17. Viktor

[ 17 ]

VIKTOR

Jake: Be ready, my brother

The cryptic message I’d deleted burned a hole in my brain. Like the phone I’d stuffed in my pocket, knowing it would now become a third limb until whatever battle Jake waged was over and the next one began.

It was a long way from fun. And according to Ranger’s horror-struck expression, such things were nowhere to be found when we reached our destination either.

For the first time, perhaps . . . ever, he took a meaningful step back from me. “You’re having a laugh if you think I’m getting in that thing.”

That thingwas one of the fastest civilian helicopters in existence.

I told him as much.

He retreated another step. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”

I frowned. “Why?”

Ranger darted a glance around the vertiport. It had still been dark when we’d arrived, but dawn was beginning to shine a light on the rows of gleaming aircraft around us, and he stared as if he’d opened his eyes to hell on earth. “What is this place?”

“What does it look like?” I had already opened the door to the H155 I flew most often, allowing Lida to check it the way she had been trained before I ever knew her. “Is an airfield.”

“Whose airfield?”

“Mine.”

Ranger rubbed his lips with the back of his hand, his brow glistening with sweat despite the cool of the early morning. “You’re the helicopter friend . . . fuck.”

“I am what?”

He didn’t answer. Just shook his head as Lida hopped out of the aircraft, already carrying her ear-defenders.

That’s my girl.

I tossed her a treat and turned back to Ranger. He had not run, but he possessed the air of a man caught between the urge to get as far from this place as possible or drop to his knees and vomit.

The image of him on his knees affected me. For reasons I did not have room to contemplate if I wanted to get in the air today.

I pushed it out of my mind, tossed the bag I’d brought into the cabin of the aircraft, and approached him, hands out, as if he was a rabid animal. “I was a helicopter pilot in the Russian navy before I deserted back to my employer. I have flown since I was much younger than this. You are safe with me, I promise.”

Ranger set his jaw. “I have no idea how old you are. And for the record, I’m safe on the ground, thanks.”

He meant it, I could tell, and I considered my options. Leaving without him was the most obvious. If Ranger would not board the aircraft, it would be the simplest thing to leave him behind. But I knew this man. Even if he would not fly, he was stubborn enough to stand in front of the chopper and dare me to cut him down.

Because he was brave. It was not like him to be nervous. “Is no different to the airplane you flew here on.”

Ranger’s glare deepened. “I didn’t fly here. I rode, like a sane person. Or did you think my heap-of-shit hog had fucking wings?”

I had assumed he had taken a three-hour flight and Jake had shipped his bike to the island as part of whatever deal they had made to babysit me. It had not occurred to me that Ranger had spent thirty-six hours on the road to reach my side. “You must be very attached to your heap of shit to go to so much trouble.”

His dark gaze flickered. “Don’t say shit. It’s fucking weird when you swear.”

“I curse all the time.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. Just not in English. It is not how I learned.”

A retort opened Ranger’s sinful mouth, but he was distracted by the chopper behind me and genuine distress cut through his belligerence.

He is afraid.An emotion I understood, but never about this.

I glanced around the heliport, searching for a solution to a problem I had not anticipated. “Maybe that one instead?”

Ranger followed my gaze to a lighter aircraft, and if anything, his expression fractured more. “The bubble machine that looks like it’s powered by chewing gum and lollipop sticks? Yeah, I’ll pass.”

I laughed, and it felt good. Not that he was upset, but that for once, I could reassure him that everything was okay and mean it. “It is small,” I conceded. “But powerful. You understand that a helicopter is designed to stay in the air, no? They do not fall from the sky unless they malfunction. Like any vehicle can. Like your bike.”

Lida barked before Ranger could question my sanity again. Eager to go. My girl loved to fly.

She hopped back into the aircraft and hovered by the door. I went to her and slipped her defenders on, smiling as she claimed the seat behind the pilot’s to lick my ears whenever she felt like it.

Ranger was unamused. “I’m not getting in that tin-pot death bird.”

He folded his arms, cementing his boots to the tarmac as I turned to consider him again.

“Would you get in if we stayed on the ground?”

“No.”

“It would feel good if you did . . . to fly, for you, I mean.”

“How do you work that out?”

Torn between touching him and giving him space, I returned to the chopper, hoping that perhaps if he saw Lida and I were safe inside it, he’d relax. “It is always good to face a fear. Did you have a bad experience?”

“What?”

“In the air,” I clarified. “On a plane, maybe?”

“No.”

Because he had never flown, I deduced. And I could not decide if that made this easier or more complex. “Come here.”

“No.”

Maybe it made no difference at all. “I want to show you something.”

Silence.

I leaned back, perching on the floor of the chopper, absorbing the familiar smell of fuel and leather. It was not dissimilar to the scents that clung to Ranger, the top notes that led to the smoke and sandalwood I had dreamed of for so many months, and I remembered how I had felt then. Compared it to how I felt now.

“The fuck are you grinning at?”

Ranger’s growl was harsh against the gentle dawn. He did not seem in the mood for me to tell him that the only reason we were here, in this airfield, with me contemplating something I had not done for more than a year, was because he had given me my life back.

I took the weight off my hip. “I am not grinning. And I will not make you fly if you really don’t want to, but you should know that it is something I have to do. So you will need to be okay with waiting on the ground.”

Ranger made another indecipherable noise low in his throat. I thought he might leave. That of everything I’d thrown at him, it was this that would drive him away.

