18. Ranger

[ 18 ]

RANGER

There was something in the water on this fucking island. There had to be. It was the only explanation for what sounded an awful lot like Viktor promising sex . . . stuff in exchange for me letting him take this thing up in the air while I was still in it. Heaven and hell served on a platter, with the added bonus of a morality kick to the dick.

You can’t let him do that.

The sex stuff. As if I would. And I opened my mouth to say so, but he moved past me to the front of the fucking helicopter, and I pretty much shat myself. Give me gangsters. Give me guns. Wire my balls to a fuse box. Anything but leaving the safety of solid ground in this shit can. “What are you doing?”

Viktor slid into a seat with a million buttons and some kind of stick. “Checking.”

“Checking what?”

His lips twitched like he wanted to say something hilarious, and in any other circumstance I’d have welcomed it. But nothing about this was funny. Nothing at all. My heart was in my fucking eardrums. I was basically already dead.

Why are you scared then?

I retreated to Lida, watching Vik as he examined every inch of the helicopter, inside and out. Calm. Methodical. Energised. He was so fucking hot, and I held on to that as I leaned into a quiet panic attack.

This is it for him. If you do this, he won’t go out and score.

Wishful thinking. And he hadn’t even lied about it. Instead, he’d reminded me that everything us was temporary, about six seconds after he’d almost told me he loved me.

Love. That word did a number on me as much as the thought of him taking this thing up in the air. Did I wish he’d said it? Would it have made any difference to the way I felt about him?

No. Cos you already love him.

True fucking story.

Viktor hopped back in the chopper. Dressed all in black, he was every wet dream I’d ever had. But it was more than the weight he’d put on over the past few weeks, the newfound colour in his cheeks, and the way his body was moving today. It was the spark in his eyes. The light—the sheer intelligence I’d never match.

I’d legit fallen for a smart-arse.

“Will you sit in the front with me?”

I blinked. “What for?”

“So you can see.”

“See what?”

“Everything.”

The only everything I was interested in had nothing to do with the bowels of a flying death tractor, but like this, Viktor was irresistible. I was in motion even as my brain screamed at me to get the fuck out of the chopper.

I peered over the front seats.

He patted the one next to him. “Please?”

“You fucker.”

Viktor’s lips inched up, but he caught them, tempering his amusement with no fucking clue that I’d grown to live for his smile. “Would you like to know how the aircraft works?”

“Nope.”

“It might help you believe it will stay in the sky.”

“Do we really need to do that?”

Viktor raked his eyes over me. “We don’t have to do anything.”

Of course. Cos he’d fly without me. But as nut-witheringly terrified as I was of leaving solid ground, I couldn’t let that happen. Literally or otherwise.

Otherwise?

A flush rattled me and I held onto it as if it was the only lifebelt left on earth.

Then it hit me that I was relying on the one thing Vik had seemed so certain he could never do, and I felt kinda sick. A lot sick, actually. Maybe it was the giant windows. “What’s that?”

Viktor’s lips twitched again. “A door handle.”

“And that?”

“The throttle. It controls the rotor speed⁠—”

“Shh. I don’t want to know.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“You look cute when you talk about it.”

“Not cute enough for me to finish a sentence?”

I bit back a dirty retort, focusing on the fact that I really did have no fucking clue how this thing was going to take flight, let alone not fall to the ground in a fiery ball of twisted metal. “Does it go straight up?”

“From here? No.” Viktor pointed to a marked circle in the tarmac fifty feet away. “We will taxi there first.”

I frowned. “Like . . . a plane?”

“The aircraft has wheels.”

“Shit the bed.”

“Get out and look.”

“No. You’ll leave without me.”

“Are you sure you do not want me to?”

“I think whatever you’re going to do, you need to get on with it before I have a fucking heart attack.”

Viktor’s gaze pinned me in place, spearing me as if he had nothing else to look at for the rest of his life. His long life, if his whirlybird didn’t kill us both.

At least you’d die together.

No. No. That wasn’t good enough, for me or for him. Vik deserved to live, and I wanted to be around to see it.

