23. Alexei
23
ALEXEI
Lena Gordon .
A face to a name I had known for a long time now, and of course she was so beautiful I could not stop thinking about the heady nights they’d shared with her, imagery that kept me company as I left my soul on Whisper Farm with Cam and Saint— and her —and rode alone from Cornwall to Bristol.
It was a pilgrimage I had not made in a while, and I had no regrets. My penthouse apartment was as sterile and unwelcoming as it had always been, but perhaps I noticed it more since I’d spent so much time living differently.
Either way, I shivered as the door shut behind me, rubbing eyes that had been open too long, missing Saint’s silent presence. It had been a long time since I had been here without him. Even longer since Cam had been here. My first love did not like this place. He had never said, but I knew. The empty fridge, the unused oven. The sheets so crisp and cold. My home was everything Cam was not, and maybe that was why I couldn’t be here anymore.
I moved through the barren space, collecting the few personal effects I had amassed in my life, the weapons I’d once stored beneath the floorboards long gone. Most of the rooms did not mean much to me, but I paused in the bedroom, remembering the very first night I’d brought Cam home—a night we had both felt so reckless it could’ve been the end of us, not the beginning. He had seemed young to me then. Burdened by life, and yet somehow untamed. I smiled now, thinking about it. I had not known the meaning of such wild words until I met Saint .
My gaze fell on the bed, recalling how I had slept in his arms there as rain had lashed the windows, a perfect storm until Cam’s nightmares had woken us—as they still did from time to time, wrenching my heart, all the reminder I ever needed of how profoundly that night had changed me.
And how I knew I would never come back here. That I no longer needed to. I’d thought I would die in this place, but as I turned my back on the bed and walked away, only life filled my heart.
* * *
It was a long ride home, and I arrived to a compound thrumming with the crowd congregated to observe the Christmas lights being illuminated. Many faces I knew, and plenty I didn’t—a scenario I did not like or wish to participate in, and on my third day without sleep, I was not in the mood to pretend.
Unnoticed, I parked my bike and made my way to the chapel, where I found Nash, and with bustle in the yard in full swing, his presence surprised me. Nash was nice. He liked people. And he was good at being around them. Lurking alone in the dark did not fit his personality.
“Something is wrong, zolotoy mal’chik?”
Cam’s vice-president grimaced, leaning hard against the counter of the chapel’s tiny kitchen. “Some kid hit my leg with a scooter.”
I edged closer, eyeing the appendage Nash had come so close to losing last year. “Can you move it?”
“Yeah. Nothing’s broken. Just took the wind out of me.”
“You are very pale.”
“Amazing.” Nash shut his eyes. Opened them again with a slow breath. “Think I need to puke, then I’ll be all right.”
My lip curled of its own accord. “You must be sick? Really? Why are you all like this?”
“Like what?”
“Always, if something happens, one of you will have your head in the sink.”
“What can I say? We’re fucking sensitive.”
That was one word for the visceral reactions these men could not seem to subdue. I filled a glass of water and set it on the counter. Then I left him, because for all Nash McGovern was a people person, observing him recovering from his injury had taught me he was a man who sometimes needed a moment to gather the enduring strength he possessed.
So I moved to the table, taking a seat and opening the laptop I’d swiped from the neglected corner of the compound still absurdly referred to as Cam’s office. A desk and chair I had not seen him frequent since the day I’d come to find him after our first encounter. It was ironic perhaps that the troubles he had revealed to me then still haunted him now.
I opened the accounts for the parent company owned by Cam, Orla, Nash, Rubi, and River. Poked at the hole their sentimental idiocy had left in the figures. I had the money to make it go away, but I had already been told no by Cam, and I was happy to oblige. For now, at least. I did not mind Cam’s belief that he could somehow contain me, but I wouldn’t let it hurt him.
Nash shuffled in from the kitchen, favouring his uninjured leg. He fell into the seat beside me and cast a glance at the numbers on my screen. “That looks horrible.”
“It could be the code to eternal happiness and you would not like it.”
“Would if it made any fucking sense.”
“It is easier in the context of an engine?”
“Only if I can put my hands on it and feel how it’s supposed to be. And at least an engine doesn’t twat me round the head with a belt if I get it wrong.”
I pursed my lips, suddenly as rattled as Nash seemed to be by more than the pain in his leg. “How long until your child is born?”
He blinked, startled out of a daze. “Ten days.”
