9. Viktor

[ 9 ]

VIKTOR

Waking up from getting high was the worst feeling in the world. An abomination of the worst hangover and the flu, and the most heinous thing about it was that it got worse and worse until I made the biggest mistake of my life all over again.

You are weak.

My first thought as I woke up, fully clothed, in my unmade bed instead of on it. But for the first time in forever, it did not endure, shoehorned out of my brain by the immediate reality that I was not alone.

Ranger.

Asher.

Surely, he had been a dream. A trip far more wild than the dope I’d smoked deserved. But that I still felt him in every fibre of my aching body drove me upright faster than I had the equilibrium for. Nausea hit me, the kind that usually ripped me from the bed, but even that didn’t hold up against the rabid need to know for sure if Ranger’s inexplicable presence in my house had been real.

A groan blistered my throat. I forced it down and planted my fist to the mattress, wrenching my head to the doorway. And there he was, leaner and meaner than I remembered with his short hair, but every bit as enchanting.

The sickness faded and I fell into his sooty gaze. There were six feet between us, but somehow my own bleary eyes still saw those shades of black. Those gunmetal flecks, and suddenly, we were a world away from here, in a dark, concrete ditch. In the rain with our hoods up. In the living room of a flat thousands of miles away. He was in my arms, bare skin pressed to mine, and that memory hit me harder than any drug ever could. “Why are you here?”

Ranger flinched at the scrape in my voice. He tossed a water bottle on the bed and rapped his knuckles on the doorframe. “Meet me in your fancy kitchen and I’ll tell you all about it.”

I’ll tell you all about it . . .

The phrase jarred my brain. But he was gone before I figured it out, and his abrupt absence compelled me out of a bed I didn’t recall getting into any more than I recalled changing my clothes. Out of a flux I’d been trapped in for . . .

I did not know how long.

I glanced at the window. The sun was high. Since this morning then. Or maybe since Priest had jabbed that first needle in my arm.

My feet hit the tiles, the coolness travelling up my legs and into my aching hip, but the discomfort was not awful. It was just . . . there, and the activity beyond my bedroom was distraction enough for now.

I followed the sound to the kitchen. To where Ranger stood at my fridge, scowling at the shelves. “You need to teach me the Russian word for bacon.”

“Why?”

“So I can tell your sister I need that shit in my life more than . . . whatever the fuck this is.”

He wrinkled his nose, and it was so adorable that I forgot the English word for salmon and spoke Russian instead.

Ranger’s glower deepened. “Nah, I’m not having that. My sketching skills have limits.”

“What?”

“Your sister. She drew me some pictures. I returned the favour. If this monstrosity is anything to go by, it didn’t pan out.”

“Is smoked fish. You have it in England.”

“Who does?”

“I do not know. People?”

I took the package from him and put it back on the shelves my faithful sister had stocked while I’d slept. My aloof sister. That she had engaged Ranger enough for some kind of illustrated conversation was unfathomable. “When did you speak with my sister?”

“Yesterday.” Ranger shut the fridge. “She brought you some sausages, but you were still out, so I ate them and I’m not fucking sorry.”

“Yesterday?”

Ranger slid me a murky glance. “The day before today, but you won’t remember it cos you were sleeping off your smack binge. You only got up to piss and feed the dog, and I’m pretty sure you sleepwalked through both activities.”

“It was not a binge.” I pushed out of the narrow space we’d both claimed.

He caught me.

I let him.

“It is what it is.” His harsh brogue deepened to a growl, his rough fingers tight on my wrists. “Pretending otherwise isn’t going to fix it.”

“Maybe I do not want to fix it.”

“Don’t believe that.”

“Why not?”

Ranger released me from his scalding grasp. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. I know you’ve got connections, but scoring round here must be a fucking nightmare.”

“I’m here for my sister.”

“You didn’t give a fuck about your sister when you went out the other night.”

He spoke with no judgement. Only the monotonous logic Jake had weathered to death before him. Reason that scratched my conscience enough to drive a snap from my lips. “Do not tell me what I care about.”

