23. Viktor

[ 23 ]

VIKTOR

I could not stop fucking him. He consumed me, the perfect fit whichever way I positioned him. And Ranger—his long limbs and elegant spine—he was flexible, body and mind. He let me do anything and everything to him, and I could not stop.

We fucked all night. At first it was me who pulled back when it seemed one of us might come, afraid to lose this moment. Then it was him. As if we had been a lifetime in the making and we would not survive the end.

It was almost dawn when I pushed him onto his stomach.

Ranger reached back, tugging my thighs, holding me tight inside him as I moulded to his tall frame, curving around his spine. I swallowed his deep groan with a kiss that made his hips pulse and my cock turn to granite. Every limb trembled. Every nerve shuddered, his and mine, and the wave finally broke.

We came together as the sun rose, my face buried in the crook of his neck, my cock so deep inside him as his painted my hand with wet warmth.

I had never . . .

Not like that. I had never come with my whole self, and for long moments, it stunned me. I lay boneless, without breath or thought. Then his scent returned to me. His hot skin and messy hair, and I nuzzled his neck. “You are okay?”

Ranger’s face was hidden by his arm, shoulders still heaving with exertion.

I kissed between them. Rubbed his back.

He did not move.

“Asher?”

Slowly, he raised his head, eyes cracking open as if they were welded shut.

He was already gone.

I let him be.

I let him sleep, and for the first time, I think, he truly did.

It left me alone, and without him. Free to stare at him after I had cleaned up. And I did stare. I lay on my stomach beside him, chin on my folded arms, taking in every inch of his sleeping face. His long lashes. His dark brows. The raven hair that curled at the nape of his neck. The bite mark at his throat.

I did that.

It shocked me in some distant way. That Ranger had unravelled such paralysing fears so fast. Years undone in a matter of weeks.

It has been longer than that.

Since I met him, perhaps. But the specifics didn’t matter. I had told him that I would be a better man after I fucked him, and I truly felt like I was. Energy skipped in my blood. Life that had not been there for the longest time. I felt like I could fuck him again. That I could do anything, and even the rabid monster that lived in my veins was quiet.

I love him.

I had not told him. But there was no reality I could imagine that he did not already know.

The sun rose higher, blazing through the window. I got up and shut the blind, leaving a single ray to filter through the gap. It hit the stone in the leather tied around Ranger’s wrist, prisms of light dancing on the pale walls and ceiling. Divine and pretty, but nothing was as beautiful as him, bare to the early morning, only his legs half hidden by the rumpled sheets.

The music we’d fucked to had played out hours ago. I found some more and turned the volume even lower, not that Ranger seemed like he would wake any time soon. And it left me plenty of time to think—something I found easier than I had in a long time.

I lay on my back beside him, watching the prisms scatter on the ceiling, pondering the story behind the rock in his bag. Ranger did not seem like a man who believed in the magic of crystals, but the amethyst stone meant the world to him, I could tell.

He loved his father.

So had Jake, which turned my thoughts to a darker place. To the phone I had abandoned to lose myself in Ranger all night long.

There were no more messages from Ivanov. For me or for Ranger. And only one from my brother.

Jake:This will be it

Four words that could have meant the end or the beginning, and for many years, as long as Katya was safe with her family, I had not cared much which. But as my gaze fell on the woven thread knotted around my wrist, I knew something had changed.

Ranger.

I wanted more than a hot summer with him. A handful of stolen nights. I did not deserve him—no one did. But true to the fear I had carried since I met him, I could not give him up.

As if he had heard me, Ranger stirred, his obsidian eyes wrenching open a split second after he reached for me.

I was in his arms before I could snatch a breath, and the unfettered burn we’d revelled in all night surged to life again.

We did not speak.

We fucked.

Harder this time. Without fear, without caution. Ranger took what I gave, strong and unyielding, and he came with a growl that rattled my bones.

Panting, I pressed my face between his shoulder blades, one foot on the floor, a knee braced on the bed it was a wonder we hadn’t toppled right off. “You are awake.”

Ranger hummed. “Ya fucking reckon?”

I eased out of him.

He rolled onto his back, grinning, and another scar on my soul healed over. Even if I could not keep him forever, these moments made every hurt worth it. “And you thought I didn’t like that shit.”

“You are not going to let that go?”

Ranger waited for me to toss the condom. Then he hauled me down on top of him. “Not today.”

His smile dazzled me a moment longer before he sobered. “You good?”

“You tell me.”

“I meant in here.” He tapped my head. “I tried to be careful at the start . . . last night, whenever it was. But I lost my mind somewhere along the way.”