“You are ready?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you are a practical man. If you are worrying, it is for something in your head or your heart. Surely you are not worried you will be a bad father?”
“Nah.” Nash shook his head, his hands restless for the cigarettes he no longer smoked. “I’ll be grateful for the chance to fuck it up.”
“You are worried about Orla and the birth?”
Nash’s only answer was a distant nod, and I could not help him. For all he and his lovers had shared about Orla’s pregnancy, which was not a great deal, his concern was as valid as the sleep Cam had lost to fretting over the fate of his only sister and her unborn child.
“The old one tells me he has been manifesting with runes and sage.”
At that, Nash smiled, lightening his handsome face. “Rubes loves all that.”
“Like his tattoos?”
“Some of them.”
“And what of yours? You have Catholic words all over your skin, but the mention of any god upsets you.”
Nash’s humour faded. “How’d you know that?”
“Honestly, Saint told me. I have never seen it myself.” And it had been something I’d allowed to be buried, but Cam had told me what Viktor had shared with him on the road, and it had got me thinking about this man more than I was used to. About myself too, perhaps.
I was good at reading men. At seeing the things that had made them the way they were without them having to tell me. It concerned me that Nash’s abusive childhood had passed me by.
Not just you. Cam did not know either.
I wondered if Locke did. If it mattered when Nash was so focused on the future. If there was more for me to learn from this honest, kind-hearted brother than he had already taught me.
In any case, his body language gave me every cue I needed to change the subject. “I received Rubi’s email about the fields. What do you think about it?”
Life crept back into Nash’s sky-blue gaze. “I like it. If we can pull that shit off, it’d be a dream come true. Cam said it’s up to you , though.”
“Me?”
Nash peered at my laptop screen, grimaced, and looked away. “You’re the numbers man.”
“Rubi can count. So can the queen. You do not need me to tell you this... venture will make or break you.”
“You don’t think we can do it?”
“On the contrary. As a collective, I think you can do anything if you work together. But that is what it will take, no? Cohesion. Trust. Courage and caution.”
“Sounds like war.” Nash stretched his leg, massaging the muscles around his knee. “But I think I understand. This shit is on Cam and Rubi, right? If they can’t get along, the whole thing is fucked.”
“Indeed. And they will need to do most of the work while the rest of you are busy raising your children. But think of the reward. By the time you have a little McGovern under your feet, this empty land, combined with what you want for the Crow territory, it could be the start of the club’s legacy.”
I left it at that and went back to work, noting the lone AirPod in one of Nash’s ears, a tell that he needed some space to sift through his thoughts. Thoughts he likely judged unimportant, but anyone lucky enough to know him knew better.
Eventually, though, even I grew tired of crunching numbers. I shut my laptop and moved to the window, surveying the yard through the safety of the privacy glass, scanning the dwindling crowds for the few people I cared about.
Saint was nowhere to be seen, naturally. He had been impossible to keep track of for days now. A breath in the wind. Raindrops in the sky. A wave lapping over my feet, gone by the time I crouched to meet it. Cam, though, I was so drawn to him I did not consciously seek him out. My gaze found him unbidden, and there he was, a beacon among the crowd, charming and beautiful, at ease in the kingdom he’d been born to rule.
It was an effort to look away from him. To observe Decoy and Folk preparing to leave. To spy Ranger perched on the clubhouse roof, flicking who knew what in Rubi’s general direction while River laughed, complicit and happy , a state of mind the youngest O’Brian truly deserved.
And where was Viktor? It was a new phenomenon to care beyond logistics, but I could live with how I felt as I sought him out for a second time today. I could live with most things these days. For reasons I did not quite understand, since Folk, Ranger, and Locke had laid Rocco St John to rest, everything—even me—seemed to come easier.
I did not find Viktor. Or his faithful dog. My search discovered Mateo and Embry in the shadows, a sight I skipped over, and ended on Locke and Orla as they crossed the yard, Locke’s gaze darting around enough that I knew he felt the same absence in his heart I did while I could not see Saint.
“Mishka looks for you.”
Nash’s chair scraped the floor. I sensed him rise and waited for him to leave, but if anything, he seemed to drift closer. “What you said earlier, about how my life might be when every thread of our lives finally comes together, you were wrong.”
I rotated to face Nash. He was a few feet away, jaw set, his usually placid gaze flashing with something I couldn’t quite decipher. “Wrong about what?”
“About a little McGovern under my feet. It’s not going to happen.”
