22. Ranger

[ 22 ]

RANGER

Life in the sun became crazy busy. If we weren’t fighting, we were flying. If we weren’t sleeping, we were rolling around on Viktor’s bed.

That was the simple version of it, anyway. If I didn’t think too hard about everything in between. And I tried not to think too hard about anything, except keeping my dick to myself when Vik wasn’t in the mood. Or when he was, but the life he’d survived worked against him, and his gaze hazed over, pulse spiking too hard for comfort.

It happened less as the first week of fight training flew by. His anxiety faded as mine grew. Most nights he couldn’t get enough of me. Like a fucking dam had broken. But some we lay in the dark, his heart pounding beneath my palm, he talked, and I learned more about him than I’d ever dreamed. Nightmare shit that he shared like he was narrating a wildlife documentary, but I felt every hit like a poison arrow, and my mood started to buckle under the strain.

“We are here.”

I jerked to awareness, the noise and motion of the chopper gone, Viktor’s voice a real thing, not a robot in my ear. “We landed?”

He sent me a wry glance. “Unless we are floating in the sea and you were too asleep to notice.”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“I am never sure. Do you dream?”

Only of him. But that hadn’t happened since I’d crossed a continent to be by his side. These days I shut my eyes so infrequently that I wasn’t sure what happened in between.

I got out of the dickbird without answering. Viktor did a load of shit I didn’t understand while I leaned against the warm heli, eyeing the darkening sky like it held the answers to questions I hadn’t thought of yet.

“What is wrong?”

Viktor made me jump for the second time in as many minutes, revealing that he’d exited the chopper without me noticing. Either I was getting worse at this gig or he was getting closer to the kind of form where I had no hope of keeping up if he got away from me.

Tell him the truth. I always did. “I’m worried you’re gonna switch up sneaking off to get high for legging it when I’m asleep to go die in a gangster war.”

He frowned. “I will not run away in the night to fight this war. You will know before I leave you.”

And there it was—the devil my conscious self didn’t want to acknowledge. That whatever mobster party Jakov and Viktor were gearing up for, I wasn’t invited.

“You do not want to look at me?”

I turned my head, unaware that I’d let my attention slip from him in the first place.

Viktor stared back at me, saying nothing, and all I fucking heard was the low murmur of his voice last night, when he’d told me about the night he was taken and given to Priest and his goons.

“That close to the Kings’ territory, I was complacent. Distracted, maybe. Lost in my thoughts.”

“What were you thinking about?”

Viktor tore his gaze from the ceiling. “I was thinking about you.”

“Come.” He touched my elbow. “Let’s go home.”

Home. To his house on the mountain. To the kitchen where he cooked for me for no other reason than he liked me. The shower that no longer made us clean. To his bed for the next six nights until he was fucking gone.

I shrugged off his touch. “You’re the boss.”

Viktor was one of the cleverest people I’d ever met. And I’d met some clever bastards. But somehow, little old me had nurtured a way of bewildering him.

With a deep frown, he pushed off the chopper and walked away, heading for the car we’d driven to the airfield.

For the first time ever, I hesitated to follow him, my legs heavy with a feeling I couldn’t fucking name. Dread. Fear. Love. Man, this shit would be easy if I hated him.

I made myself move and caught up with him at the car, sliding behind the wheel without asking him if he wanted to drive. Viktor’s energy levels were bossing it along with the rest of him, but bless his heart, he’d stayed awake the whole time we’d been in the air, and I wanted a reason not to look at him.

He had two phones. After weeks of him barely acknowledging an outside world existed, if his face wasn’t attached to me, it was in one of these fuckers.

I drove.

He texted.

Fifteen silent minutes in, he held a screen up. “From Ivanov.”

Unknown: Remember, nomad

I sighed. As if I had the bandwidth to spend three days deciphering his cryptic bollocks. “Why is Alexei texting you?”

“He is not texting you?”

“What do you think?”

Viktor eyed me as he tossed the phone on the dashboard. “I think it is a strange coincidence that you would be so upset about something two minutes before Alexei tells me not to do it.”

“I have no shitting clue what you’re talking about.” More silence. Uncomfortable fucking silence that leeched oxygen from the air as a humourless laugh broke free of my lungs. “You don’t believe me?”

