14. Ranger

[ 14 ]

RANGER

Viktor stared at me.

I stared at him.

It was our thing, apparently. Some people got movie nights and banging sex. We got this.

We? You’re not a couple, knobhead. You’re his fucking bodyguard.

As if he needed one. Vik wasn’t himself, I knew that. But he was still a scary motherfucker with a gun, and it was the most screwed up thing ever that I was less worried about him now than I was when he retreated to his bedroom and shut the door.

More screwed up than me admitting that eating orange segments from his fingers while he pretty much sat on my dick made me think about blowing him.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Movement beyond me caught his attention, breaking the spell my messy confession had cast on us. The curse. Viktor stepped in front of me again and it took everything I had not to yank him back. “Where are we going now?”

He glanced over his shoulder but kept the answer to himself, leading me across the street to the busy strip of clubs and bars.

It was early. The clubs were closed. But the bars were already kicking, and he ducked into one that made me want to bleach my eardrums. Garage music. Was he taking the fucking piss?

I trailed him inside, my gaze a laser beam of fuck off as I surveyed every exit the way Folk had trained me a thousand years ago. Every face, mindful of Viktor’s warning about damsels and tourists. And there were hundreds of the fuckers packed into the bar, all bopping along to Craig David or some other shite I didn’t care to know.

Was this revenge for the blowjob thoughts? If it was, I’d changed my mind. I didn’t want to suck his dick. I wanted to bite it off and spit it in the sea.

“You do not have to look at everyone like you wish they were dead.”

Vik’s voice was low in my ear. While I’d been drifting down cock lane, he’d made it all the way to the far end of the bar and turned to face me again, his back protected by solid wood unless the barman decided to shank him.

We were inches apart. But it was enough that someone stepped between us, and I moved so fast the air blurred. So fucking fast, the English lad gobbing off at his mate didn’t even notice me lifting him clean off the floor and moving him along a few steps.

Already drinking, Viktor saw it all. He smirked over the rim of his glass and I wanted to throw the posh tumbler against the wall.

And him…but that was something different. “Don’t fucking laugh at me.”

“I am not laughing.”

He drained the glass and dropped it on the bar.

I swiped it and took a sniff.

Vodka.

And it was barely eight pm. Fuck my life, it was going to be a long night. But if I’d remembered anything about the time I’d spent with Viktor before, it was that this beautiful bastard had hollow legs. That he could smash a bottle of voddie for afternoon tea and still gangster the fuck out of the night.

Hours passed. I stopped counting at three. He drank a lot of vodka while I nursed the same beer bottle and nothing fucking changed.

Not him.

Not me.

Not the clusterfuck of an existence we’d wound up in. “How do you know it’s not poisoned?”

Vik swirled his glass. “It is a new bottle and I can see it from here. Besides, I have not been to this bar in many months.”

“Cos it’s shit?”

His lips twitched. “Because I do not frequent establishments in any particular order. That would be unwise, don’t you think?”

I thought a lot of things. Mainly to do with the way the low light hit his hair and how his slate grey T-shirt clung to his shoulders. We’d been sharing meals for a few days now and he already looked less like a puff of wind could blow him over.

Stop thinking about blowing.

Fuckidy-fuck.

I scanned the bar, trying to stay on point, but with Vik stashed in the corner and my view of the place unchanged, I felt pretty safe.

That means you’re not.

Viktor nudged me. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer you before.”

I lounged against the bar, craving a cigarette and a bacon-stuffed teacake. “This a blanket apology or something specific?”

“When we were talking about the orange. I feel like that conversation is not over.”

“It’s over for me.”

“Why?”

“There’s nothing else to say. You asked me a question. And unlike you, I answered it.”

Viktor brushed his drink aside and leaned closer. “By telling me how something made you feel, and I don’t know what to do with that.”

I knew that. I’d seen it in his face before he’d rerouted his attention. The bewilderment. The fear. And it wasn’t cos he didn’t swing that way. It was something else, and if it was anything like the shit I suspected, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. My living-with-how-much-fuckery-Vik-had-survived box was full. Maxed out. At capacity. I couldn’t stuff another shred of heartache inside without it—without me—falling apart. “Can we go somewhere else yet?”

Viktor rolled his body upright. “Whatever you want.”

As if. But we left the bar anyway, and away from the fuck-awful music and sweaty air, my head cleared enough to realise that if Vik wanted to talk, I wanted to listen, no matter what he told me.

First, though, we had to survive the walk to wherever he led me next, and the main strip was a different place to what it had been at sunset.

Darker.

Headier.

Danger lacing the sweet ocean breeze.