“Zolotoy—”
“No, I mean I’m not giving any kid of mine that name. I’ll die before that fucking happens.”
He backed off without waiting for a response and left the chapel, a storm in his wake that belied every thought I’d had about the club being a calmer place of late. But as I turned back to the window and watched Nash find his lovers and place his hands on Orla’s swollen belly, both of them cocooned in the sanctuary of Locke’s big arms, peace returned to him, and I stole some of it for myself.
Ten days .
A countdown to a different world, a better one, if our queen and her men got the life they deserved.
Imagining a reality where they didn’t was a horror beyond even me. I forced my mind to skirt around it and returned to the past instead—to a place in time where I had not existed for Cam and Saint. When they had needed someone else to meld them together. It was a lot easier to picture, and I did not mind it.
I did not mind it at all.
The chapel door opened again. Closed with a quiet click. The scent of musk and smoke reached me.
Cam .
He had big arms too, muscles jacked from the workout he’d squeezed in when we’d returned from Whisper Farm. He wore a soft cotton T-shirt and smelled of shampoo, his hair damp from a recent shower, his skin still flushed with exertion, still warm with everything this man was to me.
Cam took advantage of his height and set his chin on my head. “I thought you liked Christmas trees?”
“I do.”
“Why are you hiding from ours then?”
“You think it is the yolka that keeps me inside?”
He chuckled. “Not a chance, but it’s over, if it’s any consolation. Everyone’s going home.”
“Are you?”
“Soon.”
“How soon? And where is Saint?”
Because I wanted to go home. With both my lovers. I did not want to think about other people anymore.
“I don’t know where Saint went,” Cam admitted. “I thought you might.”
I did not, and I didn’t enjoy how it felt. “He is not with Viktor?”
“Viktor left with Ranger.”
I darted a glance to the roof, noting Ranger was no longer there, a change in my surroundings I had missed for the sake of picturing Cam and Saint with someone else.
“What are you smiling about?” Cam turned me away from the window and cupped my face with his tattooed hands, his thumbs tracing the hollows beneath my eyes. “I mean, I’m not complaining, it looks good on you. But I thought you’d be pissed off I’d lost track of Saint.”
“Have you ever had track of Saint?”
Cam grinned, boyish and handsome beneath his menacing good looks. “What do you think?”
“I think I would like to go home with you and wait for him there.”
I did not expect Cam to humour my request any time soon. The crowds in the yard had thinned out, but he was, forever and always, a man with much to do. But he surprised me by delegating some of the many responsibilities he heaped upon himself to Rubi, and taking both my hands in his, kissing my knuckles as sweet as Saint. “Let’s go.”
Cam drove his car home, packed full of the food he and Rubi would cook together on Christmas Day, an acid test of their maturity that I had already topped up my vodka stash to endure.
I scanned the compound as we passed every landmark, the bar, the café, the sales building. The timber yard and the HGV hub. Out of habit, I counted the vehicles, matched them with the schedule imprinted on my brain. “Where is the white van?”
Cam glanced left. “I think Saint has it.”
“Why?”
“His hog is still here.”
I knew that, but Saint had many bikes. Even I lost track of which he rode on any given day, and I had never seen him drive the plain white van Decoy used for local firewood deliveries. “Where has he gone?”
“Lexi, if I knew, I’d tell you.”
“I know. It was rhetorical.”
Cam chuckled. “Can’t lie, I’m loving watching you learn to live with this version of him.”
“And what version is this?”
“The happy one. Trouble is, he never stays still long enough for you to see it.”
Whatever my face did in response to that made Cam laugh more, and as he drove through Whitness to the cottage on Beach Road, I considered what he meant. I considered Saint , beyond how I’d spent most of the day picturing him. His devastation to realise we could’ve eased Folk’s grief for his dead friend far sooner, and the change in him since he’d put it right. Was he happy now? Was this feral behaviour how such things looked?
“We’re home.”
I turned my head to meet Cam’s dark gaze. “I know.”
“I thought you might be asleep.”
“Why?”
“You went quiet.”
“I am usually loud?”
Cam rolled his eyes, easing the car to a stop, but I had him field trained enough that he kept the engine running while I assessed the house, waiting for me to allow him into his home.
Inside, though, his deference evaporated. The door shut behind him and he gripped my collar, hauling me against him, peering into my face like he had in the chapel. “You’re tired.”
“Am I?”
“I haven’t seen you sleep since you got back from the road.”
“That says more about how much you have slept than me, biker boy.”
“Will you eat?”
