12. Ranger
12
RANGER
This was, one hundred percent, the worst thing in my life I’d ever fucking done.
The road trip from hell.
And every time I thought it couldn’t get any worse, some other screwed up thing happened to prove me wrong.
I glared murder at the crocked tyre on the Bone Rattler. “Just set it on fire.”
Rubi kicked it, his frustration as palpable as mine. “Tempting, but we’re gonna have to nurse this twat to the nearest garage with a platform big enough to raise it.”
I had zero enthusiasm for such fuckery but even fewer choices. I crawled back into the cab of the shittastic truck and drove like my nanna for another forty miles before Rubi found a garage that could help us.
A mechanic came out to meet us, dressed in high-viz trousers and a camouflage jacket.
Rubi regarded him through the haze of the vape he’d stolen from Mateo before he and Decoy had left. “That’s a juxtaposition of an outfit. Does he want to hide in a bush or be seen from space?”
“Looks like a cunt to me.”
“Try not to tell him, will ya? We need him to like us.”
“All right.”
“Bro, your face has subtitles. If you can’t be nice, be somewhere else.”
Fine by me. I took my real-life smokes and fucked off across the road to a bench outside a bicycle shop, pondering how long it would take me to steal one and pedal it from Leeds to Devon. Cos that’s where we were, fucking Leeds, and the last time I’d been in this city, I’d been with Vik.
Getting mashed on mandy.
Kissing on his living room floor.
We still did that, the kissing on the living room floor, not the mandy. But these days, he didn’t leave me to the fate of a cold pizza and a comedown. He rarely left me at all— I’d left him this time and I regretted it as much as the blue smoothie juice thing Rubi had poured down my throat this morning.
“Spirulina, Roo. You need it.”
I didn’t. I needed Viktor, and I’d learned that calling and telling him so was better than suffering alone.
Need his voice.
I called him. For the first time since I’d left for this cunty trip, he didn’t answer. Couldn’t describe how that felt. Or how annoying it was—how I felt, not that he wasn’t at my beck and call for phone therapy. My head throbbed, anxiety or fatigue, I couldn’t tell, and it pissed me off.
Couldn’t even enjoy my smoke. I tossed it away, jittery, like I’d been all day, driving alone in the Bone Rattler. It made no fucking sense that I missed Rubi’s constant yapping, but I did. I missed company. I missed home. I missed Jean and Viktor, and I didn’t know how I was going to survive any extra days that fucker of a tyre added to this hell.
Headache could keep you off the road too .
I didn’t get severe ones anymore, but even the middling bastards screwed my focus too much for me to handle a truck this big, and worrying about it made my skull buzz harder, the threat of it worse than actual pain.
Fucking cunt.
I slouched on the bench, hating the entire world. Except Vik and my nanna. And okay, Rubi, when he came back and slung an arm around me.
“Two hours. Paid him extra and everything. How’s that noggin’?”
“How’s your fucking noggin’?”
“Probably the same as yours. Take these, drink this, and let’s go for a nap.”
I took the pills and drank the water. “Where are we going for this nap? My bed’s in Kwik Fit purgatory.”
“Bertha. I keep telling you, the bunks are a dream compared to the padded shelves in the Rattler.”
Uncomfortable beds were the least of my worries. I squinted at my phone, my silent phone, willing it to ring.
It didn’t, and Rubi wasn’t in the mood to let me stew on it. He pulled me into a full-blown side hug. “I’m sorry this has been so hard for you, brother. I should’ve told Saint not to put you with me on this run.”
“You’re not the problem.”
“I have been. Chattypants put us together for a reason, and I fucked it up with my hooliganism.”
“I like hooliganism.”
Rubi chuckled, giant body juddering as I squirmed to get away from him, then changed my mind cos this fucker was comfortable. “Can’t lie, you’re one of the best. But I’m still sorry I gave you chaos when you needed calm.”
“What about you?”
“Eh?”
Rubi’s arm was a big pillow. I enjoyed it a second longer before forcing myself away from it with monumental effort. “What do you need from me?”
“Fucked if I know, mate.” Rubi stretched his arms over his head. Then he seemed to remember something and fished an orange from his pocket. “I’d feel better if you ate this, though. Then I can at least tell Vicky you’re getting your vitamin C.”
He tossed me the fruit. Heavy and caked in wax, it was nothing like the oranges I’d grown to love on Satsuma Island, but I appreciated the sentiment, even if the scent that assaulted me the moment I pierced the rind made my heartache ten times fucking worse.
I passed Rubi a segment.
He chewed with the same misery I felt.
I ate the rest and slumped back on the bench.
Love sucks.
It didn’t. If this trip had taught me anything, it was that love was fucking life. But Viktor didn’t call me back, and fretting over that killed any inclination I had to take a nap before we hit the road again.
I took a shower instead and my mood remained foul, but Rubi’s persistence in pushing fruit and water on me, and the radio chatter he struck up in lieu of harassing me from the passenger seat, kept my looming headache at bay enough for me to safely drive. Couldn’t say what that fucker talked about, but for the six hours he kept it up, I was more grateful than I’d ever tell him.
It was dark again by the time we called it a day. By then we’d had news that Mateo had lost his appendix but none of his attitude.
“Worse patient than you ,” Rubi confirmed through the radio. “Which is like saying Ebola is worse than the plague.”