Viktor flicked the radio on. Spanish dance beats filled the quiet and made me want to punch something as I wracked my brains for whatever forgotten fucked-up wisdom Alexei was trying to remind me of.

Only one came to mind.

Plan with your head.

Shoot from your heart.

Do not let anyone tell you how to love them.

With Alexei, shit like that always came out of context. I hadn’t understood it then, and I didn’t understand it now. None the fucking wiser, I drove on until something occurred to me. “I didn’t know you and Alexei were friends.”

“We are not.” Viktor extended his leg, rubbing his hip. “This is business—what is that look for?”

I unfolded my face from whatever it was doing. But not fast enough for Viktor to give up on an answer. “I’m trying to understand the hierarchy. Jake’s the big boss, right? And so’s Cam. But every time Alexei’s in the room, everyone does what he says.”

In the darkness that had fallen as we’d driven home, Viktor almost smiled. But it was tainted by something I didn’t understand any more than I understood anything else. “You would like a Sidorov family history lesson?”

“A what?”

“You have cigarettes?”

Course I did. It was the one requirement I’d managed to communicate to Katya with no trouble.

I passed them over.

Viktor lit up.

I didn’t bother, knowing that whatever mood he’d fallen into, he’d share.

The road began to wind in steep curves, ascending the mountain. Viktor relinquished the cigarette as Katya’s house came into view. “It is not fanciful to tell you that Alexei falling in love with Cam O’Brian changed the world.”

I jammed the smoke between my lips, keeping both hands on the wheel, navigating the shady road. “Whose world?”

“Mine. Yours. Every criminal in Europe.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m not a criminal. And I don’t give much of a fuck where Cam puts his dick.”

Viktor laughed. With actual real-life humour. “I believe you about O’Brian’s cock, but there is nothing un-criminal about you, Asher Moore.”

“Don’t whole name me.”

“Why not?”

Cos it made me want to do unspeakable things to him. Things he wasn’t ready for, and maybe never would be.

I stopped the car outside Katya’s house and got out, moving automatically to scan our surroundings and open Viktor’s door.

“You can stop doing that now.”

I ignored him.

He caught my arm as I turned away. “We have started three conversations and finished none.”

“You wanna talk, Vik?”

His eyes blazed meadow-green fire, but Lida appeared before he could answer and jumped at him. Cos she’d got the memo that he was no longer made of glass and she was miffed we hadn’t taken her flying with us today.

Having her close chilled me out. At least when it came to assassins lurking in the shadows. I walked ahead to the house, scoping it, checking the security footage on my fancy phone.

All clear.

I opened the front door, waiting for Viktor to catch up.

Lida slipped past me and headed for her bed. Viktor took his sweet time and I realised he’d shimmied up a tree for a fucking orange.

I was not in the mood.

“Is the last blood orange.” He dropped it in my palm. “Come.”

Stop telling me to come.

Viktor eased past me, his neck so close to my face I smelt jet fuel and smoke. The sweat he’d built while he’d flown the chopper.

Fucking oranges.

All of it made my dick hard and my heart hurt, and I raised my gaze to the night sky, pleading for help from a god I didn’t believe in. Seriously. This shit was The Crystal Maze of horny heartache.

No help arrived. I locked the door and trailed after Viktor, following him to his bedroom.

I handed him the gun from my waistband and watched him stash it. Watched him strip his shirt, waiting for him to move on to the shower.

He didn’t.

Viktor closed the gun safe and came to me. “I cannot stop thinking about all the things we have done. The things we have yet to do. I have never thought of someone in such a way.”

“If you’re not talking about sex, I’m gonna need a translator.”

“That is my point. I do not think about sex for months at a time, and then you . . .” He tapped his temple. “I cannot stop.”

I felt that. But none of it had anything to do with the conversations we’d abandoned in the car. There was shit I needed to know. Words he needed to speak. And then I had to tell him to go fuck himself if he thought I was staying put while he fought a war without me.

But . . . Viktor tugged my shirt off. His hot skin met mine and my thoughts scrambled, only one coherent enough to catch.

Careful.

Viktor kissed me.

I kissed him back, but my brain was noisy, and tonight, he knew it.

He bit my lips. “This . . . between us. It cannot always be about what you think I need.”

