13. Ranger
13
RANGER
I’d never run to someone the way I charged at Viktor, not even as a joke. But I barrelled into him as if a god I didn’t believe in had commanded it, and I didn’t give a shite if Rubi mocked me for it for the rest of my fucking life.
Viktor smelled of the road, that orange-blossom scent hard to detect beneath the petrol fumes staining his skin. And he was cold, his hands, his lips, and the crook of his neck where I buried my face. But his arms were home, and not even the worst winter gale could suck the warmth from his laughter as I swept him off his perfect fucking feet.
As he let me. “You missed me this much?”
“Shut up.” I set him down without giving an inch, breathing like I’d run a marathon. Trembling , if I looked too closely at myself— fuck that . “Just... shut up.”
Viktor held me tighter, his hands finding their way beneath my clothes to my back and my neck, his magic fingers rubbing a soothing rhythm into the base of my skull that had me swaying on my feet.
I straight up groaned. “You can’t be fucking real.”
“Asher, I am real. I promise.”
Asher .
The next sound that fell from me was too wretched to be a groan, and I felt like I could bawl my eyes out in the middle of this shitcan truck park, just because he was here .
It’s why I needed him to not talk. To give me a fucking second to acclimate to the spell he cast on me. To breathe and saturate myself in the orange-blossom scent buried deep beneath the grime of the road. And to make peace with the bewildering reality that I loved him more now than I had ten minutes ago.
I took another grounding inhale and my heart slowed, settling into the steady contentment I’d never known until I’d found peace with him. Only then did I find the equilibrium to pull back and meet his meadow-green gaze. His amused gaze, though something that looked an awful lot like concern lingered there too. “Hey.”
Viktor smoothed his thumb between my brows. “What are you wearing?”
“Clothes.”
“Whose clothes?”
“Dunno. Found them in the rig. Where’s Lida?”
“With Orla.”
“She okay?”
“Which one?”
“Both.”
Viktor rubbed the cinch between my brows again. “They are fine, but I think Locke and Nash breathe a little easier with Lida on guard.”
Made sense to me. This didn’t, though. Viktor, here , in my arms, feeding the unhinged daydreams that had kept me upright the whole time I’d been gone. “I should ask what you’re doing here, but I don’t really give a fuck.”
“That is lucky. I do not have a tangible reason save that I could not be anywhere else, and River O’Brian is my new best friend.”
“Done a runner together, eh?”
“Something like that.” Viktor brushed his lips over my cheek, too fleeting to be a kiss but so fucking sweet it hit me like a wrecking ball. “And, I would have come sooner if I’d known Alexei had left you.”
“You know where he went?”
“Only because Jake enjoys the challenge of tracking him.”
“Your brother needs to get laid.”
Viktor didn’t argue, but his gaze flickered, letting me know there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“What is it?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. I might be wrong.”
“Is it bad?”
“I do not think so. Difficult, maybe. For everyone.”
The rush of his sudden appearance began to fade. I sank into his stare, searching for answers, but he gave me none, and I knew there was only one reason he’d do that—to protect me. But from what?
“Jean—”
“She is fine. You know this.”
I did. I’d spoken to my nanna two hours ago, confessing that I was pretty sure missing Viktor this hard was gonna kill me. She’d laughed. Then she’d told me that even the worst things didn’t last, and of course she’d been right. She always was.
Viktor’s sharp jaw called to me, those wise eyes and high cheekbones. His pillowy lips. My stomach growled, but I didn’t care about eating. Didn’t care about smoking or that barely a sip of water had passed my mouth since wank o’clock this afternoon. I just wanted to hold Viktor’s face and stare at him all night long.
“Asher, it is okay.”
I believed him. Viktor was a retired mobster with a lifetime of secrets, but he never lied to me. “I know.”
“I need to load my bike onto your truck.”
“What?”
Viktor gripped my wrists, prying my hands from him. “The bike. The truck. Unless you do not want me to travel with you?”
It took me a second to catch up. “You’re going to ride with me? In the cab? Not buzz about on the road where I can’t see you?”
Viktor grinned. “What would be the point in that? Lyubeemiy, I did not come to protect you. I came to be with you.”
* * *
He came to be with me.
My heart ached for a whole new reason.
