25. Alexei
25
ALEXEI
Not right now , which was different to the last time a child had burst into a room to say such a thing. But the room erupted all the same, bodies piling onto Decoy and Folk as they entered the house.
Saint hung back with Ivy, and I wondered if that was why she’d come to him. All the children we were blessed to love were astute in their own ways, but Ivy knew Saint best.
“You won,” I told him quietly enough that Ivy would not hear.
Saint’s magical smile returned. “Twenty quid.”
That I owed him. At Orla’s long-ago birthday barbecue, Cam had been stupid enough to bet fifty.
The noise died down.
Decoy and Folk ventured further inside, and I caught Decoy’s bashful joy across the room.
Folk’s grin was broader, and I did not have to ask to know he had been the one to propose. Veles had wanted this a long time, only a lack of faith in himself had stopped him making it so.
I rose and moved to where he stood with Locke. Embracing him was easy, we had shared too much for it to be any other way. “You deserve to be as happy as you’ve made him.”
Russian words. Folk understood most, and even if he did not, he knew me well enough to gauge the sentiment.
“Thank you, brother.”
We parted. Folk glanced over my shoulder, to where Viktor stood alone while Ranger was caught up with the children he claimed not to like.
He watched them with an absent gaze.
Distant.
Folk gave me a pointed look.
I sighed. “You too?”
“It won’t kill you.”
“It might.”
Folk laughed, leaving Locke mystified by our Russian exchange, but there was not much I could do about that. I escaped to the kitchen and swiped a vodka bottle from the freezer, evading Rubi as he loomed behind me with food I did not want to eat.
“Go away, old one.”
“Have one of these then.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s Christmas and I know you like raisins and shit.”
“Raisins and shit? This is an Irish thing?”
“Oi.” Rubi scowled. “Less of that. You’ve been to Christmas before. Have a mince pie and stop being a cunt.”
In the spirit of following his advice, I grabbed an extra glass and went back to the living room. “Vitya, sit with me.”
Viktor glanced at me from where he loitered in a doorway. “Why?”
“So I don’t have to talk to anyone else.”
His flat stare turned unconvinced. “You love these people.”
“That does not change who I am.” I waved the vodka at him. “Come. Sit. Before the old one makes me eat something else.”
Viktor did not like being ordered around any more than I did, but he came to the couch and sat beside me, hiding his faint grimace with a smile for his faithful dog as she followed and wedged herself between us.
Lida was not a small dog, but she gave me grace of her front end, and I scratched her ears. “Do you ever wonder where you would be without her?”
“I know where I’d be without her.” Viktor’s humour faded, leaving the tightness in his face.
“You are in pain?”
“A little.”
His damaged hip. I remembered. We had talked about it before, and I had extracted more details from Locke. “We have a supply of safe medication. You are not the only brother who cannot take opiates.”
“Is fine. Vodka will do.”
We were not close enough for me to press him. I poured vodka for both of us and we drank and endured—at least I did. Until now, Viktor had proved more adept at this part of club life, slotting into the big Rebel Kings family as if he had always been there.
Sometimes even I forgot he had not.
Others, our gazes clashed and all I saw was the past. It made being around him difficult if my mood was already all wrong for this place. I had not thought hard enough about how it felt for him.
He misses his own family.
Of that, I was certain. It was why I had brought him to Whisper Farm, believing that perhaps a place that reminded him of his island home, albeit colder, would be good for him. Perhaps I had been wrong.
Rubi came out of the kitchen and banged a ladle against a pot. “All right, you esteemed collection of queens, princesses, and scoundrels, dinner’s nearly up. Where’s the secret Santa list?”
“I have it.” Liliana sprang from where she’d been quiet in the corner of the room, drawing with Mateo, their dark heads both bent over the same sketch pad. “Alexei has to go first.”
I sighed. “Why?”
“We’re doing it in alphabetical order this year.” Rubi jabbed a thumb at Saint. “He said so.”
“Did he now?”
Saint’s expression gave nothing away, and I was not sure I believed Rubi’s claim. But I supposed it did not matter. Nash passed me a poorly disguised present. A vinyl record, of course.
Neil Young.
“Harvest Moon, zolotoy mal’chik? I am surprised you remembered, with all the sandwiches you had on your mind.”