“You are sure?” He asked me one last time, and I chanced a glance at Lida still chilling in her seat behind Viktor.

Her tongue hung out, eyes bright with excitement. And that had to be a good thing, right? Even if I didn’t trust Viktor or his flying death machine, I trusted his dog.

Fuck it.“Let’s do this.”

Let’s do thisdidn’t pan out as quickly as I hoped. Turned out Mr Petrenko was a fucking safety dweeb, and despite me telling him I didn’t need or want to know all the technical shit that was about to turn my world upside down, he forced it on me anyway. The word thrust had a whole new meaning, and I didn’t fucking like it.

What I did like was watching Viktor move around his pet chopper like an absolute boss. I loved the moment he shared with Lida as he strapped her in. And I died a slow, glorious death as he straddled my lap to do the same to me.

My heart thumped and his neck called to me.

Don’t do it.

I did it—brushed my lips over his pulse point. Cos fuck it. I was probably about to die, and I didn’t want any regrets.

Viktor shivered, tightening the buckle of the belt he’d fixed around me. “If you keep doing that, we will fight my fears long before yours.”

“You scared of feeling good, Vik?”

His eyelids fluttered as I kissed him again. “We have been over this.”

We had and I’d listened. I’d heard him. But I didn’t want him to have any regrets either, so I kissed my way to his jaw, to his lips, and let us have a fucking moment of our own.

Kissing Viktor sometimes felt like a permanent state of madness. A magic carpet ride that would take me to the grave before I came up for air.

Others passed so fast it was hard to accept that it had happened at all, and this kiss was like that. Over too soon, leaving a wreck in its wake.

Viktor backed up, sliding lithely into his own seat. He passed me a headset. “You will need this.”

“What for?”

“To hear me speak.”

“What are you going to say?”

He gave me one of those fuck-hot smiles. “I will say breathe, Asher. Everything is okay.”

I wasn’t okay. Not even close. But I slipped the thing over my head cos I didn’t want to give him anything to worry about when he needed to focus on shit far more complex than me.

Also didn’t want to be without his voice, but I kept that to myself and settled back in my seat to die quietly.

Viktor went back to work. He explained more stuff to me, but it went over my head, and I sank into a haze of anxiety that somehow managed to be distant and a roaring present beast at the same time.

“You are ready?”

I jumped, Vik’s voice in my ear. It’s a radio, you melt. And my answer was a resounding fuckno. But I nodded, gritting my teeth. Vik had survived a thousand versions of hell to bring me here. Throwing it back in his face felt worse than lighting a crack pipe for him.

He doesn’t smoke crack.

Man, I wanted a cigarette.

Viktor flicked a couple of switches. Noise built, shaking my seat, rattling my bones. “We will taxi now. I will tell you before we take off.”

Cheers, mate.

The chopper began to move, edging forward, the blades casting whipped shadows on the tarmac, taking a slice of my soul with them with every rotation, curdling my stomach.

Don’t puke.

I wouldn’t. Never did, never had. But fuck me, this was the closest I’d felt since I ate eleven McFlurries that one time a million years ago.

The bird reached the magic spot. I risked a glance at Viktor. His face was a study of sexy as hell concentration, but he spared me a grin, that spark in his eyes brighter than perhaps I’d ever seen, and I realised that how I felt about him was more than love. That if I only saw him so alive this one fucking time, it was worth everything.

Even the breakfast I clearly wasn’t getting until this was over.

The noise of the chopper grew louder, the blades above my head picking up speed.

Viktor said something else about thrust. A strangled sound escaped me, and he rubbed my arm. “You are okay. I promise.”

Absolutely was not. But that wasn’t going to change. I peeled his hand from me and pushed it back to where it needed to be on the controls. “Both hands on the wheel.”

His soft laugh crackled in my ear. I held onto it, and to Lida’s happy bark, as the heli made some fucked-up sound and finally began to rise . . .

And rise and rise and rise, leaving my stomach on the ground as my hand flew to my mouth and my eyes slammed shut.

Fuck.

Fucking fuck.

Viktor did this shit on the regular? For fun? If I hadn’t known he was tapped before, I did now.