A better one. Having Viktor with me when I had eight hours to kill before we got back on the road was pretty much the happiest I’d ever been. Or at least in the last month. I didn’t care that we were stuck at a shitty truck stop. Or that we had nothing to eat but the fried chicken and chips I was finally sick of. I cared that Viktor currently stood on top of the Bone Rattler, surveying the truck park or whatever, and this fucker would not get down.
Also, I wasn’t entirely sure how he’d got up . I’d turned my back to take a piss and now Vik was a mountain goat. “What are you even looking for? What if a sniper gets you?”
Viktor paced the roof of the cab, shooting me a droll look, the glow of a nearby downlight making his eyes gleam. “In Northampton? This is King territory. Is why you stop here.”
Facts. But I still wanted him down and he didn’t give a shit. He leapt from the Bone Rattler to Bertha, rousing Rubi from inside.
“Oi. The fuck are you parkouring around for?”
Viktor crouched, grinning down at him in a manner I knew spelled mischief, but no one else did. “You need to reposition your vehicle.”
Rubi narrowed his gaze. “And why’s that, Sir Jump-a-Lot?”
“You’ve left a blind spot on your flank. Also, it looks as though a drunk person parked it the first time.”
“Dick. And to think I baked you that orange cake just to fix your sad little face. What about—oh. When did Roo move the Rattler?”
I hadn’t. Viktor had, manoeuvring that bitch like a boss, or some pretty thing with a pilot’s brain. But I didn’t tell Rubi that. I just smirked and lit a smoke, snorting as he growled and stomped to the driver door of his own truck, jabbing a tattooed thumb in Viktor’s general direction, which was still up.
“Get down then, you cretin.”
Viktor obliged, leaping back to the Rattler before he hopped to the ground, no hint of discomfort on his face as he landed beside me with enough leonine grace to make my dick hard.
“Mind that fucking hip.”
Viktor stole my smoke. My heart. My faculties as he bit my neck, before stepping off to show Rubi exactly how he thought our brace of HGVs should be parked.
“You’re off your head,” Rubi complained, finally killing the engine of the humungous HGV. “Did Teddy put you up to this?”
Viktor shrugged, as easy as he always was until he wasn’t. “Is common sense to use each other to block access to the rear of your vehicles.”
“Coulda told me that before I went to bed.”
“You can go back to bed now . No one is stopping you.”
Rubi shifted a pointed stare to where River had already wandered off, as interested in lorry parking as I was, texting on his phone while he ate a bag of Squashies.
Viktor smirked. “So go for a walk.”
Rubi gave him the finger. “I liked you better when you were somewhere else.”
He strode away to join River.
I laughed, and it felt almost as good as Viktor did, but I had to ask, “What are you mithering him for?”
“He will find out soon enough.”
Colour me intrigued, but I was still all about being as close to Viktor as possible. I tugged him further into the new shadows his parking arrangement had created, pressing him against one of Bertha’s giant wheels, fire in my blood before I’d even kissed him, smouldering flames that fast became an inferno the second our lips touched.
And yeah, okay. Maybe Rubi had been right about me missing this as much as I’d missed everything else about Viktor. Kissing him set me aflame, but I found so much peace in that fire. My headache faded, my eyes stopped itching, and I no longer wanted to murder every other driver on the road. More than that, I wanted to fuck Vik against the wheel of a truck, which was definitely not going to happen.
He laughed and pulled away, putting some much-needed distance between us. “You looked so tired when I first saw you, but you have some energy left, I think.”
“I’m never tired around you.”
Lies, especially these past few months, but it was true that I sometimes found it hard to sleep around him, as if my cynical heart was scared I’d wake up to find him nothing but a concussion-induced illusion. On my better days, I knew it was because I didn’t want to miss a moment with him. Right now , I couldn’t look away from him to even think about it. “Why are you so fucking hot?”
Viktor leaned in and licked the seam of my mouth. “Because you know what it’s like to be cold. Now come inside. I brought you something.”
Inside meant the depressing interior of the Rattler, but thanks to a loneliness-fuelled tidy up at our last rest stop, it no longer resembled a skip. Just two narrow bunks with a foot of space between them and a taped-up porta-loo.