I eyed the traffic, glad of the gun concealed at my waist. Glad that Vik stuck as close to me as I did him and that it was easy to switch our positions, blocking him from passing vehicles.

“There will come a time when I will not let you manhandle me.”

I accepted the warning with a sly smirk. “Just not tonight, eh?”

Viktor said nothing as we crossed through the spot I’d take a shot from if I was gonna gun him down.

No one did, but the air crackled with intention. Those fuckers were out there. Which meant Jake was alive and we could go home.

I opened my mouth to say so, but it was Vik’s turn to move too fast for anyone but God to stop him. He dragged me back from the roadside, flattening me against the side of a nearby kiosk, his back to my chest.

My crotch to his⁠—

Stop.

A car sped past us, tyres squealing, some twat shouting from the open sunroof.

False alarm.

I relaxed. Viktor didn’t, and our position spun my head. Sent my blood pooling south, and shitting hell, I could not do this danger hike with a fucking boner.

“Hey.” I gripped his hips, edging him forward. “That’s not how this works. If some cunt wants to mow you down, they have to go through me first.”

“No.”

“Yes. Or I’ll have to give the Monster Munch back.”

“If such things exist, you do not even have them yet.” Vik moved abruptly again, spinning to face me. My arms came around him without my fucking permission and I swear on my nanna’s life, I couldn’t take it back.

My breathing heavied, pulse pounding.

Let him go. He doesn’t want this.

But Vik didn’t move, and either my imagination was staging a riot or this fucker was staring at my mouth.

“Stop.”

I said it out loud this time.

Viktor blinked and moved back.

I missed him.

I fucking missed him. “We need out of the open. Unless you need more proof someone out here wants to kill you.”

Viktor hesitated.

I pushed away from the kiosk, invading his space again. “Take me somewhere safe. Please?”

Safe for him, not me. But if it got Vik off the street, the distinction wasn’t important.

“This way.” Vik twitched, like he wanted to grab my arm, but the giant messy monster that had sprung up between us had him spooked.

He kept his hands to himself and took off up the road.

I matched his pace, smoking like a beast, hyper-vigilance still throttling my lungs. But with the island streets growing busier by the second, keeping Vik safe turned into my worst fucking nightmare.

Fuck this. I grabbed him, pulling him close. He let me. Then he resisted, twisting out of my grasp. “You would make me use you as a human shield?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“No.”

Viktor surged away from me, melting into the crowd and weaving through the packed bodies like a fucking dancer, forcing me into a jog to keep up. I’d forgotten how fast he was on his feet. Until this moment, everything here— everything about him—had seemed to move slower than where I’d come from.

He’d been holding out on me. Either that, or a few solid days of food and rest really had worked.

Whatever it was, Vik stayed three steps ahead of me until he deigned to slow the fuck down.

I reached his side, fuming. But he snatched both my wrists before I could take a breath and propelled me down a hidden alleyway.

My back hit warm brick. Viktor crowded me, reminding me again that beneath the scars and injuries, he was still a top-tier gangster.

His body was all deadly angles, his gaze brutal. And his sweet fucking mouth?

Inches from mine.

Inches.

Fuck me. Who needed bullets for a quick death when you had this shit to deal with?

I licked my lips, watching him track the movement, fighting with all I had to keep my brain and my dick in separate corners. “What are the rules on youmanhandling me?”

Vik’s green gaze flickered. “I have not decided yet.”

“Who says you get to decide?”

“Me. Is the one choice I have left, no?”

“You have choices. Living or dying.”

Kiss me or kill me.

Viktor curled his lip, nose flaring, and it ruined me. The back and forth between keeping how I felt about him locked in a blast-proof box and kissing the hell out of him left me dizzy, and only his earlier words playing on a loop in my head kept me from choosing one side—the best fucking side—once and for all.

“I don’t know what to do . . .”

Me too, mate. Me too.

I settled for staying still and surveying the dead-end alley while Vik worked through whatever had driven him to sling me against the wall in the first place. His favourite move, apparently. Would he pull it out if he was fucking me?

Dear God, make it stop.

Dear God,

Don’t ever let him stop.

“If you died for me, I would not even try to survive it.”

I tuned back into Viktor. “You’re not trying that hard to survive now.”

“That is rude.”

“True, though, ain’t it?”

Viktor made this sound. Couldn’t even say what it was. Just that it reached parts of me only Finch had with her big blue⁠—

“Come with me.” Viktor was in motion again before the words had fully left his mouth, but this time, he took me with him, he took my fucking hand, and towed me to a door I’d had half an eye on the whole time I’d been Vik-pressed against the wall.

He pushed a brick. It slid aside, revealing the same high-tech keypads that littered the property up the mountain. “Let’s see how far ahead Jake thought when he sent you here.”