“You have no idea what I’m fucking thinking.”

“No?” Viktor set his palm to my chest and shoved. “So you are not thinking that you want something you can’t have? So that means you cannot have anything?”

“Sure you’re not tripping over that language barrier there, Vik?”

His hands twitched, like he wanted to shove me again.

He walked out instead, leaving me alone in his bedroom. I sent a longing gaze to his unmade bed, memories of the last time we’d been in it so vivid I felt his teeth at my neck, his dick heavy in my hand—his dick hot against mine. Vik liked grinding. He could do it for hours. Made me think about how he’d fuck me. If he’d edge me to oblivion like he had last night or go hard.

I was good with either, and that ache bloomed inside me again. That fucking craving I’d never felt with anyone else.

The front door opened.

I snapped out of my sex-themed daze and darted out of the room in time to see Viktor stepping outside.

His shirt was back on. Shoes on his feet. And that fucker was fast.

He jogged to the car.

I sprinted after him, heart in my throat. If he got behind the wheel and gunned it, I had no chance of catching up unless he drove somewhere really fucking obvious.

Like the drug strip at the beach.

Viktor reached the car. He opened the driver door. I reached him in time to slam that bastard shut again, and he whirled around, instinct balling his fists, muscles bunched to strike—to kill.

But he moved aside, gesturing to the door. “Fine. Get it yourself.”

“Get what?”

“Is in the cupholder. The paper bag.”

I trusted Viktor. But I was wound up enough that I didn’t believe it. I invaded his personal space, gripping his wrist, and opened the car door with my other hand.

Sure enough, the cupholder held a small paper bag I hadn’t noticed on the way home. “If that’s smack, I’ll smack you.”

“You can try. But it is not drugs. It is for you.”

I snagged the bag—definitely not powder—and straightened to face him.

Frustration and amusement warred for dominance in his pretty fucking face and I kissed him—I had to, cos this night was apparently weird like that.

Full moon, baby.

I shut Rubi out of my head and peeked in the bag. Coiled dark leather greeted me, and a glitter of colour I’d recognise anywhere.

Amethyst.

“Is for your birthday.” Viktor sidled closer and took the bracelet out of the bag. “That stone you lug around is important to you, no? I thought you might like to keep a piece of it closer to you.”

“A piece of it?”

“You kicked your bag a while ago. A fragment broke away.”

“Fuck.” I couldn’t hide my wince. “I’ve done that so many times, I’m surprised there’s any of it left. And my birthday was ages ago.”

“It was two days after you got here. I am sorry I was not present enough to know.”

Viktor peeled my hand from his wrist, pried my fingers open, and dropped the bracelet into my palm. “Will you tell me what the stone means to you?”

I stared at the bracelet, the wrench in my heart I always felt around Viktor taking a trip down memory lane and making way for something else. “It was my dad’s. He was a rough as nuts Scouser, but superstitious as hell. Carried that rock around his whole fucking life, and now I do too.”

“For luck?”

“And energy. My nanna reckons it’s why I’m adaptable. Cos I grew up surrounded by it.” I uncoiled the bracelet. The fragment of stone was bound into leather the colour of my nanna’s old couch. For a moment, I was back in her council flat, chips in the pan, nuggets in the oven, fucking Billy Ocean blaring out of the kitchen. Only the scent of orange blossom kept my feet on the solid, sun-baked ground. “Thank you. Sorry I thought you were scarpering to get blitzed.”

Viktor swiped his thumbs under my damp eyes. “I am sorry too. For every moment I have made you chase after me.”

“It’s not that many.”

Vik hummed and took the bracelet from me. He tied it around my wrist and it stirred another memory.

I led him back up the hill and into the house. My much-abused bag was in the hallway, abandoned in the corner. Kneeling, I dug through it while he wandered off, rummaging past the broken sticks until I found a newspaper-wrapped gift right at the bottom.

I’d already opened it, but the fancy ribbon was still tied. I took it to Viktor’s room where he was making a half-hearted attempt to straighten the sheets while he texted on his phone.

He set the phone down.

I slipped between him and the mattress, grasping his arm, ending his brief run of trying to be tidy.