My bag lay on the bunk I’d slept on the most. Viktor picked it up with one hand, and unhooked the other bunk from the cab wall with the other, dragging it across to make a double bed—a tiny double bed with a death drop in the middle, but it was still cute.
“Asher, come here.”
My body moved of its own accord to where Viktor had stretched out on the makeshift bed. He flicked the switch on the low lamp built into the wall, the treacherous cunt that only worked for me if I punched it. “Is like an airplane.”
“Wouldn’t know.”
“We should maybe change that one day.”
“Why?”
“So I can see you with the sun in your face again. Is selfish, but I think about it a lot.”
Of course he did. My empty stomach contracted. Viktor had left his whole life behind to be with me, sacrificing the family who had kept him alive before I’d found him again so I could be with mine. Jean. Folk. Locke. And yeah, okay, even dickheads like Rubi. Cos Vik had known how much I needed them. But what about him? He had Lida, but he hadn’t seen Jake in months. Had only seen his sister and her kids one fucking time. It’s not enough. I knew that. But I didn’t know how to fix it either.
“Asher.” Viktor knelt behind me, his arms around my chest, lips at my throat. “What is making you feel this way?”
“What fucking way?”
“You seem... sad.”
“I’m not sad—” A yawn cracked my jaw. “ You broke me, and now I can’t hack road trips without you.”
“You are not worried about something?”
Nothing I wanted to talk about in the cramped insides of the Bone Rattler. “What did you bring me?”
“Technically, you brought it.”
“Eh?”
Viktor reached over me and dumped my bag in my lap. “Look inside.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
Cos I hadn’t since Rubi stole my headphones. Cos I’d left my dad’s crystal with Viktor, and unless he’d been living in my bag this whole fucking time—Vik, not my dead dad—there was nothing in there I gave a fuck about.
Viktor settled behind me again. He opened the bag and gripped my wrists, shoving my hands inside. Why he was so enthusiastic about a pile of old clothes, I had no fucking idea, but my palms didn’t find tatty denim and worn cotton. They found something sharper, louder, and I pulled my hands free with a bag of pickled onion Monster Munch. “I didn’t pack these.”
“You did not pack anything.” Viktor rummaged around some more and came up with the T-shirt of his that I most regularly stole, more snacks, and a net bag of the posh Spanish oranges Juana had given him a few weeks back. “And Rubi thinks you need some vitamin C.”
I didn’t need vitamin C. I needed the sight of Vik’s deft fingers peeling oranges and his wicked grin as he fed a segment into my mouth that was a thousand times sweeter than the fruit Rubi had bullied me into eating on the road.
My eyes closed. I leaned back into Vik, soaking up a moment I’d needed even more than everyone around me had realised. The Rattler could still fuck all the way off, but Vik’s body, solid and warm against mine, was all the dreams I’d never thought to have come true.
Most of them, anyway.
I tipped my head.
Viktor kissed me, he owned me, with his sweet mouth and the palm he slid along my jaw and down my neck. He didn’t grip my throat, it wasn’t our thing, but his fingertips grazing the sensitive skin there did something to me—something that set me on fire all over again.
These bunks weren’t built for shenanigans. Rubi had warned me of that, though how he knew I wasn’t sure. River never went on haulage runs. Regardless, common sense dictated he was right, but shit like that had never mattered to me. Or to Viktor. Whatever life threw at us, we found our fucking way.
Vik got me on my back and dropped my bag on the floor. He tugged at the clothes covering my upper body. “These are not yours.”
“I already told you that.”
“Take them off.”
I took them off, not feeling the cold as Viktor’s gaze flared in the dim light of the cabin, stare fixed on the puny slash scar that always riled him up. He traced it with the same fingertips he’d trailed down my throat, and I shivered. “Are you trying to kill me?”
“Someone did.”
“Lots of people did. Let’s skip that part and get to the good bit.”
“And what is the good bit?”
“Whatever you want it to be.”
Viktor hummed. “I like it when you tell me what you want.”
“Then pin me to this shitty bed and do your fucking worst.”
Viktor had been hovering over me. He let his weight drop, knowing I loved it, and gripped my face again, claiming my mouth with a bruising kiss, shutting out the cold with his blazing touch, and I lost myself in it. In him. It had only been a few weeks, but somehow I’d forgotten how good this shit was. How hard I fell into it when we focused on nothing but each other.
