11. Ranger

[ 11 ]

RANGER

Because they were donkeys, I discovered three days later, on Viktor’s eighty-seventh walk around the property. “Fucking ears on them.”

Viktor leaned against a fence post, his grip as subtle as the discomfort lining his face. “That means they are big?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you say words in strange ways.” Viktor clicked his teeth. A donkey ambled over and he fed it mint leaves from his pocket. Cos apparently he was a secret donkey whisperer on top of presiding over an orange farm that kept half the island in juice.

Didn’t have that shit on my bingo card either. But the donkeys were cool. “How many do you have?”

“Twenty-five, I think.”

“You think?”

Viktor rubbed the donkey’s nose. “I have not paid attention recently. It’s possible Ivan has collected more and I have not noticed.”

“Collected?”

“From the mainland. See here?” Viktor skated a hand over deep marks embedded in the animal’s back. “This one was a tourist ride at a beach. They did not care that he was broken.”

“Did you kill them?”

“Me? No. But the donkey and all his friends live here now, so you can make of that whatever you like.”

The sun was beginning to sink in the sky, casting Vik’s face in that golden glow—the one that made it impossible to hold it against him that he’d given me the run around for three days straight. That he hadn’t eaten or slept since the first night and the morning I’d forced him to share the breakfast he’d cooked for me, and I was pretty fucking sure he was trying to break me.

So he can sneak off and score.

Not happening.

I snacked like a beast every time he took a shower, and catnapping was my superpower. If he wanted out, he’d have to go through me, not round me.

Viktor shivered, sudden and out of context. My hands itched to rub the goosebumps that prickled his skin, but I settled for moving closer, sharing body heat without actually touching him.

Cos I was a professional.

One who asked questions I already knew the answers to.

“Cold?”

Vik was still leaning on the post, chin resting on his folded arms. Not answering, but I didn’t take it personally. He drifted a lot, like Locke used to when we pulled him out of Priest’s pits in the bad old days. Unseeing, unhearing, lost to shit the rest of us would never understand. Made me wonder if Jakov should’ve tapped him up for this instead of me. Or Folk. Then again, as nice as they were, they wouldn’t have come. They had lovers. Kids. For better or worse, Viktor got me, and the demon who lived in my belly and chose that exact moment to rumble like a troll.

The lucky fucker raised his head, frowning.

I looked away, gazing at the sea in the distance instead. It was weird to be so close to the ocean and not have felt it against my skin yet. I wasn’t a legit merman like Folk, but I liked to swim. To sink beneath the waves. It was fucking freeing, and I reckoned Vik needed that as much as me.

Viktor called the dog and started walking again. It was early evening. Katya and her family were eating dinner on their patio.

The kids ran out to see their uncle, like they always did. His nephew gave him an orange he wouldn’t eat. His niece came to me, waiting for me to pick her up cos somehow she knew Vik was having the kind of day that meant he couldn’t.

Fuck my life.

Like, seriously.

I scooped the little beast up, fitting her to Viktor’s uninjured hip, taking my payment in the soft smile he had for her. The murmured words that meant nothing to me, but everything to the tiny human who looked just like him.

Copper-streaked hair. Greener-than-green eyes. The world was fucked when she grew up.

Like you.

Like Viktor if I couldn’t get him to eat and sleep anytime soon. When his niece had gone back to her parents, we moved on up the mountain. It was the fourth time we’d trudged this route today, and Vik was getting slower.

I walked close behind him.

Waiting. Cos I’d catch him if he fell. But he didn’t. Not yet. He kept going until we reached the house and made it inside.

Viktor drank tea the colour of amber ale, loaded with sugar. I swear to fucking god, it was the only reason he hadn’t dropped dead over the last few days.

I watched him brew it in his favourite glass cup. “Is it always like this?”

“What?”

“Detox,” I clarified. “Withdrawal. Whatever. I get that you’re hiding a lot from me, but I thought you’d be sicker with it than this.”

“Hiding from you?” Viktor clattered a spoon into the sink. “I did not know such a thing was possible.”

“Maybe you should try harder.”

Viktor slid a coffee mug across the counter. He’d been deathly pale since I got here, but as the light outside faded, it seemed more pronounced. “Maybe you should eat dinner with Katya. She would not mind.”

“Fuck off.”

“You like chicken?”

“Excuse me?”

“Chicken.” Viktor opened the fridge. “There is some in here. If I cook it, will you eat it?”

“Will you?”

He blanked me again and lit the flame beneath the griddle plate on the fancy stove he’d cooked eggs on my first morning here.