For him, yes. Anything to stop him looking at me as though his heart would break if I didn’t. “If you let me go, I will take a shower and eat whatever you wish.”
I meant it in a way he did not yet understand. Regardless, Cam released me and ambled onwards to the kitchen, shedding his jacket to reveal the cut lines of his shoulders, the bullet scar lurking beneath his clothes. Though I couldn’t see the mark, the mere thought of it threatened the peace my heart needed if I was to give up my Bristol penthouse for good. I ran my tongue over my molars, latching onto Cam’s muttered curse instead, following him into the kitchen to where he stood by the bi-folding doors that had not been there when I’d first come to this place.
He faced a freshly dug hole in the garden, a frown creasing his face. “The fuck is that?”
“Saint did it.”
“Don’t suppose you know why?”
“I am afraid not.” I opened the utility room and claimed a clean towel. “I saw him marauding around with a shovel on the security footage, that is all.”
Cam sighed, and if he hadn’t made fun of me in the car, I might’ve felt bad for him, but I was not so kind. I kissed his neck and left him alone to ponder the fate of his garden.
Upstairs, I ignored the urge to clear a path with bleach and stood beneath the hot spray for as long as I could without Cam feeling the need to rescue me.
It was not a surprise to find him waiting in the darkened bedroom, though. He watched me gather the clothes I had taken off and fold them. Unlike Saint, he’d never commented on my habit of throwing them away after one wear, so I did not know if he’d noticed how hard I’d tried to stop.
I noticed him move behind me, the solid heat of his body close enough that I felt his warmth kiss my skin.
Cam caught a bead of water running down my bare back. “I still can’t believe you’re really here.”
“Where else would I be?”
“I don’t know. But when I met you... there were moments, even when we were fucking that first night, when I thought I knew for sure I’d never see you again.”
“You very nearly didn’t.”
“I didn’t turn your head as much as you turned mine?”
“The opposite. I was afraid of this thing”—I touched my chest—“that you had awakened in me. I am still afraid of it now.”
“Why?”
“Because you have shown me how it would feel to lose you.”
“You’ve given me my fair share of heart attacks.”
“I know.”
“You love me, Lexi?”
I opened a drawer, found the matches we kept there, and lit the candle that was perhaps my most precious inanimate thing in this house. Then I turned to face him—to face Cam, the soul who had shown me the way to my own. “More than I ever knew such things were possible. You did not already know?”
Cam’s lips rose to a shadowed grin. “I like hearing you say it.”
“What else do you like?”
The candlelight flickered around us, dancing in Cam’s molten gaze, the energy we shared as charged as it had always been. Cam closed the inch of space between us and released the towel at my waist.
It fell to the floor, but he kept his eyes on my face, gauging my mood. With Cam, I craved his rough touch and natural dominance as much as Saint sought to fuck him a different way. But how we got there was not a given. Sometimes I needed him on me, over me, more than I knew. Other times Saint would not allow it.
Saint was not here.
I brought my hand to Cam’s chest and splayed it where his heart beat against my palm, steady and strong beneath the cotton shirt so white and clean. “Have I ever told you how much I like this?”
Cam glanced at my hand. “My T-shirt?”
“How it feels when I touch you. It makes me wonder how anything can be left undone between us.”
Cam arched a dark brow, a spark igniting in his gaze. “If you’re talking about sucking my dick, you need to stop. I’m never gonna ask you to do that, but thinking about it makes me fucking crazy.”
“Do you think about it a lot?”
“No.” Cam wrapped his inked fingers around my wrist, tugging my hand from his chest to pull me forward. “It’s not important.”
It wasn’t, and I had been grateful for that in the past. But we lived in the present and I was not the same man I’d been when we’d locked eyes in that Bristol bar so long ago. Cam and Saint had taught me to be someone who could kiss a man as powerful as Cam and feel nothing but want.
Nothing but more.
Chest rumbling like a wolf, Cam held me against him and his tongue slid between my lips as easily as it had done the first time. As easily as it did with Saint, when he kissed him with such tenderness I could hardly bear to watch them. And yet, it was a rare day or night that I could stop.
Cam and I, though, without Saint to temper the rampaging current, the tenderness did not last. Untamed heat flared between us and we tore at each other with bruising hands, staggering with the force of it, falling onto the bed, Cam’s clothes finding their way to the floor.
He was stronger than me. I had accepted this. I enjoyed it. I allowed it. There was nothing he could not do to me, though there remained things that he wouldn’t.