But that sound, it wrenched from him, and he came closer, stepping between my legs. “Don’t leave me behind.”

I slid my hand up his torso, coming to rest over his pounding heart. Would it beat this hard if we were fucking? Would the rush be the same as the first flight I’d ever taken?

It would be better.

I kissed him to be sure, and my pulse ascended faster than any machine ever could. And like this, sitting as he towered over me, it was easy to forget that I had come here with a purpose beyond the taste of him, the warmth of his body pressed to mine, and the dizzying euphoria his touch left in its wake.

My skin.

My blood.

The hardness that grew in the black fatigues I’d thrown on before we’d come.

My cock being hard around Ranger was not new. Being here with it was, and I wondered if it was fear that made him kiss me with more intent than he ever had in the club. If it was me making him tremble or the thought of how it would feel to truly fly.

Perhaps they were one and the same.

I drew back, breathless. “You are afraid of this. I am afraid of you.”

Ranger gripped my chin. “Why are you scared of me?”

“Because loving you might be something else I cannot live without.”

“You love me, Vik?”

Yes. But the word caught in my throat. As if the sky would fall the second I spoke it aloud. The very moment I admitted to myself and to him that of course I loved him. Ranger. Asher. He was so strong, so vibrant, so wonderfully and brutally real. He was so beautiful as he simmered that dark stare at me that he took my breath away. “I would like to make a deal with you.”

Ranger’s kiss-reddened lips twisted into a shadowed smirk. “Let me guess, you packed a pineapple or some shit and you want me to eat it while you fly us to the fucking moon.”

“You are ridiculous.”

“So?”

“So . . . you are scared of heights?”

“No.”

“Of flying then?”

Not denying it, Ranger dropped his face to my shoulder and heaved a low sigh.

It was the easiest thing in the world to rub his back and tangle my fingers in the messy hair at the nape of his neck.

To kiss him again.

It was the hardest thing to stop. “I need to fly,” I whispered. “It might be the only thing that saves us. But . . . I need to be with you. Because you are the only soul who has ever truly saved me.”

Ranger dug his fingers into my shoulders. “Your employer saved you—Locke fucking saved you.”

“I do not want to do the things with Locke that I want to do with you.”

Comprehension and compassion warmed his face. “I know you want me, Vik. I want you too. But even if you somehow talk me onto this death shed, you don’t owe me anything. Not like that, anyway.”

“What would I owe you?”

He shrugged. “What you’re already doing, but I’d expect it forever and a few more days for luck.”

“You are talking about sobriety?”

“I’m talking about junk.” Ranger eased back from me. I braced for the distance I expected him to put between us, but he gripped the chopper’s frame and stepped over me instead, levering himself into the aircraft, the luxury interior as lost on him as it had been on me when I’d bought it. “I was psyching myself up to bang some brown with you—cos that’s the only way you’re getting to do it while I’m around. But I guess there’s more than one way of getting high, and I’m less scared I’ll like this one enough to keep doing it.”

He was comparing the filthy rush of heroin to the freedom of being in the air. Because he knew which one I would choose. Because he knew I was weak.

But watching him peer around the chopper as if he expected it to combust at any moment, I did not feel weak. Instead, I felt that if I could share this one thing with him, I could do anything. “To be clear.” I hauled myself into the aircraft. “You are saying that you will fly with me if I do not smoke heroin again?”

“Stay clean forever.” Ranger reached where Lida sat and scratched her ears. “Otherwise, what’s to stop you getting fucked up the second this death ride is over?”

“Forever is a long time.”

“Then you have to decide how much you want this.”

I could not tell if we were still talking about flying. Or if the distinction mattered. Just that I would sooner die than lie to him. “I cannot promise you forever. I tried once, with Jake, and I betrayed him.”

Ranger folded his long body into a seat. His gaze bored into me, testing the truth of my words. My intent. “You didn’t betray him. Addiction did.”

“The semantics aren’t important. I still told him I would not do something, and then I did it, and he could not look at me for so long—” I pursed my lips. I was used to being without Jake, but those long weeks when we had breathed the same air while living like strangers still hurt.

Your fault.

Guilt incinerated me. Made me yearn for those blank moments where I felt nothing at all. But Ranger was here. A reality I did not deserve any more than he deserved to be lied to.

I stared at a tiny thread in the leather seat closest to me. “There is a monster in me and I do not know how to kill it.”

“You’ve been clean for weeks. Just keep stabbing that fucker.”

“It is not me holding the knife.” I made myself face him. “Surely you must know that. Is why you are here, no? To fight this for me?”

Ranger laughed. “Vik, I’m just an idiot waiting for you to turn that fucking sound system on, ready to catch you if you fall. You’re the one surviving this shit every day.”

“But that is my point. Before you came here, getting high was my first thought—my only thought until I got what I wanted, and it will be again when you’re gone. That is not me vanquishing anything. It is postponing the inevitable.”

Ranger had been irritable before we had left the house. But the flash in his eyes as he absorbed my words felt beyond that, and he shook his head, wild hair falling into his face. “Nothing’s inevitable. If it was, we’d have stayed together after that first time back home, and none of this horrible shit would’ve happened to you.”

Together. With him. I wondered who I would be if that dream had become a reality. But we were together now, and even without the devil in my veins, I was still the same broken person I had always been.

I still could not fuck him . . .

Could I?

I made a decision. “New deal.”

Ranger arched a dark brow, waving a hand for me to explain.

“Is simple.” I reached behind me and shut the chopper door. “You face your fears and I will face mine.”