“What?”

In answer, Viktor jabbed my thumb at the pad. For a hot second, nothing happened. Then the door clicked open, and Vik’s wry smile fixed every broken thing in the world, except maybe him.

We slipped through the door.

It shut behind us with a quiet snick and I locked it, reacclimatising to a dim corridor that instantly set my teeth on edge.

Nope.

Despite almost dying for it a few minutes ago, I rooted my boots to the floor, claiming both Vik’s hands in my own. “What are we walking into?”

Viktor smirked. “Now you are nervous?”

“Cautious. There’s a fucking difference. See earlier notes about living and dying.”

Viktor squeezed my fingers, rubbing his thumbs over my knuckles before he seemed to catch himself doing it. “No one’s dying here. Apart from our farm, this club is the safest place on the island.”

Club. Distant music breached my senses, and it was abruptly obvious that he’d snuck us in the side door of one of the dozens of venues along the main strip. Except this one was set further back, away from the bars, bakeries, and jewellery shops, and off my fucking radar until now. “How is it safe?”

“You’ll see. If you trust me. Do you trust me, Asher?”

Asher. At some point, I was gonna have to ban him from saying my name like that. But his question caught me off guard. The response that bubbled up my throat too complex to form actual words, and it pissed me off that if he’d asked me a year ago, when he’d had me half naked on his living room floor, my answer would’ve been an unequivocal yes.

Viktor stepped closer. “I am not trying to die tonight. And I am tired of putting you in danger. If you believe nothing else I say, believe that.”

He was asking me to believe that he cared about me more than he cared about himself. And it wasn’t that hard to do. That stupid fucking orange. I knew he’d only eaten it so I would too. I knew he only ever went to bed so I could. And yet here we were, running around town letting bullets chase us—cos he cares more about Jake too.

Put like that, nothing made sense. But if I’d learned anything from kicking around with the Kings, it was that loving people, whether you lived or died for them, was simple as fuck when you just let it be.

And fuck, I was growing to love Viktor Petrenko. I had to be, for even considering the bullshit that came out of his mouth next.

“Take your shirt off. Lose the gun.”

“You talking to me?”

Viktor’s smile was rare these days, but it glimpsed at me now, turning his face into this magical thing that could convince me to do just about anything as he walked backwards, still clutching my hands, towing me with him. “I’m talking to you. Is that okay?”

It was beginning to be. I let him tug me through door after door, using my thumbs and his to open them, until we came to what I recognised as a boss room. Screens and gadgets. A glass wall that looked out over a sea of colour and joy.

I stepped towards it before I caught myself, made myself stop and shut the reinforced door behind me. “The fuck is this place?”

“I told you.” Viktor was already ditching the gun at his waist and another I hadn’t noticed him strap to his thigh. “Is a club. My club.”

“I thought you and Jakey owned the island?”

“Not all of it. And this . . . is just mine. Is where I would come, no? If I was a different person with a different life, and I had nothing to worry about but music and maybe some top shelf vodka.”

“Who runs it?”

“Someone who has never seen my face.”

Course it was. Again, I had to remind myself that this was a world I was never meant to understand. “Just so we’re clear: you’re invisible to everyone who works here? No one else has access to the entrance we came through, the corridors, and this room, except you and Jake?”

“You are learning.”

Vik tugged off his tee, throwing skin and scars in my face like a motherfucker.

My mouth went dry. I flattened myself against the door, muscles bunching, fists clenched, and not cos I wanted to punch him.

He wasn’t joking about the shirt.

And somehow that bothered me more than watching him disarm. Than disarming myself, when every fibre of my existence was screaming at me to protect him. Maybe I was about to learn there was more than one way to keep someone alive.

I gave up the gun and the knife in my boot. And the fun-sized chisel I’d swiped from my jeans a split second before we’d left the house to drop Lida with Katya and Ivan.

“The razor.” Viktor pointed to my other boot. “This is no place for blades. You will see.”

“You keep saying that, but all I see is you and me with no fucking weapons.”

“That is the point. Besides . . .” Viktor spread his loot on his big boss man table, lined that shit up like surgical instruments, before he came back to me. “Your greatest weapons are not those you can carry in your pocket.”

“There’d better be a compliment in there somewhere.”

“Or what?”

I latched onto his gaze, holding it as I dragged Jake’s shirt over my head. “Or I’ll be proper fucking miffed, and you don’t want that shit in your life—what the fuck is that?”

Viktor unscrewed the cap on a small tube. The contents leaked out, immediately staining his fingers with neon paint. “Your invisibility cloak.”

He moved closer.

Closer.