“It’s about all I remember,” Nash confessed. “I was off my nut.”
“You wore it well.”
Nash grinned. “Thank you.”
I set the record aside, knowing Cam would want to play it for me later. If he was naked, I’d allow it, a thought that carried me through as Cam, Decoy, and Embry received their gifts next.
Folk gave Cam a book on the art of surviving happiness. Decoy and Ivy gave Embry the ugliest cactus I’d ever seen to go with the one that had lived in his office long before he’d called the club home.
Orla passed an envelope across the room to Decoy. It contained two things: a document that explained his ex-wife’s sentence had been extended for bad behaviour inside the prison Orla controlled—our queen had kept her promise. And a faded and framed photograph of a young, shirtless Royal Marine, the marks of jungle training on his tanned skin, a baby orangutan on each slim shoulder.
Decoy’s face lit up with unrestrained delight.
Folk rolled his eyes. “Where the hell did you get that?”
“You left me with your sister for three days.” Orla wagged her finger. “Did you really think we wouldn’t be besties by the time she left?”
“I was afraid of it,” Folk admitted.
Everyone laughed, even me, and Rubi banged his dinner gong again.
We decamped to the huge table Saint had built for this very purpose in the kitchen Cam had extended last summer. It was still a tight fit, but I stuck with Viktor and drank more vodka, and we survived.
I had never seen so much food—at least since last Christmas—but Cam and Rubi had outdone themselves. And more than that, they were happy. Everyone was. The music was loud, and there was so much singing, and not enough vodka in the world for Nash and Rubi’s version of charades.
We did not play, Viktor and I, and it was perhaps for his sake that Rubi let it slide.
“Is it time for more presents?” Ivy tugged Rubi’s sleeve. “I want my other dad to open his.”
Rubi had his arms filled with the sweet things I had sat at this table to eat. He piled them between Orla and me. “All right, all right. Folk, Juana, Locke, and Mats. You’re up.”
Liliana flitted out of the room and returned with a package as artfully wrapped as the one I’d abandoned upstairs. She gave it to Folk, and he peeled back the paper to reveal a wolf keyring sculpted in pewter.
“I made it,” she said. “It’s the same wolf I drew for your birthday.”
“I can see that.” Folk held the wolf to the last of the winter sun filtering through the glass door. “Now I get to keep him with me all the time, eh?”
Liliana gave him a rare hug and whispered something to him.
I turned away, watching River pass his gift to Juana instead. A knife, naturally. For killing things. She loved it. Mateo did not, but Locke distracted him with a sketchbook and charcoal set, skipping his own place in the order Saint and the children had commanded.
“So you can draw when you’re alone instead of pacing around like a psychopath.”
Mateo flipped the blank pages. “I’m gonna do Rubes first.”
“Are you fuck.” Rubi flicked balled paper across the table. “Last time you drew me, I had a conk that could smell a Sunday roast on Tuesdays.”
“Serves you right.”
Rubi opened his mouth to retaliate.
Ivy cut him off. “It’s Locke’s turn. Dodger, give him his present.”
Dodger.
Viktor .
Beside me, he dug into his pocket and pulled out a slim flash drive.
He passed it to Locke. “You told me when we were... away, that you had lost all the pictures of your children when they were young. I asked my brother to find them for you.”
Emotion kept Locke quiet. He cocooned the flash drive in his fist and tugged Viktor into an embrace that swallowed the smaller man whole. “Thank you.”
The table gathering broke up. Rubi put the children to work washing up. I retreated upstairs, aware of footsteps behind me.
Cam .
He followed me all the way to the spare bedroom, and I knew why.
“You are worried I will escape?”
“Do you want to?” He came up behind me, pressing his chest to my back. “It’s okay if you do. I know it’s a lot.”
“Is a lot for Saint too.”
“He’s used to it.”
“Being used to something doesn’t make it easier.”
“Are we still talking about rowdy dinners?”
Probably not. But my vodka-loosened tongue had neglected to inform me of the subject change. So I did not answer. I opened a wardrobe that contained dusty records and storage boxes. Lifted the lid from a box and retrieved a benign iPad I kept for benign things and a USB adapter to connect Locke’s flash drive, reasonably certain he did not possess such things. “I am not going anywhere.”