I walked away, back to my bedroom, and kicked the door shut. My head buzzed—tinnitus of the brain—noisy in a way it always was these days, and yet it had been quiet in the kitchen with Ranger.

Lida pushed the door open and clacked into the room, pushing past me to jump on the bed before she turned her soulful gaze on me.

Her eyes weren’t as dark as Ranger’s, but her stare pierced as deep, and it hurt. “I am sorry.” The Russian words bled me dry. “You deserve better than the man I have become.”

The sanctuary of her neck called to me. I went to her, but my heavy pulse and tingling skin would not let me forget that I had left Ranger in my kitchen.

How was he here? Jake, obviously. But the semantics gnawed at me. I’d shared . . . something with Ranger—with Asher—that I had never shared with anyone. But he was not family. He was not kin. And yet here he was, in my home. A place no one outside of Jake, Katya, and Ivan had ever set foot.

I kissed Lida’s head and moved to the unit beside my bed. The top drawer held a handful of benign phones. I snatched one up, dizzy again now I was away from Ranger’s hypnotic aura, and typed a message to Jake.

Viktor: What have you done?

Jake: What I needed to. Going dark. Do not fight it.

He was offline in the blink of an eye. Invisible, the number erased from the chat app as if it had never been there. As if he’d been waiting for me to wake up before he hit the kill switch on communication.

It was not a new experience to watch my brother disappear from the world, but it didn’t get any easier, and a new pang of guilt and worry scratched my chest. Jake and I . . . we had been apart before. For months, for years at a time. But whatever he was doing now, it was barrelling us towards the end, and I should have been with him. I would have been if I had not grown complacent enough to be caught by Gianni Sambini.

The phone powered down. I dropped it in the drawer and shut it away.

From the bed, Lida huffed, restless, and I knew why. She liked Ranger. I had heard this already from the Rebel Kings who had cared for her when I’d been gone, and for me when Locke and I had escaped. And I understood. I liked him too, and I wanted more than anything to go to him, but what would I say? What would we do? I’d had many thoughts of what would become of Ranger and I if we ever saw each other again, but him bearing witness to this was not a reality I could contemplate.

Locke.

Like she’d heard the sudden concern flare in my jumbled mind, Lida jumped from the bed and nosed the door open. She wedged her body through but stopped short of abandoning me like I had abandoned her.

She waited, the fur on her back bristling with whatever emotion being caught between Ranger and I was giving her. Frustration, perhaps. She did not like it when I was rude to Jake either. If nothing else, this dog of mine was a stickler for manners.

And Ranger is hungry.

The thought was sudden. Intrusive. And paved the way for a slew of recollection that had slipped my mind every moment I had thought of Ranger before now. A wave of certainty that however empty his belly was, he’d struggle to find anything he wanted to eat if Katya had stocked my fridge the way she usually did.

Ranger was beautiful.

Fierce.

Fascinating.

He was also the pickiest eater I’d ever met, and the thought of him glaring into my fridge for however long it took me to face him again felt worse than the creeping itch lurking under my skin.

“You win.”

The whisper was for Lida. And it was all she needed to set her in motion, hustling back to the kitchen, to where Ranger had indeed returned to the refrigerator.

His back faced me, his tall frame hidden by a dark T-shirt, his legs encased in ripped jeans that would become too hot if he truly had plans to stay here—a thought that failed to manifest as my attention latched on to every inch of skin not covered by clothes.

His long arms.

The graceful curve of his inked neck, more visible to me now with his shorter hair.

I reached the counter and gripped it for support for no reason other than the sight of this man, unguarded and so human, unravelled me. I could not see his face, but I knew the expression it was scrunched in. I knew the boyish discontent that seeped from his gaze. Because I had seen it before, when I had offered him anything but chocolate or fried things to eat. When I had taken to peeling oranges around him for entertainment more than sustenance.

“Fuck off, Vik. They smell like my nan’s Shake n’Vac.”

Okay. So no oranges, but it bothered me more than I was prepared for that there could be nothing else for him.

“You will not find anything you like in there.”

Ranger glanced over his shoulder. “How do you know?”

“My house is not McDonalds.”