We were in a lorry cab.
Rubi and River were... wherever the fuck they were.
I lost track—of everything, not just them. I forgot where we were. I forgot who I was, except that I was fucking gone for Vik, and I had no intention of ever coming back.
The clothes on his upper body disappeared. His bare skin found mine and a swelter built between us, expanding into the kind of heat no cold could touch. And it wasn’t even about fucking sex. It was about the biological reaction my body had to his. The spark I’d felt the first time I’d laid eyes on him. That shift. I’d never been the same, and I didn’t fucking want to be. Loving Viktor had altered my DNA, and I was here for it.
He broke our kiss and grappled with my belt buckle, unbuttoning my jeans and dragging them down, taking the Rebel Kings branded boxers I wore along for the ride. My dick sprang free, so hard I stared at it like I’d never seen it before.
Viktor stared at it like he wanted to eat it. And fuck me, maybe he did. He braced his hands either side of my hips, those wicked green eyes glittering in the dark. This fucker dragged his tongue over the head of my cock and I was dead . Destroyed. Shovel earth over me and bury my corpse.
An inhuman sound escaped me.
Viktor laughed and did that shit again.
“You— fuck .”
He took it all with no fucking warning, sliding me down his throat, teeth grazing my length, eyes fixed on me, pinning me in place harder than his body ever could.
My hands flew to his hair. Not to push him down— never fucking doing that —but to cling on for whatever he was about to do to me. For the slow ride of a blowjob that built and built, cutting off my air supply as every muscle and nerve coiled and strained too tight for me to fucking breathe.
I couldn’t even groan. Not a sound got through my clenched teeth as Vik had his fun. Cos this fucker had rhythm. He sucked my dick like he danced with me, and at home, we danced every night, chasing sultry beats around our tiny empty house, filling the space with love and the kind of happiness that didn’t happen to everyone.
I’m so fucking lucky.
My last thought before I blacked out with pleasure, a surge of ecstasy wiping my brain clean of anything but the snap of my spine and the bitten-out moan that finally broke free.
I came down breathing like a crazy person. “You fucking fucker.”
Viktor slid into my shaking arms, saying nothing, just kissing me with salty lips and another grin that bolstered my heart.
His cock dug into my leg.
I reached for him.
He caught my hand. “Not yet.”
“What am I waiting for?”
“Shh.”
Shh? Fucking cheek. But I let him have his way and sank into a post-blowie daze. The cab grew cold again. Viktor roused me enough to jam my clothes over my head, but it was the last thing I remembered before I opened my eyes to pearl-grey dawn skies.
Viktor pressed a coffee cup into my hands, wide awake enough that I knew he hadn’t slept. Smiling . Dressed, though, which I resented.
I started to sit up.
He pushed me back down. “You have time.”
“For what?”
“To rest more.”
“Eh?”
“Be quiet, Asher. Be still. You do not need to get up yet.”
Okay then. I stayed where I was, noting that at some point in the night, he’d pinched my boots, put my dick away, and tucked me up in the sleeping bag.
I shifted, making room for him. “You rest, I rest.”
He made me drink the coffee first. Then Viktor lay down beside me. His skin was cold, letting me know he’d been outside, and the habit I’d developed post-concussion of sleeping like I’d died was still alive and kicking.
I didn’t hear him .
Unsurprising, considering the life he’d lived before he’d made mine worth living, but I still fucking hated it.
“Why does your heart beat so fast?”
I pulled Vik on top of me, knocking away the fingers he’d plumbed into the pulse point at my throat. “You excite me.”
He offered no challenge. Just chuckled as I fucked around with the sleeping bag, trying to warm him up, his head on my chest, arms around me, legs tangled with mine. Quieter still as his breathing evened out, not sleeping, but close, his grip on me looser with every pass of my fingers through his hair, shorter since he’d asked Orla to cut it.
I let my thoughts wander, contemplating the drop we had to make today before we finally went home, a pull that remained, even with Viktor in my arms.
Lida.
Jean.
The hours of driving until I saw them again that were nothing beside the miles we’d already put in, but maybe that was the Vik effect?—
Bang !
Something hit the window.
I bolted upright, a sharp gasp hitting my fucking lungs. Fight or flight could get fucked, I was a hundred percent fight all the way, and I surged from the bed, already making to pull Viktor behind me.