I’d eaten nothing but bread, peanut butter, and weird Spanish crisps since. He’d eaten nothing at all, unless he had more than guns stashed in his room. And he didn’t. I’d checked while he’d slept that first night.

I mainlined coffee while Viktor grilled chicken and something green that he could put straight in the fucking bin.

My third cup was jittering down nicely when he shut the stove off and dumped a plate in front of me.

I eyed it, fighting the growl in my belly. A scratchy hunger that warred with suspicion at the giant pile of vegetables. “Where’s yours?”

Viktor moved to leave the room.

I lunged faster than my brain ever could, snapping a hand out, catching his wrist, triggering an instinct in him that should’ve killed me.

’Cept he didn’t kill me. He launched me against the fridge. I didn’t let go. And momentum did the rest.

Vik collided with my chest, bracing a fist on the fridge door. It jarred him, I could tell, but he stood his ground, skewering me with a mobster glare. “What? What? What do you want from me?”

It was fucked up, but his frustration turned me on. And I didn’t mean sexually. Okay, maybe I did, but not entirely. Cos after days and days of drifting silence, the sharp anger lighting his gaze was fucking heaven, and I nearly bit his snarling lip. “I want you to eat.” I chose my words with more care than I spared anyone else. “And take a nap that lasts longer than six minutes. Then I want you to get back to doing whatever it is you bought this fucking island for. Cos I know it wasn’t for the shitty smack you’ve been scoring down the beach.”

Viktor’s mouth twisted in a sneer he’d never sent my way before. “Jake really did tell you everything.”

“He told me that. There’s loads of shit I don’t know about you.”

“Like what?” Consciously or not, Vik pressed his forearm to my windpipe, reminding me that he was a soldier—the kind that came in the night and snapped your neck. “This is all there is. I am boring, remember?”

“Not to me.”

“Then maybe you are boring too.”

A beat passed. One where he could’ve released me.

He didn’t. He held out, the tremor in his arm barely detectable, and my pulse went fucking crazy. Pounding in my ears like an escaped Derby runner.

Slowly, I wrapped an arm around his waist, tugging the rest of his body against mine, as if I could shift this from a death threat to the embrace he needed. I leaned forward an inch, less than that, and nuzzled his cheek as if I had every fucking right to. “I don’t mind boring, but watching you starve to death is killing me already, so this ninja shit is unnecessary.”

His chest caved in, releasing the breath he’d caged in his lungs, and some of the tension in his body deserted him. “Do not say things like that.”

“It’s the truth.”

“I know. Is why I can’t hear it.”

Viktor dropped his murder stance.

I took a calculated risk and wrapped my other arm around him, pulling him even closer, gripping the nape of his neck, my fingers sliding into his hair.

It felt so good—he felt so good that a legit sigh escaped me, but I didn’t care. Vik was getting honesty from me whether he wanted it or not, and the honest truth was I’d been waiting my whole life to hold him like this, even if he was dying in my arms.

I relaxed against the fridge, coaxing him to drop his head on my shoulder and just be, while I kneaded his neck and shoulders, breathing him in. He didn’t just smell of oranges. He smelled of the ocean breeze and the sunshine he liked to walk in. He smelled like summer. Bright and edible despite his black mood. And of course, it was the edible part that my body reacted to with another wall-shaking rumble.

Viktor startled, as if he’d fallen asleep standing up.

Maybe he had, but he wasn’t asleep now. He drew back, gaze sharpening with every inch he put between us. “You need to eat.”

“We’ve covered this.” I stayed by the fridge. “I’m not eating alone.”

“Okay.”

I arched a brow. “What does that mean?”

Viktor returned to the scene of the crime—to the stool he’d thrown me off—and nudged the plate. “Come here.”

For the first time since I’d got here, he spoke like the gangster who commanded fear across a fucking continent. Eyed me like one too, but the most enduring effect was that for as long as his hardened stare lasted, I wanted to bang him more than I needed to fix him.

I pushed off the fridge and joined him at the counter. The green stuff was still on the plate. “I’m not eating that.”

Viktor shrugged. “Then I will not eat anything and the stalemate continues, no?”

“Never knew you were such a difficult motherfucker.”

“Inflexible.” A ghost of a grin flickered through his features. “As much as you are stubborn. We will see who wins.”

I didn’t believe he was inflexible. Not in the literal sense. I’d spent long hours watching his body move, and even now it was battered and broken, Vik still moved with grace.

His mind was something else, though. And whoever ate what, I’d already fucking won by goading him into giving a shit.

I reached around him, grabbed a fork from the drawer, and swiped half the vegetable crap in one scoop.

Cramming it in my mouth was the easiest thing in the world.