“Maybe we both did, and it is how it should be.”

Ranger studied me and pressed the sweetest, softest kiss to my cheek. “Works for me.”

He relaxed.

I rolled off him but did not go far. I left my head on his chest and drowsed while he played with my hair. Unnatural energy still thrummed in me, but it was tempered by his affection.

By his love.

Tell him.

I lifted my head in the same moment his hands stopped moving. His gaze met mine and he mirrored the gesture I’d forced on him last night, silencing me with a finger to my lips.

“Not yet, Vityasha.”

He said with a wink, perhaps not realising that calling me that, Vityasha, was as good as confessing his undying love.

Or maybe he did know.

Either way, I sealed my lips together and lay down.

Ranger was quiet for a while. His busy fingers let me know he hadn’t gone back to sleep, but his eventual soft sigh still caught me off guard. “Were you serious about the history lesson?”

“I am always serious.”

He rolled his eyes. “Not for a Russian. Told you before, you’re way more fun than Alexei.”

“You do not fuck Alexei.”

“That’s not why you’re fun, Vik.”

Warmth caressed my heart—such a broken place before him. “How much did you know about the Rebel Kings before you became one?”

Ranger had a tell when he wanted to smoke. A twitch in his fingers. A darted glance to wherever he’d left his cigarettes.

He never forgot.

Never lost them.

But he never smoked inside either, even though I’d told him I didn’t much care if he did, and the moment passed.

He propped himself up on one elbow. “I know what I heard, filtered through the Crow grapevine. What I saw when we fought. But that shit was nothing like the reality of riding with them.”

“How so?”

He shrugged. “They care so much, about everyone and everything. I don’t know how they fucking do it.”

As if Ranger didn’t care about anything, when I knew his heart to be as big and warm as any Rebel King I’d ever met. But I let that go and considered how to tell a story I did not know in its entirety myself.

I went back to the start as I knew it and traced a shape on the bed between us. “I meant it when I said Cam and Alexei changed the landscape of mob rule in Europe.” I sketched a line down the middle. “It is two decades ago. Over here, the Sidorov family rule, so other organisations—the Sambinis, the Aldea cartel, the Albanians—have to operate far out of their traditional territories. Like the UK and Ireland, which brings them into the path of the Rebel Kings who seem to cause trouble whatever they do.”

Ranger snorted but narrowed his gaze, listening.

I pieced it together, streamlining twenty years to explain how the lives of other men had led us here. “They did not know each other,” I explained. “Pavel Sidorov and Cameron O’Brian Senior, but for a long time, they fought the same war from opposite sides. Not for power, money, or product, but against the evilest trade in our world.”

“Trafficking?”

“Yes.” I shifted onto my stomach. Ranger did the same and the movement brought us shoulder to shoulder—as if he knew I needed to feel him, but more than the lightest touch would derail me. “It was the life work of both men, and eventually, it cost the Rebel Kings their patriarch.”

“I remember. Frank Crow thought Cam was too young for the gavel. Scared the shit out of him when he proved him wrong and brought all his nutter mates to the table.”

“He was right to be scared. Cam is a fearsome leader, but it was not until he happened across Alexei that everything changed.”

Ranger’s frown deepened. I realised he did not know Alexei’s story, and to share it with him felt like the betrayal of a man I had revered from the moment he’d breached the ceiling of my first captor’s home and killed him in his bed. “Alexei and I share a history.” I trod carefully. “He came to Jake’s father a few years before me, but we did not cross paths. And by the time he met Cam, he was free of the life that had saved him.”

“What brought him back?”

“Their bond.” I rubbed my foot to Ranger’s bare leg, revelling in his closeness. “Like a wolf joining a new pack, no? For Alexei to be with Cam, first he had to keep him alive, which was difficult, considering the threats to his life at the time. Second, he had to navigate a war that had begun before either of them were born.”

“Cam said that to me.” Ranger fiddled with the woven thread he’d tied to my wrist. “That this shit was years old and it needed to end.”

“He was not wrong.” Ranger’s fingers brushed my skin. I was so attuned to him now, so into him, that the ghost of sensation was a wrecking ball to my nerves, but we were not done. “Like their fathers before, Cam and Jake share a dream. To be free. But legacy holds them back. Unfinished business. Vengeance. You can call it many things, but the ties that bind them remain.”

Ranger slid me a dry look. “I love how you speak like a poet, but I’m a regular fucking idiot. You need to break it down better than that, cos all I’m getting is that a lot of cunts need to die before anyone’s dreams come true.”

Dreams. The bite mark on his neck reeled me in, breaking my focus. One day, if I survived the tipping point I had yet to reach, I would tell him that these quiet moments with him were the only dreams I’d ever need.

