24. Alexei
24
ALEXEI
I had spent many long nights with Saint, but perhaps the longest I could remember was one I was so sure he’d forget.
He did not forget many things, but that endless night in the hospital when he had woken, but I was still not sure if he would live or die, he had not seemed present enough to recall the Bolshevik history lesson I’d murmured to keep him with me.
But I’d been wrong about that too.
And he’d stolen the tree, naturally. He planted it in the hole he’d dug in the garden, and then he lay down beside Cam on the sofa and went to sleep, leaving me to shake my head. And to blink when he was gone again by morning.
This man. I had stopped seeking to understand him. Loving him was enough and it always had been.
Besides, I had places of my own to be.
With Cam safe on the compound in a meeting I did not care to attend, I stole his car and drove north-east out of Devon and all the way to London.
I parked on the street outside a townhouse that screamed wealth and taste. Forwent the front door in favour of a skylight. Broad daylight home invasions were my favourite, and I would never grow tired of the shock on my cousin’s face as I landed at his feet.
Or his long-suffering sigh. “Did you bring my car?”
“No.”
“My childhood pocketknife?”
“No.”
Amusement danced in Sacha’s hazel eyes. Sacha Ivanov-Gray. “Jonah is beginning to believe these things never existed.”
“Maybe they didn’t.”
“I can live with that.” Sacha studied me from where he drank coffee at his marble kitchen counter. “I would ask if you are well, but I know you are.”
“How?” I asked the question because I liked how the answer made me feel.
“Cam told me when I spoke to him yesterday. He sounded well too. You are being nice to him, I trust?”
“Sometimes.”
“You would like coffee?”
“No.”
“And your other lover?” Sacha never said Saint’s name—he wouldn’t until they’d met. “How is he?”
I searched for the words to describe Saint as I’d last seen him, treading barefoot on dew-damp grass, studying every branch and needle of the tree he’d planted in the dead of night, his forest-green gaze alive with intelligence and empathy you could not teach. “He is everything.”
Sacha smiled. “Jonah is that to me. And he left you something, when I said you might come. Wait there. I will know if you move.”
He would not, but I obeyed anyway. Sacha and I had not grown up close, but until Cam, he had been the only kindness I’d ever known.
Sacha eased from his stool with sinuous grace and left the kitchen. He came back with a gold-wrapped gift and stood close enough that I smelled coffee and the cigarettes he only smoked when Jonah wasn’t around. “I do not know what it is. Just that he wanted you to have it.”
“I have something for you too.”
Sacha arched a brow.
I removed an unwrapped object from my pocket and placed it on the counter—a crystal tumbler I’d stolen from this place when he’d first moved in. “It does not match anything in Cam’s house.”
“ Cam does not seem like the kind of man to care about such things.”
He wasn’t.
Neither was Saint.
And my cousin was sharp enough to interpret what I was trying to say.
He smiled again. “When I think of you—all three of you, it is nice to know you are happy. You deserve it, Alyosha.”
So did Sacha. He had survived as many unfathomable things as the family I chose. And I loved him as much.
I loved him enough to let him embrace me for the first time in a decade.
And then I left him.
I went home.
* * *
CHRISTMAS DAY
Rubi arrived at dawn, dishevelled, as if he had stumbled from his bed with nothing on his mind but the comically large turkey he had commandeered himself to cook.
River was more awake, like he always was so early in the morning. Somehow he made even Saint look half asleep.
Saint, who had not slept any more than I had after we had disobeyed Cam’s wishing not to tag-team him with?—
“He’d better be awake.” Rubi broke into my thoughts. “I’m not playing dinner lady all day on my feckin’ tod.”
It was a moment where perhaps I could’ve volunteered to help him cook Christmas dinner for eighteen people.
I did not. I left him to grumble into Cam’s oven and sought out my lovers upstairs.
Cam was in the shower, blasting hot water into his face to wake himself up. It was tempting to join him, but I already heard more bikes and vehicles outside. Our time for peace and quiet had come to an end.
I found Saint in the bedroom, lying on the rug, staring at the gold-wrapped present I’d left next to the candle we’d burned down to the wick last night.
He tilted his head. You’re not going to open it?
“Not yet.”
His silence asked the question for him.
Why?
“Jonah is thoughtful. And kind. But I am not sure how well he knows me.”
So?
“So...” I padded to where Saint lay and planted a foot either side of his hips, stooping to peer into his curious face. “He has either gifted me something terrible that I need to find the will to pretend I like, or it will make me feel... things, and I have not found the mood for that yet.”
Saint smiled, with his eyes more than his mouth, but it was his mouth that drew me to sink to my knees and kiss him, entranced by the low-slung jeans he wore and his bare chest. By his light touch as he slipped his hands beneath my shirt and ghosted them up my torso. Fucking on the floor was not my favourite, but with Saint it did not bother me. I was powerless to how he made me feel, and...
I liked it.
Cam cleared his throat. “As much as I love to see this shit, Rubi is gonna come up here and bang pans around if we don’t go downstairs and help him.”
“Rubi will not survive the stairs,” I murmured against Saint’s lips. “Do not worry about such things, biker boy.”