“Your house isn’t fucking real. There’s a bath in Jakey’s bit the size of a parking space.”

“That is your counterargument?”

“Who am I arguing with?” Ranger shut the fridge and rotated to face me with everything I’d predicted bleeding from his criminally attractive face. “It’s a bathtub for fucking llamas. Even Rubi would drown in it.”

“Rubi can drown in it.” I spoke with no malice. I liked the big King with a heart as vast as his mouth. His face was the first I saw when I woke up with the Kings last winter and he had hugged me back to life the moment I’d sat up. “Jake too. Did he send you here to babysit me?”

Ranger leaned against the fridge door, casually curious as he ran that sinful gaze over me, pausing at my waist for whatever reason, before he continued his up and down assessment. “Depends.”

“On?”

“How honest you want me to be. I’m not here to play games, Vik. I can’t be arsed.”

I was still gripping the counter as if it were a life raft that could keep me from drowning in him. I unclenched my fingers and moved closer, feeling the heat of him deeper with every step. “You think I can?”

Ranger shrugged, his flashing gaze the only warning I got before brutal honestly spilled from his mouth. “I think you’re fucked up enough right now that you don’t know what you’re capable of.”

“Get out of my way.”

A pause stretched out before Ranger stepped away from my fridge.

I shut the door and opened a cabinet instead. “Katya keeps the eggs in here so they do not sit in the sun.”

“What does she do when you don’t eat them? Yeet them at the moon?”

“I eat them.”

“When?”

“Specifically?”

Ranger shrugged. “You’re skinny as fuck.”

I gave him a pointed once-over of my own. “Your house is made of glass.”

“Meaning?”

“What do you think it means?”

Ranger made a low sound. I gritted my teeth against it, but it reached me all the same and my hands shook.

He stretched a long arm over my shoulder and took the eggs from me. “I think you talk a lot of shit.”

“You are not hungry then?”

Ranger set the eggs on the counter. Something about the movement seemed off and I allowed myself a moment to truly look at him. Much of Ranger’s skin was covered in the sinister ink that didn’t match the mischief I’d grown used to seeing in his onyx eyes, but enough was visible to show mottled bruises I had not noticed before. On his arms, his throat, and the side of his head. A cut to his eyebrow, his knuckles scabbed and split. “Who did you fight?”

“That’s not breakfast.” Ranger propped a hip against the counter. “And it’s not the conversation we need to have.”

“Says who?”

“Me.”

“You are hurt.”

“Am I?”

The challenge in his eyes did not dull the certainty rising within me. I narrowed the distance between us and grasped the hem of his shirt, lifting without permission, tugging it up and away from his torso.

He raised his arms, letting me. Leaving himself bare to me. Skin, ink, and a swathe of injuries that bore the mark of another man’s fist. A burn to his palm. A gash to his ribs that bore the mark of a blade.

A feeling I barely recognised expanded in my lungs, pressure hitting my sternum, bending the bone. “Who did this?”

Ranger snorted, catching one of my hands before it landed on him, letting the other roam free. “No one you know.”

“Are they dead?”

“Nah, just fucked up.”

“Worse than this?”

“You doubt me, Vik?”

Never. I had seen Ranger fight many times. But this wound . . . this injury. It was superficial, taped, not stitched, but it was too close to his heart to quell the raw fury—the fear—roiling in my stomach. A few inches left, a few inches deeper, and he would’ve been dead.

My palm made contact with his skin. A mistake, I realised, the second we touched. This was nothing like taking his hand and tugging him up from the floor. Nothing like his long fingers wrapped around my wrists.

The current between us was witchcraft.

A nuclear weapon.

And my fragile heart was in the blast zone.

It did not stop me, though. I had made sacrifices for less. And I could easily give up my soul for his man. For this moment as I splayed my hand over his warm skin, tracing a bruise with my fingertip. “I am not an angry man, but I would advise against telling me the name of the person who did this to you.”

Ranger grinned. “Persons. Plural. It takes more than one ordinary motherfucker to body me in the ring.”

“This was an organised fight?”

