24. Ranger

[ 24 ]

RANGER

Alexei leaned against a tree, gaze hawkish and deadly as Viktor straightened and I rolled to my feet. Something that looked like approval glittered in his eyes, but with this dude, I was never sure.

I rubbed dirt from my elbows. “You could’ve called.”

That earned me an arched brow. Just one. “Why would I do that?”

No idea. But if the maddest, baddest Russian thought spying on us from the bushes was fucking normal, I didn’t know what to say.

Reading me, Alexei switched his appraisal to Viktor.

He said something Russian.

Viktor nodded and extended a hand to the house. Apparently, we were going inside.

I had no desire to sit there like a thick-as-mince bellend while they talked over me. I took a shower, rinsing off the dirt from Vik’s brutal put down. Washing away the hours we’d spent in bed together.

Sweat. Cum. Love.

Feels wrong.

But kinda right now Alexei was here.

Alexeiwas here. What the fuck?

It was right up there with Satsuma Island.

I shut the shower off, water dripping from my sodden hair and disappearing down the drain, taking with it the sanctuary me and Vik had found over the last few days. Weeks. A month. I didn’t know how long it had been. I’d stopped counting eight seconds after I’d laid eyes on him. I’d stopped fucking existing as the man I’d been before, and now here I was, about to go to war with him, and I’d have bet my left kidney that Alexei was here to tell us how to do it.

Wasn’t sad I was missing that. But . . . I missed Viktor, and it was enough to propel me out of the shower with a heavy sigh.

I dragged some clothes on. Deathly silence filtered from the kitchen, but I couldn’t see Vik and Alexei kicking it on the couch, so I headed there anyway and found them at the counter, studying blueprints while Alexei scratched Lida’s ears.

She remembered him.

Liked him.

I guess I did too.

Viktor slid me a coffee. “You are okay?”

No. “What’s this?”

The blueprints.

Alexei answered for him. “The port building on the west side of the northern bay.”

He didn’t say which port. Didn’t have to. I recognised the layout—it was the same port Viktor and I had fought for more than a year ago.

“This building is behind the harbour police base,” Alexei explained. “Tonight, the area is still monitored by uniformed units from the local constabulary, but those patrols will cease in three days.”

“How do you know?”

Alexei slithered me a flat glance. “Maybe I do not. Maybe it was a wild guess, no?”

“All right. No need to be a sarky cunt.”

Viktor rolled his lips, concealing a smirk.

Alexei drank from a vodka glass I hadn’t noticed. “Nomad, you do not change.”

Couldn’t tell if that was a compliment. But since I owed him for persuading Vik to not leave me behind, I let it slide. “Why are you here?”

It was the simplest question without getting into how the fuck he’d got this close to us without triggering Jake’s billion-and-one sensors.

Jake let him.

Alexei set his glass down and dead-eyed me. “Jakov believed you when you told him Viktor was fit to fight. I wanted to see for myself.”

This time, Viktor set his smirk free. “I did not know you cared.”

“I care about the people who love him.” Alexei pointed at me. “And if you die, he dies, no?”

Viktor’s humour faded. He spoke Russian again.

Alexei shrugged and replied in English. “It is the same for all of us now. Get used to it or die alone.”

It was the only small talk he offered before he and Vik got into it about the logistics of a murder op so close to a police station. Port police, but still. Feds were feds.

“No explosives.” Alexei sounded regretful. “The collateral damage risk is too high.”

Viktor nodded, agreeing. He leaned closer to me before he caught himself and dropped his elbows on the counter instead. “This building is complex. We have a few good men, but not enough to cover the space and exit undetected if the alarm is raised.”

“Then you will have to make sure that does not happen, and you will need to do it with six men.” Alexei tapped the blueprints. “No more. And no less. Allowing for injuries, you will need the manpower for disposal.”

Of evidence. Bodies. Whatever. I’d worked that shift before, and I’d do it again, a hundred times if I had to.