Cam snorted and stepped over us, moving to the drawers, his gaze skimming the gift I’d brought home from London.
With Saint squirming beneath me, wanting up, I relented and rose, biting Cam’s shoulder before I left them to dress in peace.
Downstairs, Orla, Nash, and Locke had arrived. Orla was in the kitchen with Rubi, Locke was on the phone, and Nash was already halfway to a nap, if he’d ever been awake at all.
It left me with River, who seemed to be brimming with energy, feet tapping, one hand a restless mess of rhythm while the other typed on his phone.
River was not a man who spent much time engrossed in a screen, but he seemed... excited by whatever he was doing, joy shimmering in his dark O’Brian gaze.
It was a sight I had not thought I would see when I first met him, and I liked it almost as much as Saint’s smile, though it did not inflict the same heat in my blood—heat I felt to my core when Cam and Saint eventually came downstairs, Saint’s hair more tousled than it had been when I’d left him on the floor.
I fired a scowl at Cam.
He smirked and disappeared into the kitchen. Saint followed, but he wasn’t gone long before he reappeared, ushering Orla out.
“You’re lucky I like you.” She allowed him to guide her to the armchair closest to me. “If Rubi manhandled me like this, I’d cut off his dick.”
I eyed the queen as she took her seat, arranging her swollen stomach. “You have been nice to Rubi while you’re pregnant. Will that change when your child is born?”
“Depends how annoying he is. And of course I’m nice to him. He brings me food.”
“Cam brings you food.”
“I’m always nice to Cam.”
She was not, but I let it slide. Orla terrorising Cam saved me the trouble. Besides, I was quite fond of my own cock. “How are you feeling, koroleva?”
“As well as I look.” Orla rubbed her neck. Done with his video calls—for now—Locke noticed and came to stand behind her, doing something with his thumbs that made her eyes flutter closed. “I think I could sink a cruise ship with how heavy my boobs are.”
My eyes did not stray to her chest. Some of the others had struggled with how primally beautiful our pregnant queen had become, but it had not happened to me. “Perhaps you should stay on dry land.”
“While you drink all the vodka?”
“I meant literally, but okay. It is not my fault you are unable to drink it with me.”
Orla grimaced. “I haven’t been sober at Christmas since I was fifteen.”
“You weren’t sober then.” River glanced up from his phone. “You got into Nan’s sherry and puked on the stairs.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Fucking did.”
Orla threw a cushion. Missed and hit Nash, stirring him from his doze, and even I could admit his bemusement was cute.
Not cute enough for me to wonder if it was too early to start drinking. Only Saint stopped me, dropping onto the couch at my side and flicking the TV on, settling on a black-and-white film that immediately sent Nash back to sleep.
Locke’s phone rang again.
River retreated to the kitchen.
If not for Saint, it was an opportunity I might’ve taken to be somewhere else, but he stayed... and so did I.
Hours passed.
Days.
A lifetime of noise and bickering. And that was before the others arrived. Mateo and Embry, the enforcer back to his usual sharp-eyed self. Juana and their children. Ranger and Viktor came next, bearing a gift Ranger’s grandmother had made in her pottery class for Nash, her favourite of Ranger’s Rebel King brothers.
The gift was a pottery tile with a coded message imprinted across it.
Nash frowned at the raised dots. “What does it say?”
“Fucked if I know.” Ranger perched on the arm of Nash’s chair. “Learn Braille and figure it out yourself.”
Very Ranger. Orla threw a cushion at him too, and this time she found her mark.
Ranger threw it back.
Lida jumped, intercepting, and took the cushion to Viktor, laying it at his feet.
He still wore his boots and lingered in the doorway with the air of a man who did not want to stay.
I frowned and spoke Russian. “What is wrong with you?”
For the first time I could remember, Viktor glared back at me. “What do you care?”
“I do not. Other people do. Fix your face.”
Lida turned her head, her liquid gaze finding mine. I waited for her growl, but it did not come. Another vehicle outside distracted her.
Saint elbowed me. “Be nice.”
“I am nice.”
“Be nice to him .”
“Why? He would think he was dying.”
Saint took a moment to force out his next words. “You managed it the other day.”
“I did not tell you that so you could use it against me for the rest of my life.”
“It’s enough that you stay with us that long.”
I turned to face him properly. “That has nothing to do with Viktor.”
“I—” Saint stumbled, letting me know whatever he had to say was important.
I waited.
And waited.
He shook his head.
“All right, wingman. I will be nice. And you have him in this secret Santa nonsense, so you can be nice to him on my behalf.”
“Don’t murder his present.”
“What does that mean?”
Whether Saint would’ve answered me, I would never know. The front door banged open and Ivy tornadoed inside. “Saint! SAINT! You have to come here right now. So does Uncle Cam.”
The house was full—and loud—enough that Ivy’s screech should not have reached Cam in the kitchen. But somehow it did, and he emerged with Rubi in tow, both men, coincidentally perhaps, clutching knives.
“What is it? What happened?”
Ivy shoved her way to where Saint had shot to his feet and made it halfway across the room. She leapt at her very favourite uncle, right into his waiting arms. “My dads are getting married!”