He resisted, eyes blinking open like a sunbathing cat. “Asher, stop. Is just Rubi waking up.”
“How the fuck do you know?” I scrambled from beneath him anyway, my feet hitting the floor as something else hit the window. A protein shake that splattered the glass, white gunk eroding the view. “Never mind.”
I hopped into the front of the cab and exited through the driver door, rounding the front of the HGV in time for Rubi to sling another bottle, and you know what? Fuck that. The Rattler was a heap of crap, but she’d done me proud so far, apart from the fucking tyre. If Rubi wanted to throw camel jizz at something, he could throw it at me. “Stop being a crazy cunt.”
Rubi whirled around. “ You .”
“Me what?”
“You swapped my protein shakes.”
My brain turned itself inside out trying to make sense of that bullshit. “Swapped them for what?”
“Fucking goat’s milk. My mouth tastes like Philoctetes took a shit in it.”
I’d jumped out of bed ready to take down an army, but I was definitely not awake enough to have a fucking clue what he was talking about. Didn’t even have the words to say so. I just stared, waiting for his ranting to make sense.
Didn’t happen.
Rubi pulled his arm back to chuck the bottle at me, but Viktor had it out of his hand so fast Rubi jumped out of his skin. “Did you just fucking teleport?”
Viktor laughed, but though he’d done far worse to me than flick tarted-up milkshake in my face, his stance had enough edge that Rubi cocked a brow and folded his arms across his chest.
“Like that, is it, Vicky?”
Viktor shrugged, launching the bottle into a nearby bin. Oh cute. He was protecting me. From Rubi . As if the eight seconds I’d been out of bed could be any more fucked up.
A web of tension filled the air. Rubi had this way of being aggressive without losing the laughter in his eyes. And Vik? He was more lethal than most people—even me—would ever know. Rubi was massive, but in a real fight against Viktor, he didn’t stand a chance. Which meant River would fight too—which meant I’d have to fight River, and... yeah. Fuck that. “I didn’t touch your gorilla shakes.”
Rubi dragged his gaze from Viktor and settled it on me, searching for the untruth. But he found none. I’d been messing with him all trip long, but too lazy to lie, I’d owned it. Which meant either River had done it—unlikely—or someone had fucked with him before we’d left Devon. Or the whole charade was in his fucking head.
“Did you check the dates on them?”
Rubi took a breath to respond, but River exiting Bertha derailed him. It was freezing cold out here and that sinuous fucker had no shirt on. And he was already grumpy if his glower was anything to go by.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Rubi, not me.
“Nothing.”
River’s gaze slid to the protein shake dripping down the Rattler. “Uh-huh. Well stop it. I wanna fucking go.”
To Berkshire. And then home .
He was getting no argument from me. We dispersed to get our shit together. Rubi and River wandered off to get showered and find breakfast.
Viktor started the Rattler, letting the wipers take care of most of Rubi’s mess. His kill mode simmered down, leaving... that fucking mischief in his Jelly-Tot eyes. Mischief I knew all too well. But how the fuck would he have got to Rubi’s stupid big boy shakes? Unless he’d ninja-ed into Bertha while Rubi and River had slept?—
Oh.
All right then.
So the real question was why , and it was a puzzle that kept me occupied all the way to Berkshire, where Rubi had his second meltdown of the day.
He swigged from a water bottle. Spat it straight out, narrowly missing a random loading bay operative at the site we’d delivered to. “Mother of Dragons, I’m going to fucking murder someone.”
The worker disappeared, taking Rubi’s general appearance at face value.
Rubi pinned me with his suspicion.
I sighed. “Really? Again?”
“It wasn’t Riv.”
“What wasn’t?”
I spoke as Viktor hopped down from the back of our rig, his lithe body flexing enough that I was as instantly distracted as Rubi had been by River earlier.
Rubi wasn’t as taken by him, and as Vik drew closer, something seemed to click for him. “It was you .”
Viktor reached my side and leaned against the Rattler, his shoulder pressing against mine, that pretty face relaxed in the kind of smirk that spelled trouble. “That is it? No dodgy Hercules reference this time?”