Jesus Christ.

“You can look, Asher.”

“Fuck off.” I pressed the heels of both hands into my eye sockets. “Tell me when we’re on the ground again.”

“It will be awhile.”

“Don’t care.”

“If that was true, I would not be able to do this.”

His hand grazed my leg—my thigh, skimming the constricted muscle. But the touch was over too soon, cos this fucker had to concentrate.

It felt like I was stuck in a potato rumbler for a hundred years, but eventually, the god-awful noise mellowed. “Are we in space yet?”

Viktor laughed again. “Look and see.”

Nope.

Still not doing it.

But my hands were hurting my eyes, and it started to piss me off. I let them drop and cracked a lid, turning to Lida first, then Viktor.

He was so fucking beautiful that I couldn’t stop my other eye from forcing its way open and taking him all in. That bright gaze and his sharp cheekbones. The tiny frown creasing his forehead as he did fuck knew what to the beast keeping us up in the air.

Shitting hell, I hated him for this.

I loved him.

And maybe that was why I did the stupidest thing in the world and let the scene before me widen to include the view from the fuck-off giant windows. To include the sky. “Fuck me.”

“Do not say things you don’t mean.”

It took me a nauseous second to hear him. To compute what I’d said and his response. And even then, I couldn’t think clearly enough to verbalise an answer.

I leaned forward.

Regretted it.

But I wasn’t in the business of travelling backwards and I made myself stay and face the teeny tiny flecks of civilisation below us and the sheer drop it would take us to reach them. “This is fucking high.”

“Not really. If you were on a plane⁠—”

“Don’t get any ideas.”

“You are okay?”

“Yep.”

“Are you lying?”

“Never. Just don’t do anything violent with this thing.”

“I will have to turn soon.”

“Fuck off.”

Viktor reached for me with that stray hand again. He found my clammy fingers and squeezed them. “I am not going anywhere.”

“Good.” I squeezed him back. Then let him go back to piloting the chopper.

Piloting. The. Chopper.

This shit was insane. But the longer it went on, the less scary it became, even as Viktor braced me for a couple of turns, and an increase in speed I was a hundred percent sure he instigated to see if I’d combust.

I didn’t. And after a while, fear left me as abruptly as it had arrived on the ground.

My seat swallowed me up, fatigue hitting hard. I propped an arm behind my head, watching Lida. Watching him. Watching the sea glitter as we buzzed over it.

“Like your bike.”

It wasn’t. But I got it now. Why he loved this. Why it made his eyes shine and his grin almost as bright as it used to be.

“Do not say things you don’t mean.”

I blinked and sat up. “Why would you think I didn’t mean it?”

Viktor flinched. Subtle, but I saw it. “It was not my intention to say that.”

“But you did say it. And I’m fucking confused. When have I ever said shit about whether I like to get dicked or not?”

“You haven’t. I made an assumption a long time ago, and my brain has become bad at letting things go.”

He did something that made the helicopter bank. It tossed my stomach, but not enough to distract me from the fact that he’d been looking at me this whole fucking time thinking—believing—that I was someone else.

I wasn’t known for my diplomacy. For him, I tried. “Why did your assumption swing that way?”

Viktor took his time answering, and the silence left room for a thousand other questions to sweep through my mind, not all of them about sex. Cos I wanted more from him. To know more. To understand. The people I respected in my life—Jean, Folk, even fucking Alexei, had always taught me that filling in the gaps was important . . . until it wasn’t. And it was the most fucked-up thing in the world that I had no clue where me and Vik had landed on that spectrum.

“It fit,” Vik said eventually. “For me, not you. I do not get the things I want the most, and this felt no different.”

“How does it feel now?”

Whatever sound Vik made was drowned out by the chopper, reminding me that we were having this conversation in the worst possible place. But then . . . up here in the clouds, we couldn’t escape it, and maybe it was for the best.

My tact stores ran dry. I gave him the truth. All of it. “I’ve never had a dude bang me, but I loved getting pegged by Finch, so whatever assumptions you’ve made about what I want, open that fuck-off door and boot them into the sea.”