3. Viktor
3
VIKTOR
I revved my bike without waiting for Cam’s reply and pointed the Ducati in the direction of a place I almost considered home. I was wet, cold, and missing Ranger.
And perhaps I was hungry.
I sped away from Cam, aware of him behind me a few minutes later. I slowed to let him pass—he liked to lead on the road, and I did not mind it. But he stayed at the rear all the way to the small town synonymous with the Rebel Kings, only buzzing me to pull over when we were five minutes from the compound.
“How do you know that about Saint?”
The question came like machine gunfire, growled in my face before I had lifted my visor.
I did not rear back. Cam was no threat when he was this emotional, even if I didn’t understand what had agitated him so much in the last thirty minutes. “Jake did a deep dive on every top-level King before his father agreed to Alexei’s request for protection. Is how I know Nash’s cousin is married to a police officer and that his childhood was as unpleasant as Saint’s. But?—”
“But what ?”
“Saint was more complicated. His records were not digitalised—they needed to be stolen, not hacked, and Jake doesn’t do his own dirty work.”
Cam shook his head, bewilderment heavy in his gaze. “I didn’t know that about Saint. I don’t think even he does.”
“Then he should talk with Jake. We burned the paper, but he’ll have a copy somewhere.”
“Saint’s never going to fucking do that.”
“So you do it. You talk to my brother more than I do these days, I am sure of it.”
Cam didn’t smile. “What did you mean about Nash’s childhood?”
“That he would have been better off if the authorities in Ireland had followed through on their threat to take him from his parents. What did you think I meant?”
Cam didn’t answer. He jammed his helmet back on and hit the road again. I followed and we reached the compound a few minutes later, wet through and still caked in mud.
Nash took my helmet. “Spa day?”
I hummed, only half listening as I searched for Lida, relaxing as she appeared from the chapel with Orla, guarding the pregnant queen like I’d known she would. Like she had always guarded Katya when she’d carried Yuri and Polina.
Lida sensed me, though. Scented me on the wind. Her molten eyes found me, her ears twitched, and I knew she would bark if I did not allow her to come to me.
Orla was safe with her brothers.
I clicked my teeth and she shot across the yard, a bullet of muscle and fur that hit me as hard as my love for Ranger did every day I woke with him still beside me. “There’s my girl. You need a walk. Shall we go?”
Lida spun a circle, excitement bristling her coat. I looked for Cam to say goodbye, but he had already vanished into the depths of his clubhouse.
I rolled the Ducati back into the storage locker.
Nash followed with the helmet, studying the dents, repeating Embry’s earlier sentiment. “This is fucked.”
“It is okay.”
“Not if you crash.”
“I will not.”
“I thought that. Now I have a titanium knee and permanent road burn on my arse.”
I took the helmet from Nash and hung it on the Ducati, more aware of him in the small dark space than I had been of Cam all day. “You do not need to worry about me.”
“That’s what you think.” Nash circled my bike, inspecting it for damage. “But you don’t make it easy.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means the same thing we all keep telling you. That you’re family whether you like it or not.”
He flashed me a handsome grin and backed up. Some tension left me, but the need to go was strong enough Nash saw it in me.
“You should stay.” He spoke quietly. “Eat. Get dry and clean. You can sleep in my room upstairs. Orls likes Cam’s bed better at the moment anyway.”
“Then where would Cam sleep?”
“Not in my fucking bed.”
It was a kind offer, but I could not sleep here. If I slept at all, I needed sheets that smelled of Ranger. The mess he left in every room whether he was in our house or not. I needed to be alone with missing him and the twisted craving his absence left in its wake. As he had taught me, to survive this, I needed to face it.
Nash stepped aside. I followed Lida out of the lock-up and into the damp air of the night. A deeper cold seeped into me, and though I longed for a place where I would not feel it, I remained thankful that I did.
I bid Nash goodnight and left the compound as I had arrived with Ranger that morning, on foot, with Lida at my side. We kept away from the roads, sticking to the trees alongside the beach that would take us to the cliff we called home for however long we were here.
Lida slipped back into guard mode, attune to every sight and sound. It gave me the space for my thoughts to wander and I found myself fixating on sex in a way I never had before Ranger, even after Jake had shown me intimacy with a man could feel better than forced torture.
I fucked Ranger a lot. Most days. Most nights. Sometimes he fucked me too, and I lived for that. How his gentle touch had evolved to something less controlled. Ranger had never triggered a bad memory for me. I did not believe that he could.
My phone vibrated.
I pulled it out to a flurry of texts.
Cam: sorry I got in your face. i’m a lairy cunt
Cam: joe called about the horse. escaped from a riding school 10 miles away
Viktor: What is her name?
Cam: hang on
Cam: Ash
I took a slow breath, feeling Ranger all around me as the trees parted to reveal the cliffs. A hidden trail led to the house, and a once public path would take me to the cliff-face and the sheer drop below. It had been closed for decades, memorials clustered in the rocky undergrowth. Benches no one ever sat on anymore. It made Ranger shiver whenever we passed, but I did not mind it. Confronting death reminded me I was alive.
And that I wanted to be.
I clicked out of Cam’s thread and opened Ranger’s again. Telling him how I felt through a text message seemed ridiculous, but to call him, to hear his voice and not be able to see him, touch him, or press my face to his skin and breathe him in...
It frightened me.
Viktor: Asher, I miss you
The message didn’t deliver right away. I lost time staring at the screen. So much time it rained twice without me shifting another foot. My imagination had never been prone to catastrophic thoughts, but as the wind began to peel my wet hair from my face I pictured terrible things, and my pulse boomed in my ears, my veins itching for the kind of relief only found in toxic oblivion.
Call Jake .
But I could not make my hands move. I could only stare and stare and stare until my phone finally flared with life.
Ranger: u better
Ranger: feel like i’ve lost a fuckin limb
I sagged with relief. Perhaps shame too. I did not want Ranger to feel as wretched as I did. I wanted him to find whatever reassurance he sought on the road and come back to me with the confidence he’d lost. But his coarse words slid through my soul anyway, soothing the scrapes and scratches his absence had left behind, and air moved freely through my lungs again.
For now, anyway.
Lida nudged my hand.
I obeyed her silent command and grounded myself in the present. The trees. The cliffs. The Ranger-scented sanctuary that awaited me if I could make myself move.
Lida rumbled.
I took the hint and began walking once more, following the steep trail to the house, my gaze on my boots, forcing my brain away from the itch in my blood and to all the ways I might occupy myself while Ranger was gone. Some were more entertaining than others, and it made me mindful of where I placed my feet, the stability in my damaged hip not as reliable as I wanted it to be. I had learned that by fucking Ranger. By him fucking me. In the bed. In the shower. In the open air of the?—
Lida froze.
Ears flicked back, front paw lifted, her tell that she had sensed something she deemed not an immediate threat but wanted me to see for myself.
She had never been wrong, but tension flooded me all the same, and I reached, again, for the blade in my boot, wrapping my fingers around blood-warm metal, sinking closer to the ground as I followed Lida’s endless stare to the cliffs above me and the shadowed figure of a man.
Tall, rangy, and dressed in cargo shorts in the dead of winter, he stood at the edge, as if he might jump. As if he wanted to jump. And this man...
He was not a stranger.