“Grudge match.” Ranger shivered, goosebumps littering his skin, the only sign my touch was getting to him as much as it was me. “I thumped their dad, so they came for me.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

“And you won.”

Not a question, but it earned me another snort. “Course I did. I’m not a fucking ninja, but I can handle a trio of coked-up bumpkins.”

“Bumpkins with knives?”

“Just the one.”

Ranger was not a liar. His story rang true. And made sense, given what I knew about the day-to-day politics of motorcycle clubs.

But still . . . this injury. I did not like it, except perhaps that it distracted me from just about everything, save the heat of Ranger’s skin beneath my palm.

“If you’re trying to hypnotise me out of asking you awkward questions, it’s not going to work.”

“Maybe I am trying to hypnotise myself out of answering.”

Ranger snatched a ragged breath. “That’s not going to work either.”

“No?” I glanced up at the wrong moment. Or the perfect moment, depending on the version of myself I was listening to today.

Ranger’s face was inches from mine. Like it had been a dozen times since we’d kissed on the rug. But we were different people now. Back then, we had laughed, blazing heat at each other as we’d drifted away from whatever war we’d been fighting at the time.

Now . . . it was just us and the crackling current between us, and I felt it in places I’d believed were long dead.

Kiss him.

No.

I could not.

But imagining I could was nice for as long as I could bear it.

I retracted my hand. Heart thumping, I tossed him the shirt I’d yanked from his body. “You can sleep in the den.”

Ranger smirked. “That right?”

“Is a problem for you?”

“No, but I was joking when I asked you. I already claimed my space, and it’s non-negotiable.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but life caught up with me and a spasm of pain needled my hip. In the scheme of things, it was not that bad, but it derailed my thoughts, and I remembered the other reason I had come back to the kitchen in the first place.

“Locke is okay?”

Ranger blinked, letting me know that the timing of my question was off. “He’s fine. Enjoying life with his double batch of lovers.”

Nash McGovern and the O’Brian queen. This, I remembered. “But he is well? Other than that?”

“Vik, he’s fine.”

Searching for wheat bread took me away from him, releasing the pressure in my ribcage, but I could not hide from the chill that came from shifting out of his spell. The shiver that rocked me as I took in the bread by the fruit bowl. A dark rye loaf that Ranger would assume radioactive and another paler baton that Katya did not usually bake.

I picked it up. “You will eat this?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“If it’s fucking weird.”

“Is bread, Asher.”

Ranger’s eyes flared as he dropped his shirt on the counter instead of pulling it back on. “When you get bored of deflecting conversation, you’ll have to tell me how you found out.”

“Is simple. Locke told me.”

Ranger peered at the bread while I retrieved a knife to slice it. “Why?”

“It was time. I think. You would have to ask him. I do not remember those moments as much as I want to.”

I sliced the bread and considered what to do with it next. I was not much of a cook, and we had already established that Ranger would not eat anything he did not immediately recognise.

What do English people eat for breakfast?

I had never cared enough to learn, and I went back to the fridge and found myself frowning at it in much the same way Ranger had. “Butterbrod?”

“Eh?”

“Was talking to myself.” I found a package of Spanish ham. “You will eat ham and eggs?”

Ranger’s expression brightened. “I’d eat you if you can find anything like that in your theme park of a fridge.”

He did not mean literally. Sexually. It was sarcasm, surely. But imagining something else wavered my balance.

Ranger flashed to my side. Like he had the eggs, he stole the ham. He didn’t touch me, but his arm circled my waist, guiding me as I moved to the stove.

It was intrusive. No one but family had been this close to me for a long time. It was nice. But I had learned this about Ranger—about Asher. He had rough hands and a savage mouth. But beneath it all he could be one of the sweetest humans alive.

“Don’t drink that, luv. It’s old as fuck. Here . . . have this one.”

The memory was old. As insignificant as the cold tea he had not wanted me to drink. But for all my life had been a hazy place for some time now, I saw him then as clearly as I saw him now. “Why did you come?”

Ranger set the ham beside the eggs and put some space between us. “Jakov asked me to.”

