitlock was. He had a timeless face, and I’d never given it much thought beyond that. Ranger, though. His features were young. “You are twenty-seven.”

Ranger scowled. “That’s not an answer.”

“Tell me your name.”

“No.”

“Then you will have to guess my age and hope you are right.”

I let my hand slide from Ranger’s skin.

A split second passed before he grasped my wrist and put it back. “What does the bird mean?”

“That is a complicated question.” Ranger still held my wrist. It was hard to tell if it was his touch that made my pulse skip or the building heat of MDMA filtering through my blood. “The answer is probably uninteresting to you.”

“I can decide that for myself.”

A rush that was definitely chemical delayed my reply. I leaned into it, light dancing through my chest, wrapping around my limbs and nerves, coalescing to a surge where Ranger’s body touched mine.

I took a breath, a soft inhale that drew his attention from my abdomen.

“You feeling it, Vik?”

“Define it.”

Ranger chuckled, relaxing into the rug again, taking me with him. “I don’t need to. Tell me about the bird.”

He had pulled me over him, swathes of our skin now touching, my weight bearing down on him, and it bemused me that he did not seem to notice. I had not been this close to a man who wasn’t Jake in many years. At least not one I wasn’t trying to kill.

This isn’t like being with Jake.

No. It really was not, but my brain was fast losing the ability to figure out why. Or maybe I did not care, and that was the meaning of this. To forget. To disregard. For a few hours to be nothing but the moment.

Tell him about the bird.

My hand was pressed to his sternum. I slid it higher, over the dark hair on his chest and to his throat. To a place on his neck, his pulse point, where I wanted to press my lips.

I settled for ghosting my fingers over it. “To me, it means good hunting . . . in a roundabout way.”

Ranger wet his lips.

Give him more. “The bird is a cuckoo. It is said that the first to hear one in the trees and then find the twig on which it sits . . . if retrieved, that twig is magical. An amulet for good luck if you carry it in your pocket.”

“Folklore.” Ranger nodded, understanding. “Jean would love that.”

“Your grandmother?”

“Yeah. Do that shit to my neck again.”

I was powerless to oblige, and I discovered that this hard-edged man liked to touch and be touched. At least when he was intoxicated by vodka and the contents of the molly bag that we slowly emptied as the hours passed.

Outside, it grew dark again. My heart beat out of my chest. In a good way. The best. Looming over me, Ranger brushed his lips along my collarbone and nuzzled my shoulder. “You still smell like that orange you ate.”

“Is better than blood, no?”

“Depends whose blood. I want to smell yours.”

He did not mean literally. Ranger was not a sadist. He was tough and strong, but this version of him was sweet. I coaxed him higher. His neck was right there, but for the hundredth time, I was derailed by his dark stare.

Caught.

Snared.

Enraptured.

His hair had come loose from the band tying it back. I tugged it free and the onyx locks fell into my face.

Ranger laughed, giddy and distant, lost to the high he was riding. “You’re more fun than you look.”

“I do not look fun?”

He flexed his arms, shifting his weight to see me better. Shaking his head to free me from the curtain of his silky hair. “I’ve never thought about how you look. When you’re on my mind, it’s your fucking eyes, and the way you ask me the same questions over and over again.”

“I don’t do that. It is you that walks away from conversations that are not finished.”

Ranger had an answer to most things. But not for this. His bloodshot eyes hazed out, another absent laugh all he had to say.

We were still working through our combined music collection. Somehow, the beats followed the moods that waxed and waned between us. Or maybe it was the other way round. Dubstep gave way to downtempo psychedelia, haunting French lyrics tipping me into my own daze.

Ranger rolled off me but didn’t go far. We hadn’t moved from the rug since the MDMA had kicked in—strange for a party drug, but I supposed this was our party. Skin. Music. Sensation.

So much sensation.

I opened my eyes.

Ranger was rolling a single-paper joint, brow furrowed in concentration, his fingers trembling.

Goosebumps littered his inked arms.

I sat up, ignoring the lights that danced in my vision. “You are not warm enough?”

“Hmm?”

I repeated the question, rubbing his forearm.

Ranger slowly shook his head, raising his gaze from the joint. “With you? In this furnace you call home? Trust me, Vik, I’m warm enough.”

I felt like he was trying to tell me more, but rubbing his arm preoccupied me, until two calloused fingers tipped my chin up, those vintage leather eyes waiting for mine. “You look amused.”

Ranger’s grin expanded. “I was about to make a really bad joke about powder rangers, but I forgot it.”

“It cannot have been that bad then.”

“It was fucking terrible.”

“You sound proud.”

Ranger lit the joint he’d wedged between his lips. “I like bad jokes.”

“Why?”

“My dad liked them too.”

His gaze flickered, smile gone, and I knew I had to distract him from why. Grief had its place, but no good would come from confronting it now. It would still be there when he was sober.

I stole the joint, letting my fingers brush his lips, easing onto my back again. “Your music is not better than mine.”

It took Ranger a moment to catch up. Then a droll frown creased his face. “All right. It’s not. And I like this.” He gestured vaguely to the wall speakers. “What is it?”

“I do not know. It is yours.”

“No, it ain’t—those fuckers.”

He sat up, snatching the tablet from the shelf, reminding me that he’d emptied his flash drive into my music collection. “Fucking Rubi. Unless it was Nash . . .”

“Sabotage?”

“Nah. They didn’t take anything off.”

“A donation then?”

“Hmm?”

It was the second time Ranger had answered me with a sound that did not constitute actual words. I laughed and persuaded him to lie down with me again. “You want to smoke?”