I felt his body heat. The thrum of his pulse. I felt him everywhere, from my tingling scalp to my curling toes.

And he wasn’t even touching me.

My throat remained clogged with sawdust. I swallowed as Viktor squeezed paint into the palm of his hand and brought it to my ribcage.

“Like this,” he whispered, sweeping his palm over my skin, leaving a riot in his wake. Of colour. Of sensation. It was all the fucking same. “So for a little while, we can be just us.”

There was no us. There couldn’t be. But the flawed promise sucked me in. I let him smear paint all over me. Returned the favour with my heart in my fucking throat, ready to spill out of me and be trampled into the floor.

Into dust.

Magic fucking dust.

“Now what?”

My voice was hoarse. As dark and dangerous as Vik’s gaze had turned in the low light of the room.

He pointed to the glass wall, to the masses beyond it, moving to the sultry beat of the best EDM.

“Now we dance.”

I couldn’t fathom how the fuck that could work. But his hands on me had flicked a switch in my fucking soul, and I suddenly trusted him more than anything.

Idiot. He’s playing you.

The voice in my head, though . . . it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t anyone’s I gave a fuck about, and I blocked it out. Vik could strip me naked if he wanted and smear paint on my fucking balls. Still wasn’t going to let him die.

While I made peace with that, Viktor reached around me and unlocked the door, his gaze never leaving mine. “Can I ask you something?”

I shadowed his every move. “If you like.”

He didn’t. Not immediately, anyway. He preceded me into the corridor, towing me further into the belly of the pulsating building, and as the beat wrapped around us, the heat, I forgot about it, too lost in the paint-streaked expanse of his naked back. In the scars I’d painted orange and pink.

In the ones I hadn’t.

We came to another door. Another keypad. His thumb lit that shit up and the door opened, a wall of music spilling out, but no light. If anything, the space he led me to next was darker, but people were close. I felt them. I heard them. And fuck me, I wanted a cigarette.

Viktor kept going, hugging a rough textured wall. Minutes passed before he finally stopped and turned to me. “You are ready?”

“To what?”

“To move as if you have always been here.”

He didn’t wait to explain. Just grabbed my hand and pulled me from the dark into the bright and flashing lights of the club. Into a teeming mass of bodies that moved to the beat of a track so dense and moody it felt like a fucking hug.

The crowd swallowed us up. Vik led the way, but I kept my arms around him, shielding every inch of him I could, even as he tipped his head back to smile at me—really smile, shedding the tension he’d carried for who the fuck knew how long with every step he took.

He hadn’t been lying about dancing. He dragged me to a dark corner and moulded his body to mine. Instinctive. Dirty. Paint smearing our skin. And it didn’t escape my notice that he’d positioned me so I could see everything around us.

And you’d better believe I hawk-eyed every fucking movement until the happiness seeping from him got to me and I relaxed enough to take it all in.

The colour.

The lights.

The pure sultry chill emanating from every shape and size of every gender.

He built this.

It was my sole thought as we moved together. I didn’t even think about kissing him. About the hardness I felt with every pass of his body or the answering throb in my own. Instead, I soaked it all in and tried to fathom how his life had led him here.

Eventually, I let it all go. I smoked the joint he passed me and let the weed buzz carry me through the club, exploring every room, easing through the homogenous crush of flesh and body paint. It was a carnival like I’d never seen, but I couldn’t resist the pull to the darker rooms. The deeper beats.

I found my favourite. Smoked another joint while Vik drank water, watching me as much as I watched him.

It felt the same as the night we’d banged all that mandy, except I had no desire to be out of my head right now, or ever again. I had no desire to be anything but present in a moment where Viktor looked at me like he was right now.

He doesn’t feel like that.

That voice again. I clenched my jaw.

Viktor’s smile faded. “What’s wrong?”

Nothing that I wanted to tell him.

I looked away.

He forced my gaze back to him. “We can leave if you want to go home.”

“I don’t want that.”

“What do you want?”

I wanted to know that he wasn’t biding his time to give me the slip. That he wasn’t eyeballing every baggie being passed around the club and wishing he was neck deep in that instead of dancing with me.

Not fair. He’s an addict cos some cunt forced it on him.

“Asher.” Viktor breathed my name against my lips. “Stay with me.”

My eyes had screwed shut. I wrenched them open and he was right there, hands on my face, his heart hammering against mine. His gaze so distraught it almost brought me to my knees.

“Please?”

“Please what?” I brought my forehead to his, sinking into him. Forever fucking lost in him. “What do you want, Vik? What do you need?”

For a long moment, there was nothing but the lights and the heat of the club cocooning us. The heady thrum of the bass synching my pulse to his.

Then he kissed me.