I didn’t answer, too caught up in wedging the Rattler into a space at a truck stop we’d already graced with our chaotic presence a fortnight ago. Back then, being away from Viktor had left me all kinds of fucking manic, and I belatedly understood Rubi a whole lot better. Now, I was just tired, and I latched onto the crackle of the radio as if it was my only tether to reality.
“Hate to say it, Roo, but your parking is still shite.”
I gave up on straight lines and grabbed the mic. “Fuck off.”
Rubi said no more and his silence got under my skin. Like I wanted to seek him out or some shit, and I had definitely not signed up to become co-dependant on that big bastard.
I shut the Rattler off. More quiet swamped me and I didn’t like it.
Fuck this .
I hopped out and stomped to where Rubi had managed to park Bertha in an actual bay.
He lumbered down from the cab, rubbing his temple with hair that made mine look tidy, glaring at his phone. “Fucking colder than a well digger’s arse out here. You get hold of Vik yet?”
“No.”
His frown deepened. “Riv ain’t picking up either.”
Honestly, it wasn’t unusual for River to not answer Rubi’s calls. I’d never seen that brother not lose his phone at least once a day. But Viktor always answered mine, and the blank screen of my own phone was giving me nightmares that hadn’t gnawed at me since the last time I’d been this wired and tired.
“He does not sleep much, until he does, and then it is my greatest fear that he will not wake up.”
“Something’s going on.” Rubi broke into my festering thoughts, still knee-deep in poking at his phone. “I don’t know where anyone is.”
“Like who?”
“Riv. Saint.”
“When do you ever know where Saint is?”
“Alexei’s AWOL too, and no offence, but last time that happened you nearly died.”
“Did not nearly die. Just felt that way.”
My skull throbbed in protest.
Rubi pulled a face. “Good for you. Not really my fucking point.”
“What is your point? You really think something’s up, or are you just losing the shagging plot?”
“The shagging plot? Huh. Maybe that’s what’s been up with you.”
A comment I should’ve ignored, but even Rubi’s wildest bullshit was better than watching him get all mithery and shit. “What does that mean?”
“It means I was right about you living in Viktor’s pocket. You’re not used to postponing the bone, brother. All this anxiety and stress —” He tapped my chest. “Just blue balls, innit?”
“I don’t have blue balls. Being around you makes me forget I have a dick.”
Rubi almost grinned, but his gaze fell on his phone again and his humour sank, taking mine with it. I wasn’t good at comfort or telling people what they needed to hear unless it was the God’s honest truth, and Rubi didn’t seem in the mood to be reminded that Rebel Kings’ history dictated one of two things: Either River had left his phone under a car and Viktor was taking an extra-long nap or everyone we loved was dead. In our lives, nothing in between existed and Rubi knew it.
He took a shaky breath. “I hate this.”
“We should get drunk.”
“That’s a terrible idea.”
“Think of a good one then.”
“Burn the trucks. Get the bus home.”
It wouldn’t have taken a lot to persuade me. I’d done worse things with far less motivation. But while the haulage firm didn’t mean much to me, it meant a new start for the people I cared about. A family I hadn’t asked for but couldn’t imagine this crazy life without. “Come here, you big twat.”
I gave Rubi an unsolicited hug, snorting at his surprise, and then his obvious attempt to make me stagger beneath his gargantuan weight.
His failed attempt.
I pushed him back and we leaned on each other as if we’d already sunk ten pints.
He almost laughed, but it came out as more of a sniff, confusion clouding his gaze as a familiar rumble filled the air, expanding in volume as we broke apart and spun a dazed one-eighty in perfect sync.
Lights hit the shadowed space between Bertha and the Rattler. Headlights— bike lights, the silhouette of the rider vague enough that I did the most pointless thing I’d ever done in my life and pulled Rubi behind me. As if my lanky frame could shield his bungalow-sized brawn from the fucking wind.
Slower to react, Rubi stumbled. Then he was all up in my business, tugging me back. “Get down.”
Urgency laced his words, and it should’ve fucking moved me, but my boots were cinderblocks cemented to the ground, every sense alert as the deep grunt of a Harley became something else. Something lighter. Something brighter. An engine with more than one fucking pin.
It shouldn’t have mattered. An ambush was an ambush no matter what hogs they rode in on. But that engine—the lighter one—it drew me in, and I wrenched free of Rubi’s grip, stepping forward as a second bike swept into the narrow space.
Sound cut off. In my head. In real life. Twenty feet lay between me and a bike that was a gut-punch of familiarity for all the wrong reasons—reasons that made my heart fill the silence with a whooshing thump.
Black, not red.
Not life, but death .
At least, that’s how my exhausted brain saw it, even as Rubi made a sound that didn’t belong anywhere near a murder scene and galloped past me like a happy rhino. Even as the Harley rider vaulted over his Softail and landed in Rubi’s steaming embrace.
Joy and love cut through the bitter wind, but I saw nothing but the shape of that black bike. The one I’d refused to look at the whole time it had been stashed at the compound. In bits, restored, I didn’t give a fuck. I hated that bike. I’d dreamed about it for months.
That engine?
I’d heard it in my sleep. Smelled the smoke from the crash and the blood staining the earth around it. I’d smelled Viktor, even before his orange-blossom scent had made a lick of fucking sense to me.
I smelled him now , through the diesel fumes from the trucks—I felt him, cos the bike of my nightmares... it was a fucking Ducati, and the rider was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.