The conversation moved on and climbed way above my pay grade. Alexei figured out I was no longer paying attention and switched back to Russian.

I got bored and took Lida outside. Turned my entire personality inside out and ate an orange alone. Go me.

It was the dead of fucking night by the time Alexei came out.

He didn’t want an orange, but he accepted a smoke. “You have done well here.”

“With what?”

“With Viktor. Jakov believes he would be dead without you.”

“Believing something doesn’t make it true.”

Alexei exhaled smoke, slowly, like a cartoon snake studying its prey. His gaze flickered to the bite mark on my neck. I waited for the barb, but understanding warmed his cold eyes. “It is not easy to love them.”

“Who?”

“The ones who choose us.” He tapped ash onto the ground and rubbed it into the grass with his boot. “But to fight it wastes time we do not have. It will be hard, nomad. To wage this war now everything has changed for you. But if you want a future beyond the time you have spent here, you have to put your faith in the risk.”

I pointed my smoke at him. “That’s the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard.”

Alexei watched faint clouds whisper over the full moon above us. “Everything is fucked up. And still we fight. Because if we don’t, we lose it all.”

He walked away before I could think of an answer, disappearing as abruptly as he’d arrived, and I knew that was it. That he was gone, and I didn’t like how I felt about that. Alexei was a weirdo, but I couldn’t deny, even in the most fucked-up circumstances, I always felt safe when he was around.

Or maybe I’d felt safer when I’d had less to lose. When loving Vik had been a distant dream.

We lose it all.

Nope. Not on my watch.

I ditched my cigarette and went inside. Viktor was where I’d left him, but he saw me coming and abandoned the blueprints, stepping into my arms.

It was the sweetest thing he’d ever done.

I kissed him.

He kissed me.

Then he pulled back with a droll fucking smile. “You called my brother Jakey to his face?”

“Didn’t know Alexei was a grass.”

“He was confused. He did not realise that you are as much our family as you are his.”

“Said that, did he?”

“He did not need to.” Viktor took my hand and led me back to the counter. This cute bastard had made me a sandwich. “I have told you already that his relationship with Cam changed everything. Is what he said, no? That he cares about the people who love you? Cam is one of those people. It is what makes him a good leader.”

“Are you talking to me or yourself?” Honestly, it was hard to tell. Vik had a lot on his mind, and my role suddenly became crystal fucking clear. Don’t give him more shit to worry about.

I ate the sandwich.

Made him one.

Then I sat with him for the rest of the night while he planned a mass murder.

I didn’t know these men. Their names meant nothing to me. But as the hours ticked by and Vik told me more about them, a bigger picture clicked into place.

“This one.” He circled a name with his fingertip. “He has ties to the Aldea cartel. He controls the trafficking routes to North America, and Alexei believes it was him who ordered the assassination of Cam’s father and conspired with Mario Sambini to kill Cam too.”

“He’s the one who shat himself when Alexei shacked up with the Kings?”

“Among others.”

“What about this one?”

Viktor studied the name and the grainy photo below it. “It is odd that you ask about him.”

“Why?”

“He’s Russian. The cousin of the man who took me from the orphanage and the one who likely paid for me.”

I tugged Viktor closer, still in awe that I existed in a reality where he let me. Where he relaxed against me, half sitting on my lap. “Why’s he still breathing then?”

Viktor sighed.

I’d have let it go, but the sense of running out of time weighed heavy on me. “Is every cunt on this list from the past?”

Viktor looped an arm behind his head, cupping the back of my neck, as if touching me gave him strength. “Past. Present. Future. Is why they must die.”

After burning the plans and scattering the ashes, we went to bed on that note. And I slept like I’d swallowed a bottle of tranqs, as if Vik being safe in my arms for the night was enough.

But I woke early the next morning with dread in my gut, my bones heavy with raw fear. We had a fucking murder mountain to climb and there was every chance we wouldn’t reach the summit. We loved each other, and it was the shittest thing ever that we might not live to enjoy it.