I rolled us over and pinned him to the bed. “Put your hand on my neck.”
He obliged, his fingers wrapping the column of my throat in a loose grip, one that would tighten if he gauged me willing.
Gaze locked with his, I guided that hand further back to cup the nape of my neck. “Push me down.”
His eyes widened. “What?”
“Do it.”
“No.”
“ Do it .”
Candle-born shadows danced on the walls as Cam fought me with his dark stare. “You don’t have to do that—you never have to fucking do that.”
“I want to. I have for a long time now.”
His shoulders rose and fell with a shaky breath. “When did it shift for you?”
“The first time you dropped to your knees for me .”
“That was years ago.”
“I know. I held back because I did not want Saint to feel he was not giving enough. But things have changed for him too, no?”
“He tell you?”
I nudged Cam’s legs apart, making space for myself. “Not with words.”
“Telepathy?”
“Maybe. Push me down, biker boy. And do not be gentle.”
He did not make me ask again. His big hand settled into place and he guided me to where I wanted to be. To his waiting cock, only the second I had ever taken in my mouth by choice. I could not say if it was worth the wait for him, but for me it was a ritual I had come to count on with Saint, and I knew the moment Cam slid down my throat that it would be the same with him.
Do not be gentle.
He was not. But the panic I had felt with other men—men I had gone on to slaughter in return—it did not come. Consumed by Cam, I did not hear my heart thundering or my blood rushing in my ears. I did not taste my own blood on my lips. I did not want to kill him.
No.
I wanted to drown in the deep sounds he made, in the scent of him filling every sense. I wanted every atom of this man he was prepared to share, and I would not stop, I did not stop, until he gave it up.
Cam had never come like this for me, as if I had drained the life force from his strong body. His rough shout faded to a snarled groan. And then he trembled beneath me, fighting for breath, panting into the forearm he’d thrown over his face.
A sight I vowed to see again before the night was over, if he ever recovered. “You are okay?”
Cam’s hand still held my head. His fingertips stroked the back of my skull, his only answer for long seconds before his arm fell away from his face, revealing his glazed eyes. “I’m not built for you two. Don’t ever tag-team me with that, I’ll goddamn die.”
“That is dramatic.”
“It’s fucking true.” His gaze fell on my cock. On how hard it was from witnessing him fall apart so entirely. “What are you going to do with that?”
“I would like to fuck.”
Cam groaned, even as his spent cock acknowledged his primal enthusiasm for the idea. “Give me a minute.”
“I will give you more than that.” I crawled over him and stole a messy kiss. “We should eat first and come back to this later.”
It wasn’t Cam’s nature to push sex aside. He needed release to function. So did I. But I offered to eat with him rarely enough that he caught a second wind and hustled me downstairs, and his happiness as I ate everything he put in front of me was as addicting as watching him come.
As affecting too, for I fell asleep on the sofa before we could fuck, and it felt as good as anything I might’ve missed.
I could not say what became of Cam as I slept. Only that I dreamed of him, and the red-haired woman on the farm, and the conversation he and I needed to have with Saint about what Viktor had told Cam.
The odd combination left me restless. I jumped awake to an alert on my phone—someone approached the house.
I rolled from the couch, landing on both feet and pivoting in the same soundless breath, instinct urging caution more than violence. But I had been wrong before, more than once, and I reached for the weapon concealed above the living room door with little conscious thought.
Cam.
He lay asleep on the other end of the couch. If I had woken a man instead of a monster, I’d have felt his long legs tangled with mine. The warmth of his body.
The love.
But... it didn’t matter how hard Cam’s affection tried to heal me, a monster I remained, and I tracked the shape that hoisted something from the roof of the missing yard van and traipsed its way up the driveway with murderous intent, as if my heart didn’t know exactly who it was.
The figure reached the front door and moved beyond it, to the gate at the side of the house. Another alert told me the bolts had been breached, and I marvelled at Cam’s capacity to sleep through such things. At my own restraint as I stood, unmoving, in the dark for half a second longer.
Then I was in motion, darting through the house to the glass doors I wholly disapproved of. I slid them open enough to slip through as the would-be intruder emerged into the garden, setting his load on the patio Cam had dug and laid with his bare hands, exertion the only therapy he’d put his faith in.
The scent of pine hit me, needle dust misting the air as Saint stepped forward and cupped my face with his cold hands.
A yolka.
“For you,” he whispered. “On New Year’s Eve.”