“Vik.”

“Yes?”

“We can talk about this later. Or never. I’m not the bloke who needs to know everything. Just give me a gun and tell me where to aim.”

He did not seem keen on firearms, so I could not tell how literal his words were. And in any case, it did not matter. If I was to take the advice of Alexei Ivanov, Ranger deserved to know why.

My brain was still an alien landscape to me, a barren land it took me a moment to traverse, while Ranger grounded me, like he always had, by doing nothing at all. “Pavel Sidorov was Jake’s father. To Alexei, and to me, he was a man who saved us from the very thing he had devoted his life to eradicating. That is not to say he was a saint, but he mattered to us. And Cam’s father was murdered for the same reason, yes?”

Ranger nodded, still listening.

“Cam’s father was killed first.” I drew an X on the bed, on the western side of my imagined sketch. “Leaving the Rebel Kings to fight a war within their ranks as much as without. But Pavel was still alive. He had Alexei, his sharpest weapon, and so they carried on, unaware that their faceless allies had faltered.”

“What about you?”

“I was not there.”

“Where were you?”

“In the military, and then overseeing Sidorov interests in other wars. I did not serve Pavel in Europe until after Alexei moved on.”

“What about Jakov?”

“If you want Jake’s life story, you will have to ask him. All I can say is that every cartel and family that has crumbled in recent years has done so from the inside.”

“Cos he’s a hacker . . .” Ranger surmised with a dark smirk. “But . . . I heard he was a bodyguard in the Esteban cartel. How did that work?”

“Not all hacking is virtual.”

Ranger shook his head, bemused. “All right. I don’t give much of a fuck about all that. Take me back to what this means now.”

For him.

For me.

For the families we had chosen. Who had chosen us.

“Losing Pavel meant Jake lost the ability to be invisible. He spent a long time infiltrating cartels and families, breaking them down one by one. But when his father was killed, he had to lead—he no longer had the option of working in the shadows. He had to fight out in the open, and in your country, we have been fighting there ever since.”

“The UK ports?” Ranger guessed. And he was correct. “That’s why they’re so important to you?”

“I think so.”

“You think?”

“It is hard to explain.” But for him, I tried, digging deep into the heart of who we were. “These wars . . .” I took his hand, lacing our fingers together. “They never end. It is kill or be killed, unless you run out of enemies. So what do you do? You draw a line in the sand, no? What you can live with if you do not want to die, and for Jake—for our family—it is to destroy the last organisations that colluded with the Sambini family to murder Pavel, and then dissolve everything he built in the hope that whoever fills the vacuum left behind lets us go in peace.”

“That’s the endgame here? To walk away?”

“To be free. I told you, Jake and Cam, they have the same dreams.”

Ranger’s gaze flickered, acknowledging. But something darker lingered. “Sambinis didn’t just murder your Russian daddy.”

“I know.”

“What are you going to do to the fuckers who helped them?”

It was my turn to be dry. “In an ideal world, burn them alive. In reality, whatever is quickest, which is ironic given that Jake believes the way the Sambini family were despatched was too fast for what they deserved.”

Ranger grunted, fingers twitching again. “He didn’t think that when he got it in his head that you were on that boat with them.”

Gravel raked my stomach. “I would never have got on that boat. I knew what it was for.”

Ranger didn’t, and he did not ask. About that or anything else. He fell quiet again, dumping his head on his folded arms. Thinking, in a way most people probably did not believe him capable of. Deducing the facts: that whoever our enemies were, and whatever they had done, in a few days’ time, I would travel to wherever Jake needed me and stand at his side to face them.

His heavy sigh broke the silence. He flopped onto his back. “That was a really long and boring way to tell a story.”

“That is rude.”

“So?”

So . . . nothing. Ranger was still naked—we both were. It was hard to think about organised crime when I wanted to trace the trail of dark hair on his lean abdomen to his⁠—

“I’m coming with you.”

I blinked and forced my gaze back to him. “I know.”

Suspicion clouded his black stare. “Oh yeah?”

“Alexei told me to bring you because you are a good soldier.”

“You needed him to tell you that?”

“No, I needed a reason to be reckless with your life, when all I want to do is send you and Lida to the ends of the earth to keep you safe.”

“That’s sweet, Vik. But it’s not going to happen. I already talked it out with Lida. She’s going to stay here and watch over the kids.”

I could not protest his logic. I had such conversations with my dog all the time. “This fight . . . for what it is worth, it will not be fair. Jake has the few men we can trust with him already. I have only you.”

“I’m not enough for you?”