By now, I’d spent so much time with my hands on him that his wrist felt moulded to my grip. I turned it over and tied the woven bracelet I’d found in my bag around him. Black and amethyst thread woven into a plait more elaborate than the ones Ivy made with her dad. That little beast had given me the sticks. The bracelet was from Liliana, a note I couldn’t read tucked into the newsprint.

“A present from the Kings.” I knotted the thread at Viktor’s pulse point. “The kids make them if they like you, and I like you, so . . .”

“You like me, Ranger?”

I love you. “You’re all right. Can you read this for me?”

Viktor took the note and unfolded it. He frowned at the Spanish words and took a slow breath. “She saw what you did. She says thank you. And that her father will buy you some beer when he sees you. She also says happy birthday and that your hair looked better long.”

I narrowed my gaze. “It does not fucking say that.”

Viktor grinned, all traces of gangster and drug addict obliterated by the dickhead humour lighting his eyes. “Prove it.”

I flicked the paper from his grasp and tackled him to the bed. After days and days of fight club, putting hands to him like that was normal.

It wasn’t normal for him to concede so easily. For me to fall on top of him on his bed, but as I scrambled to move, he held me in place. “Stop protecting me from you. I do not need it.”

“I—”

“No.” Viktor wrapped his legs around me, pinning us together as he lost the shirt he’d put back on to go outside.

Skin on skin. I’d never get over it. How the hard lines of his body fit to mine. Every muscle, every bone as I braced myself above him, fist to the mattress. The stone at my wrist glittered, doing something to me that I couldn’t handle without claiming his mouth, letting him feel all of me, just for a fucking second.

But the trouble with a tiny taste of something perfect was that it always left you wanting more. Viktor knew that better than anyone, and as I eased back, frustration seeped from every pore of him.

“We have been naked together. Your cock in my mouth. I am not afraid of you.”

He punctuated the words with a vicious bite to my neck—something else he liked doing. Teeth and edging. Who knew?

I did. So fucking much, and despite the caution I couldn’t shake, my body reacted to the shock of pain, bearing down on him again, my hand flying of its own accord to the button of the combat shorts he wore.

Need him naked.

I fought it, but the rising heat between us became a tsunami of want. A chant in my head, loud and unrelenting, until every scrap of Viktor’s clothing lay scattered around us.

Scarred skin.

Subtle, ethereal tattoos.

Coiled muscles and fine body hair that led to his big dick.

His hard dick.

That ache, it was back, and fuck, it left me dizzy.

Viktor tugged me down to kiss him, his tongue sliding into my mouth with zero hesitancy, his hands roaming every inch of me as he stripped me of the few clothes I wore. Until I was naked on top of him, moving with his body, letting instinct figure it out.

My dickhurt. And that craving in my gut wouldn’t quit. Vik took me in his mouth and it wasn’t enough. He slid two skilled fingers inside me and my body cried out for more, like a deeper part of me knew the truth better than I did. Better than Viktor, as he fucked me with his fingers, staring at me so hard it was a miracle his eyeballs didn’t scrape the tiles under the bed.

I saw the moment it finally clicked for him. That he believed what I’d been telling him since that first chopper ride.

“You want me to fuck you?”

I was still on top of him, knees braced either side of his hips, my forehead pressed to his as rough breaths tore from my chest. “I’ve always wanted you to fuck me.”

“Since when?”

“Since I first heard your voice.”

“My voice?” Viktor did something that arched my spine, driving me upright as he squeezed my cock with his other hand. “That is . . . ironic, maybe. When I was a prisoner, your voice was all I heard for days at a time.”

Thinking about the hellfire he’d survived should’ve withered my dick, but the swelter building between us was too strong. I gripped the headboard of his bed, riding the storm while he gazed at me, my dick seeking friction against his ridged abdomen, potent desperation rushing through me. Like I’d die if he didn’t fuck me.

Like I’d die if he ever did.

It messed with my head, and it was my turn to bare my soul against my will as my pulse rebelled and panic throttled me.

Viktor’s wicked fingers disappeared. The room blurred and I found myself on my back, him looming over me, his gaze a mirror as it bored into me, concern overwhelming every thought and feeling. “What has made you feel this way?”

A violent groan wrenched from me.