“That tells me his motivations, not yours.” Without him close, I shivered. “Why did you say yes?”

“Why do you think?”

“He paid you?”

Ranger’s dark brows knitted together. “Yeah, Vik. Sack of fucking gold lured me here. Now you need to do something with these eggs before I fucking expire.”

I let myself stare at him. At the bruises on his face that did not upset me as much as the hurt in his eyes as his gaze slid to the window. This man . . . it was difficult to offend him, but somehow I had, and I liked it even less than the full-body ache blooming in my bones. “I was going to boil the eggs.”

His frown deepened.

“Fry them?” I tried again.

He shrugged. “Okay.”

Okay.

I had not used the stove in months. Or even a pan in a kitchen that was the size of the entire flat in northern England. I did not know where the oil was. If there was any. But he was here. Ranger. In my kitchen. And he was as hungry as he was annoyed, and I could fix that.

Blyad, I could fry an egg.

I made him breakfast without lighting the house on fire. He was quiet while I worked, watching me from the other side of the counter. “You would like coffee?”

“I don’t care.”

“Tea?”

“Fuck off.”

Because he did not like tea. He drank milky coffee and could eat a whole packet of biscuits in one sitting.

Jake had a coffee machine. I slid Ranger’s breakfast across the counter and pressed enough buttons for it to spit out a mug of molten caffeine that could probably power a train.

He will not drink coffee like this.

I poured half of it away and topped it up with more water. With cold milk from the fridge. “This is okay?”

“You know it is.”

There was an answer to his surly statement, but Lida distracted me, bumping my leg with her nose.

“You want to go out?”

I spoke in Russian and Lida moved to the glass doors.

They were locked, the security system engaged. I pressed my thumb to a keypad that was disguised as a light-switch and nowhere near the door. In front of Ranger, as I could only assume that if he was already here that Jake had given him everything.

How did you know, brother? How did you know that I would have killed anyone else you sent to protect me?

I’d never told Jake what had happened with Ranger. I’d never confessed how my heart skipped a beat every time I saw him. Or how, when I’d been certain I would die against a grimy concrete wall, his face had kept me breathing.

His savage stare.

His dirty laugh.

His soft lips.

The door opened. Lida strolled out and sniffed the air, her stance relaxed enough for me to know there was nothing amiss in the groves.

She would not go far. I moved back to the counter.

Ranger sipped his coffee, not eating.

“It is that bad?”

He shrugged. “It’s enough for two. Come here.”

“Where?”

“Here.” Ranger crooked two fingers, beckoning me to his side as if it did not occur to him for a single moment that I would refuse.

He was a smarter man than me.

With a sigh, I rounded the counter and went to where he lounged on a stool, stopping a foot away, only for him to wrap a long leg around both of mine and draw me closer.

“You are a spider now?”

“Nah, just lazy.” Ranger placed ham and eggs onto the buttered bread I had laid on his plate. He cut a piece in half and held it out. “Don’t make me eat alone.”

My stomach rolled, but Ranger was irresistible. I took the bread and watched him take a bite of his piece. Let him pin me with a stare that did not relent.

“Just eat a little bit.” His spare hand drifted to my damaged hip. “Then you can show me around.”

“You do not seem like someone who does not know their way around.”

“I know where the guns are, Vik. That doesn’t make a home.”

No. The affection he was forcing on me, whatever the motivation, the warmth in his touch, that was what made being alive right now tolerable. I still could not eat, though. I would die.

“Just a little bit,” he whispered. “Please?”

It was my nature to be adaptable, even if I did not consciously accept that Ranger was in my house, force-feeding me breakfast. That any of this was more than a dope binge gone wrong.

It was not a binge.

Semantics. I did not deserve the reward fate was bestowing on me now. I did not deserve him.

I took a small bite of the bread and I did not die. I chewed slowly, swallowing as I tried to catch up with everything that had happened to bring me to the magical place where I was wrapped in Ranger’s long limbs, while he studied me as if I was the only soul on earth he’d ever cared about.

A thought that jarred a memory, and then a fear. If Ranger was here and he had plans to stay, did that mean his babushka had passed?