Ranger’s eyes gleamed with heat, but enough severity remained that I knew he did not misunderstand me.

I elaborated anyway. “To prevail, it needs to be a mass assassination. I do not yet know if we have enough to achieve that.”

“You have hundreds of minions.”

I shook my head. “For something like this . . . it cannot just be men.”

“Family.” Ranger nodded, slowly. “Jakov said that when he asked me to come here.”

Because my brother knew.That I loved Ranger, maybe not. But that I could.

Spent, I shut my eyes for a little while. Sleeping, maybe. Drifting. Ranger stayed close; I felt him. Felt him arrange the sheets to cover me—cover us—and the gentle brush of his fingers through my hair sometime later. “I did not know you were this nice.”

Ranger’s low laugh eased my eyes open. His smile . . . I did not have words to describe it as he skated his thumb over my cheekbone. “There you are.”

“Where did I go?”

“Somewhere good.”

“How do you know this?”

“You woke up smiling.” Ranger brandished the blood orange I had brought in from the groves. He had already peeled and broken it into segments. How things had changed.

We shared the fruit.

He remained quiet, still thinking. It gave me time to study him without him noticing, but as much as his hair and eyes, his lean muscles and inked skin bewitched me, the fading knife wound to his torso drew me in.

I traced it with my fingertip. “Will you tell me about this fight?”

Ranger shivered at the touch. “You told me not to.”

“That was who. I would still like to know why.”

He rolled over, giving me his back for a moment, digging in his bag. He came back with a vape I had not seen him use and took a lungful of menthol steam. “Some cunt raised a hand to Folk’s kid. I saw it and got there first.”

“Someone . . . hit Folk’s child?” I tried to fill the gaps in my knowledge of Folk Whitlock.

I did not succeed.

Ranger shrugged around another exhale of vapour. “He thought about it. Dunno if he would’ve followed through. I didn’t wait to ask.”

“And this man put a blade to you in defence?”

“Nah.” Ranger snorted. “I put him down. Then his three sons came for me in the ring and I put them down too. Get Jakey to tell you all about it—he was there.”

That was new information too. But it did not mean much now. It made sense that Jake had travelled to the heart of King territory to recruit Ranger. He liked it there, drawn to men who shared bonds that reminded him of our own.

I traced the scar again. “Folk did not want to fight these men himself?”

Ranger smothered a yawn with his hand. “He doesn’t know what their old man did. I put Doherty—I put him down too fast for anyone else to notice. Cam only knows cos Alexei saw it on the surveillance cameras.”

I caught the slip. Filed the information. Doherty. Four of them. I would not forget, but a dark flicker in Ranger’s gaze distracted me. “This fight upset you?”

“Hmm?”

“It upset you,” I repeated, waiting for him to look at me. “But not because you regret it.”

“I don’t regret shit.”

“You wish you had acted quicker? Before he got close enough to the child . . . Ivy, yes? She belongs to the other soldier . . . to Decoy?”

The quiet man with the kind hands. I remembered him.

Ranger did not answer me. He got out of bed and left the room. To smoke, I presumed. The vape lay abandoned on the bed.

I sat up.

But he reappeared as suddenly as he’d gone, still naked. “How did you know? I didn’t fucking know. How did you know?”

That a fight before he had come here had unsettled him. That he was unsettled by it now. “I felt it.” I rubbed my chest. “You are like a seed that grew there from the moment we met.”

“And now what? I’m a giant tree of bullshit?”

“No—”

He walked away again. This time I scooped some clothes from the floor and followed him outside. He wore sweats by the time I caught him up, smoking as if it was his last cigarette on earth.

“The old man has the same voice as my stepdad.” Ranger exhaled acrid smoke through his nose. “That same foot-stomp with that fake backhand. You don’t know how many times I wished that fucker would just hit me and get it over with.”

“I do not know,” I agreed. “But you can tell me any time you need to.”

“I don’t. You asked.”

Not quite, but I didn’t argue. I went back inside and made him coffee, and hot food.

Then it was time to take Lida to Katya and to train. I led him to the clearing that had become our battle ring, muscles buzzing in a way they had not in a long time. I felt different. Faster. Stronger. Darkness began to fall as we circled each other, and I knew Ranger felt it too.

In me, not him. He had always been fast and strong. Too swift and agile for me to contain.

But I felt different. Lethal. In motion before I made the conscious decision to strike. On him before he had time to react.

Ranger hit the ground, my blade at his throat. He laughed, but the slow clap that pierced the air was not his. The voice that joined it was Russian, though the words were for him.

“Very good, nomad. Perhaps Vitya is ready after all.”