Ranger nodded but made no move to take the joint. “I’m too fucked up to find my mouth. You wanna shotgun me, Vik?”

Vik. I was beginning to like the way his gruff voice wrapped around the single syllable. And his proposition appealed to the side of me that had brought him here. That had spent countless hours on the floor with him, leaving the bloodshed and violence we’d survived where it belonged.

This doesn’t end anywhere you want to go.

Not true. It was not about want. And how I felt about that belonged in a vault with Ranger’s grief. “I have you, friend. Relax.”

I shifted us around, manoeuvring him so his head was in my lap. As had become typical of this wild and gentle day we’d spent together, the intensity of his gaze took me prisoner, slow-motion perspective descending on me, my limbs moving as if they belonged to someone else as I watched from the ceiling.

The joint had gone out. I relit it, the crackle of the flame eating the paper the only sound louder than my pounding heart.

I flipped the joint around, the burning end in my mouth, the unlit filter between my teeth. Smoke billowed in a delicate line as I bent over Ranger, exhaling directly into his mouth, my hands cupping his face, his framing my ribcage, his fingers splayed over the chamomile blossom.

Our lips did not touch, but somehow I felt him there.

I drew back.

Ranger tightened his grip. “Again.”

I gave him another hit, longer this time, abusing my lungs as much as his. Lightheaded, I kept going until the joint burned down enough to threaten my lips.

Then I dropped it in the empty vodka bottle and returned to the clutch of Ranger’s potent stare.

Something was different. I could not say what, just that it was irrevocable.

I still held his face in one hand, the tips of my fingers grazing a bruise that had manifested in the hours we’d spent together.

The mark of another man’s fist.

A barbed feeling threatened the glow we’d cocooned ourselves in. Ranger was strong enough to fight for himself and for me, but I did not enjoy the reality of him being hurt in the process. I did not enjoy the reality of him being hurt at all.

“Lie down.”

It was my turn to speak without comprehension. “Hmm?”

Ranger blurred and the thick rug beneath us hit my back.

The movement dizzied me, my senses nothing but warmth and dancing lights. Nothing but hypnotic beats and the heat of Ranger’s stare as music seeped into my bones, melding with my stampeding pulse, quieting any thought capacity I had left.

His neck called to me, his ink. His smoky skin. I did not think before pressing my lips to it.

You’ve done this already.

Had I? I could not remember . . . I could not remember ever feeling as I did as Ranger moaned, a low sound of pleasure that travelled through me. That became me. It seemed inevitable that it morphed into the kind of kiss that transcended the lives we’d led to be here, alive and fused together on my living room floor.

Ranger’s mouth was softer than the rest of him. He rolled us, pulling me over him, and he kissed me as if I was made of molten glass. As if kissing me was the final ascension in the high we’d chased all this time.

I kissed him back as though the burning entity I’d become in this moment depended on it. No tongue, just lips, the hardness between us an otherworldly thing I could not contemplate. The slow grind of our hips incidental as time stopped for this—for him as he kissed me everywhere without his mouth ever leaving mine.

Seconds passed.

Minutes.

Hours.

I could not quantify how long it lasted—I did not try. Time was meaningless until Ranger’s shaky inhale drew me back to earth.

We had wound up entwined on our sides. I eased him onto his back, his heavy eyes breaking through the haze of his kiss. He was fading. Spinning, perhaps. I lay my hand over his heart, counting the beats. It was not rampaging as hard as mine, the molly buzz giving way to exhaustion and weed. “You are okay?”

It was a whisper, my dry throat betraying me.

Drifting, Ranger did not answer. I watched him for a while, but eventually the need for water tore me away from him.

For unknown reasons, I bypassed the kitchen and wound up in the bathroom. The steam from Ranger’s long-ago shower was gone, but his scent clung to the air like an invisible smog, and away from the witchcraft of his close proximity, it got to me.

There was a glass by the sink. I rinsed it under the tap and let the water run. Forgot about it as my reflection caught my attention.

Suka, blyad.

My eyes were red, a week’s growth on my face, hair sticking up in every direction. It was hard to believe that Ranger had willingly pressed his lips to mine.

He’s wasted too.

And I’d left him alone, a reality that sobered me enough to notice the tap blasting water into the sink.

I shut it off, my pulse still hounding my eardrums, my breath short and snatched in a way it hadn’t been in the living room, days of no sleep and hours of partying catching up with me, even as every fibre of me craved something else.

Craved him.

Ranger.

The need to get back to him unnerved me. Dazed, I stumbled away from the mirror and into the narrow hallway. Music thrummed from the living room speakers. My music. His. Smuggled tracks from his Rebel King brothers. I had no idea. I did not care.

I breached the archway. Ranger was where I’d left him, but he’d rolled to his side, head pillowed on one arm. Beautifully and wonderfully asleep.

Transfixed, I sank into a crouch, yearning to lie beside him again. To feel the heat of his skin against mine. But I didn’t move towards him. As the chemical hum in my blood began to fade, I found I could not. Because I was not the same man who had done that already. That man did not exist, and an invisible barrier rose between us, brick by brick. I had felt happiness today with Ranger. I had laughed and meant it. I had felt like myself in ways I never had away from the sunshine sanctuary Jake and I had built a thousand miles from here. But it was not real. I was not real. Not here—not in this place.

Not anywhere.

My bag and boots were discarded nearby. I came upright at a dizzying speed and retrieved them, at the last moment remembering the balled-up shirt I’d tossed away.

I dressed with little on my mind but the truth. I had to go.

Leaving Ranger was hard.

Staying was impossible.

With his kiss imprinted on my lips, I left with no idea how deeply I’d come to regret it.