Cam turned me around, dark gaze simmering with love and the rum he’d drunk. “I think this is the first time I’ve really believed you.”
We were definitely no longer talking about dinner. And I couldn’t be offended. Perhaps it was the first time I had believed it too.
I kissed him, a soft brush of lips, mindful that I had drunk enough vodka to compromise my restraint. “I have always wanted to stay, if that helps.”
Cam hummed against my mouth. “Everything about you helps. I wouldn’t be here without you.”
Now that, I had no trouble believing, but I did not want to think about all the ways he could’ve died in the last decade. My Christmas spirit had never been born, but it was not the day for maudlin thoughts. “Who did you draw in the secret Santa?”
“Ranger.”
“What did you get him?”
“You’ll have to wait and see.”
Or not, as it turned out. Rubi gave Nash a set of neon-pink underpants with # daddykink emblazoned on the back. With children in the room, the joke was short-lived, and I reached into my pocket for the small velvet box I’d carried all day.
Ivy rushed to snatch it from me and deliver it to our matriarch.
Orla grinned, opening the box. “Brother, you are too kind.”
I was not. In truth, this ritual bemused me, and the rules, a price-limited gift or a heartfelt gesture—which explained Saint’s fabled purchase of a one-way plane ticket for Cracker Delaney—had proved inconvenient when I’d drawn Orla’s name. I did not care for rules. And I would only ever serve one queen. So I bought Orla diamonds and ignored Rubi’s huffing and almost missed the handwritten note Cam passed to Ranger.
Ranger read the scrawled words. Then he folded the note and stuffed it in his pocket. “Ta very much.”
That was it, and the nomad was unmoved by the silence that followed, leaving me to study Cam’s wry grin and wonder what my kind-hearted biker boy had done.
Liliana nudged her step-father with her sharp elbow. “Dad, give River his.”
Embry obliged. An iron forged coin with the number of days River had abstained from his ketamine habit carved into it.
“Look at that.” Rubi drew River to his side and kissed him. “Fucking best days of my life.”
Mine too, or maybe it was the vodka. Either way, I was relieved that it was time to turn the lights down, put a ridiculous film on, and be quiet.
I gave up my seat on the couch to Rubi.
Viktor moved for Cam and went outside. Ranger followed. I looked for Saint and found him in an armchair, Ivy dozing against him while Liliana had curled up with Mateo.
Hope was the only child awake, playing with a bowl of pink sand under Nash’s care while Orla and Locke slept on the other couch.
I expected Cam and Rubi to nap too—they had barely sat down all day. But they bickered about the stupid film instead, reciting a script I recognised from Rubi’s vernacular.
Good journey.
But was it over?
It did not feel so.
The hour grew late. More food came out. More singing, and the unsurprising discovery that Folk Whitlock was a card shark to rival the nomad’s precious babushka.
Ranger gave Rubi his present as consolation for his loss.
Another scrawled note.
Rubi read it and hooted with laughter. “I’ll fucking hold you to that. And bring Vicky.”
I glanced at Viktor.
He shrugged. “An IOU. For Asher to attend Rubi’s yoga classes?—”
“ One class.” Ranger folded his long body back to the spot on the carpet he’d occupied most of the day. “And you’re definitely fucking coming.”
Viktor laughed.
Juana passed Saint another gift created by Liliana—a framed oil painting of Jonah the Cat.
“To remember him by,” she said dryly. “Seeing as he doesn’t live here anymore.”
Though small, the painting was deliberately grotesque. Saint loved it, I could tell, a tiny smile breaking through the weariness in his face from how long this day had turned out to be. Which meant I would be looking at it for the rest of my life, even if he chose to keep it in his van.
There are worse ways to die.
And many worse ways to live.
Saint put the painting on the mantel. He stared at it a moment before his gaze pivoted to the front door in the same moment Lida raised her head.
I had drunk enough vodka that my brain was slow— too slow to realise the security systems we relied on to keep our family safe had failed.
Or they had been disabled.
A knock sounded at the front door. I poised to spring, but Lida moved first, rushing the door with enough tail-wagging enthusiasm to draw my gaze to Saint instead. And what I saw there stayed me.
“You promised.” The whisper was for me.
To Viktor he said in perfect Russian, “It’s for you. Merry Christmas.”