It was my turn to study him, searching his dark gaze for grief and heartache, eating as I did, to distract him from my analysis. But he was hard to read, or perhaps I didn’t know him so well anymore.

The bread was gone before I had my answer, and not knowing bothered me enough to ask. “How is your Nanna Jean?”

Ranger’s lips twitched. “So I did tell you about her.”

“About her, and the girl with the pink hair.”

“Finch? Really?”

“I think so. You loved her, no?”

“Fucking hell.” Ranger finished his breakfast and pushed the plate away. “Remind me not to drop a bag of mandy around you ever again.”

“That does not answer the question.”

“I don’t need to if I told you my life story back then. Cos you’ll already know that I still love her. She’s my friend, and she always will be.”

“Does she know you are here?”

“No.”

“Who does?”

“Jakov. Cam. Embry. Though the good father only knows I’m with you, not where.”

There were names missing from that list that I had expected to hear.

Folk.

Locke.

Saint Malone and Alexei Ivanov. “Cam knows your location?”

Ranger nodded, slowly. “It was his condition for letting me go.”

“And what was your condition, Asher?”

His name rolled off my tongue like silk.

Ranger smirked. “A safe phone to call my nanna and a lifetime supply of Monster Munch.”

It was possible that he was entirely serious. I could not tell, but I honed in on the revelation that his grandmother was very much alive and let the rest go. “Where is this space you have claimed for yourself?”

With his leg still very much wrapped around me, it was hard to imagine a reality where his next words were not right here. But his answer was different to the one in my head.

“The room across from yours.”

I snapped out of my daze. “There is no bed in that room.”

“So? I like the view.”

“You can see nothing but grass from the window.”

“Maybe I’m facing the other way.”

I was not good at conversation anymore. And perhaps I’d never been sharp enough to keep up with him. Either way, my brain fell off a cliff, instantly swamped in thick fog, leaving nothing but profound empty space behind.

The disconnect was brutal. I still felt Ranger’s touch, his closeness and body heat, but I was not present enough to appreciate it.

My mind wandered, sifting through the fragmented thoughts that remained. I thought about getting high, of course. But it was distant enough that I could ignore it. That would change as the days dragged on, but for now, I could live with the flu-like ache weighing me down.

Perhaps I could live with anything with Ranger this close. Time would tell. “Can I ask you something?”

Ranger cocked a brow. “You’re back in the room, eh?”

“I never left.”

A low sound rumbled from his chest and I felt it in mine. Because he was still pinning me in place with his leg. Still hovering his palm over my hip. Still gazing at me with the sweet ferocity that was better than any dope hit.

“Ask me anything, Vik.”

“Why did Jake send you here? Was it to defend me, or protect me from myself?”

Dark things could always grow darker. I watched it happen in Ranger’s inky stare. Felt his grip on me tighten. It was not fanciful to imagine I heard his blood rush faster too.

His hand left my hip and rose to wrap around my jaw. “The second one. He told me about the assassins on your case, but he didn’t seem as worried about that as he was about leaving you to your own devices.”

I leaned into his touch before I caught myself. Wondered at the trance-like state he’d reduced me to in the space of ten minutes. With Ranger’s hand on my face and his lips mere inches from mine, it was hard to recall that someone else had tried to kill me before I’d made my own attempt. But it was not hard to remember that being around me would put Ranger’s life at risk. I had lost friends before. Comrades. Brothers. I could not lose him.

So push him away.

Apparently I could not do that either, and I wanted to kiss him so much that a strangled sound caught in my chest.

I am dying.

And I could only exist in his vortex until he saw fit to let me go.

His hand fell from my jaw as Lida padded back inside. She had a leaf from an orange tree on her back and I made myself step away from Ranger to flick it off. “It bothers me that you will not have a bed, but I will allow it if it is what you want.”

“Allow it, eh?” Ranger lounged forward, elbows on the counter. “What persuaded you?”

I needed distance from him.

To survive.

To die a slow and painful death.

I retreated to the kitchen doorway. “You are like Jake. I can resist you as much as I like, no? But you will always get what you want.”