Viktor rubbed my chest, my belly, letting his hand drift lower and lower, testing me, maybe. “You are okay.”

Not a question.

He was telling me.

And fuck, how did he know I needed that?

I’d hidden my face in my arms. I let them drop as he found my dick with his hot hand. Gripped his jaw and held him close. “Please?”

He didn’t ask what I was begging him for. Thank fuck, cos I didn’t really know. I just fucking needed him, in every way he could give me.

Viktor kissed my lips. Then he rolled me onto my side and devoured me.

Literally.

He fucked me with his tongue and I’d never felt anything like it.

Fear left me. I knew it would come back, cos what I was afraid of had nothing to do with sex. Not really. But for the long moments he rimmed me into oblivion, I had no thought in my head. No feeling except a teasing euphoria that had me shouting into a pillow.

I thought I’d wanted him before.

Like, ten minutes ago.

By the time he eased me onto my back again, I needed him more than fucking air.

Viktor kissed fire up my stomach and my chest. My neck. Condoms had appeared from somewhere.

Lube.

He held my face. “You are sure?”

“Are you?”

Viktor’s gaze fractured, emotion hazing his eyes. “I think I have never wanted anything quite so much.”

The world we endured was big and messy. Stained with death and pain. But as I gave Vik my answer with a slow, hot kiss, it narrowed to just me and him, naked and shaking in the dark.

He broke away, grabbing the music remote somewhere beyond me. Low beats filled the room, like a shield forming around us, and it settled us.

A smile warmed Viktor’s face as he rolled a condom onto that big dick. “I have never felt like this about sex.”

I watched his hands work, anticipation building in my gut, my blood. “How’s that?”

“Like I will be a better person after.”

“You’re putting a lot of pressure on my magic⁠—”

He silenced me with a finger to my lips. “No bad jokes, serdtse moyo.”

The Russian words were familiar. I’d heard Alexei say them. To Cam. To Saint. I couldn’t be sure of the meaning, but the way Viktor gazed at me squeezed my heart.

He gripped my thighs, tugging me lower on the bed. On the sheets we’d made our own every night for the past week, but this was different. So fucking different. He’d never done this by choice with anyone but a man he called brother.

I’d never done it at all.

Not sober and not with a real dick.

And fuck me, Viktor’s dick was real. As he aligned us, I couldn’t stop staring at it. Until it eased out of sight and my eyes fluttered shut.

Fuck.

Fuck.

I liked pain. The physical kind, anyway. I’d never run from it, and this shit? Damn. It tore me up, inside and out, and I latched onto it, letting it drag me under with its sweet burn.

Viktor slid home.

I wrapped a leg around him, drawing him deeper.

Vik groaned and flexed his hips, sinking his teeth into my chest, tugging my hair. Then he rose, looming over me as he found a rhythm, and his dick inside me matched the beat of the music around us.

He hit every spot. Places I didn’t know existed. My body moved with his, chasing that euphoric friction, and I couldn’t stop kissing him. Touching him, until that ever-present hunger for more had me gripping the headboard behind me.

Viktor fucked me harder, a flush staining his chest, eyes hooded and feral. Like he was holding back.

I curled my other leg around him, urging him on, and something changed—everything changed. Shackles fell away. Instinct took over and a haze of pleasure descended on me. I’d never fucked like this. I’d never even imagined it. And I’d pictured Viktor Petrenko fucking me a lot. Before he got taken. Before I knew what had happened to him to bring him into my life in the first place.

I always knew he’d be good at it.

Never fucking dreamed he’d know me this well though. That he’d read every wordless cue my body gave up and drive me to the brink so fast he had my eyes rolling into the back of my head.

So fucking good.

But it was more than pleasure.

More than fucking—more than sex. It always had been, even as his beautiful, scarred body locked up and I knew he was about to come.

Cos Viktor . . . I knew his face. How it blanked out when he was gonna explode. Only this time, it wasn’t on my chest. In my mouth. It was buried so deep inside me that I knew I’d never be the same when he was done.

Pleasure built.

Pressure.

Heat and emotion.

I let go of the headboard to hold him. His forehead came to mine, his wild gaze pinning me in place. Everything was fucking perfect. Then that fucker smiled and feathered a whisper to my lips.

He pulled back. “Not yet.”