They were talking a different language, but whatever Vik meant seemed to make sense to Rubi. That tension blanketed the air again. Then he laughed , hooting and hollering at the top of his big fat voice. “Dodger, you fucking degenerate. How did you know?”
“I cannot reveal my sources.” Viktor grinned, all teeth and menace. “But if you want to dance, friend, you must only say.”
Still laughing, Rubi ambled off to take a piss before we finally headed home.
I turned to Viktor, drowning in the amused warmth in his eyes, realising he’d played me as much as Rubi. “Explain.”
“No.”
“Please?”
Viktor dragged his thumb over my lips. “I think the way you are looking at me now should be against the Geneva Convention.”
“The what?”
“Never mind.”
“I do mind. Tell me everything.”
“ No .”
“What did you do to his water?”
“I swapped it for—” Viktor searched for the word, something he only did when he was knackered or thinking about sex. “—the sparkling one.”
“You put pins and needles in his water bottles?”
“If that is how you say it.”
“And goat juice in his protein shakes?”
“Maybe.”
He definitely fucking did. And he waited until we were an hour from Devon to tell me why.
“Dodger.” I absorbed it, picturing Willow as she’d been while Locke had been gone last winter. That kid, man. She’d known something was up, like she always had her whole fucking childhood, except this time she’d had the comfort of believing her dad wasn’t alone. And in the end, it wasn’t much of a lie, cos Viktor really had been there, and he had the scars to prove it.
“Asher, is supposed to be funny.”
“I’m laughing on the inside.”
My words misted the air. Viktor turned in his seat, eyeing me across the cab that was freezing now the heater had seized, face half hidden by his drawn-up hoodie. “You must laugh. Locke would not enjoy how you are feeling.”
“You don’t know how I’m feeling.”
“If you believe that, then you do not know yourself any better than you know me.”
Nice. The Rattler had some tight turns coming up. I wrenched her through them before I had the headspace to come back to the conversation. “If you want me to laugh about this shit, I’m gonna call you Dodger in bed.”
“You can call me whatever you like. As long as we are together, I do not care.”
“That how you really feel?”
“About what?”
“Our location.” I didn’t count the rest of it. Viktor loved me. He had to. How else would he put up with me? “I wondered if the cold was getting to you.”
“I am Russian.”
“You don’t live in Russia.”
“For reasons that have nothing to do with the weather.”
“I’m not talking about the fucking weather.”
“What are you talking about then?”
Another tight turn took all my attention, the landscape beginning to change from grey motorways to the green countryside that lined the A-road, grass-green, like Vik’s eyes.
Radio Rubi came back online after a few miles of silence. “Not sure you deserve this beaut of a playlist, but you’re getting it anyway. You’re welcome.”
Somehow, he kept the connection open and tinny music filtered through. Trippy soul with a base too low for the archaic radio to pick up. The words, though, they got to me, and maybe they got to Viktor too.
“You are asking, again, how long I can stay, when perhaps it is you that needs to answer that question.”
We passed a sign for Whitness. “I can’t see into your mind.”
“I mean to answer it about yourself.”
“Jean’s here.”
“Your babushka likes the sun. We could take care of her on the island if that is where you wanted to be.”
“She’s fucking blind .”
“Then I would be her eyes. You would be. Katya. Ivan. We are a family.”
“So you do want to leave?”
“No.”
“No?”
The Rebel King compound loomed in the distance, lights glittering as the sun began to fade.
Viktor pointed at it, gaze fixed on me with all the love I needed. “Asher, we are not done here yet. You will know when we are.”
He was right. In my heart, I knew that. But I didn’t know why or how or when that would change, and it grated on me more than I could explain, to him or to myself. And in any case, I ran out of time to try.
Rubi’s playlist shifted to a song about keeping the people you loved warm even when you couldn’t keep them safe, and the sense that my life was about to become just that squeezed my throat shut.
Hogs buzzed us on the road.
Saint.
Alexei.
They swept in front of the truck, guiding us to the long road that led to the newly built HGV hub and the tall, brooding figure waiting on us.
Even alone, Cam looked every bit the King he was.
He watched us park, and I felt his gaze on us. On me. Felt his presence in the cab even before he strode to the Rattler, pulled my door open, and climbed the steps to meet me.
“It’s time,” he said.
“For what?”
“To take him home, brother.”