27. Cam
27
CAM
I knew full well what Alexei meant wasn’t anything fucking nice . And I was here for it. But the best Christmas we’d had since my parents were alive turned into a day and night that didn’t want to end, and I passed out slumped against Rubi like we were fourteen years old again before I got to make good on my promise.
It was dark when I woke alone on the couch with a headache, a crick in my neck, and no fucking clue what time or day it was.
The house felt empty. But I wasn’t as preternatural as my lovers. I couldn’t tell if they were nearby or awake just by wanting to know. To find out, I had to get up and look, which I regretted as much as the rum I’d drunk sometime after River had passed Nash my dad’s old guitar.
Some fucked-up Shane MacGowan song echoed in my head. I rubbed my temples, deducing that no one I cared about lurked on the ground floor of the house, and stumbled upstairs and into the shower.
Cold water woke me up.
Hot water put me back in a booze-fuelled daze.
I couldn’t decide which was worse and fluctuated between the two until being upright could fuck all the way off.
At least I was clean.
But I was lonely too, and tracking down the two souls who kept my heart beating became the only thing worth being awake for. And lucky for me, I didn’t have to look all that hard for them.
I found them in bed, dishevelled and together . “You started without me?”
Alexei raised his head from where it rested on Saint’s abdomen, a book on his chest—cos they liked to read together, and it squeezed my heart so fucking tight to see it. “You have been sleeping for hours.”
“Miss me?”
He didn’t answer with words, but his simmering gaze drew me in as much as Saint’s shy smile.
I dropped my towel and crawled over Alexei, absorbing the scent of Chanel and Saint seeping from him. I’d been joking about them fucking without me—they could do whatever they goddamn pleased. But thinking about it, picturing it, had me feeling some type of way.
Had me feeling fucking starved for them.
I kissed Alexei, letting that wild energy pulse between us. Then I kissed Saint and tried to rein it in, feeling him smile against my lips. Feeling him rip the sheets away and haul me closer, the words he didn’t speak loud and clear in my head.
I’m here for this too.
Relief throttled me. Saint didn’t always stick around when me and Alexei went at each other. And even when he did, it was fifty-fifty on whether he’d join in. But I needed him as much as I needed Alexei and never more than I did right fucking now.
They lured me in, and I found myself in a wicked tangle of Alexei’s hot mouth on mine, and Saint’s gentler hands roaming my body, a vortex I’d wound up in every night we’d spent together since Alexei had blown me that first time. When he’d almost promised he and Saint wouldn’t use it against me.
That almost promise had been a big fat lie. They’d obliterated me every chance they’d had, but I knew Alexei, could read the energy simmering beneath his skin as well as I read myself. He was right. He’d been nice all day. Now he wanted something else.
I was rough with him.
He liked it.
Needed it.
I put him on his back and entered him in one rough, fluid movement, hooked on bliss in his eyes as they rolled shut. Remembering it from when we met.
That night, I could never have predicted we’d end up here, me fucking him with as much love in my heart as there was raw desire. But here we were.
All of us.
Together.
I fucked Alexei all over the bed, manoeuvring his slighter frame with the same aggression I had all those years ago, more in awe now than I had been then that he let me.
Grateful that he let me.
I’d never have this with Saint, and I didn’t want it. I’d fucking die if I didn’t have it with Alexei.
And I fucking loved Saint watching, biding his time. The unpredictability of it. The goddamn thrill. Loved not knowing if he was going to sidle up behind me and fuck me while I was inside Alexei or slide his big dick into Alexei’s willing mouth.
Loved being wrong on all counts.
Breathless, I tumbled onto my back, wrenching Alexei over me.
His pale skin was flushed and bruised from my touch, his eyes hazed, lithe muscles cut with exertion.
He looked for Saint.
Found him right there, guiding him to sink onto my dick again as I reached over my head to grip the bed frame, letting Saint set our rhythm.
So damn good.
Alexei moaned, leaning back into Saint, his dick so hard I couldn’t tear my gaze from it.
He caught me looking and smirked. “It is all for you... we did not start without you, biker boy.”
I opened my mouth to tell him I wouldn’t have minded if they had, but Saint distracted me, sliding a palm up Alexei’s spine, urging him down onto me.
Alexei complied, his face close enough for our mouths to meet in a hot, wet kiss that kept me occupied for a while, until the need for oxygen broke us apart.
I became aware of Saint’s weight shifting, of him nudging my legs apart. Of his gaze spearing me over Alexei’s trembling body.
Fuck.
Fuck .
I was buried deep in Alexei, my body thrumming with the need to come.
And Saint?
There were no goddamn words for what he was about to do.
His slick cock nudged the base of mine, carving out room. I followed his unneeded, silent instruction to take care of Alexei and wrapped my arms around the soul who’d bound ours together.
Alexei went still.
I kissed his temple. His jaw. Sought out his lips. Felt his shaky exhale. “No pain, Lexi. Nothing this good is supposed to hurt.”
He wanted this. He always had. But tension still wrought havoc in his body as he took all of Saint and all of me.
It was a fucking lot, and he was quiet for the longest time, barely breathing against my chest.
I rubbed his back, gritting my teeth against the inferno building in my gut. Fighting it. Winning. For him, for them , while Saint watched on above us, still biding his time before he shattered us into a thousand fucking pieces.
He moved, the slowest roll of his hips sliding his dick against mine. I groaned, and the sound lodged in my throat as he did it again and again, setting the fuse.
Powerless against the pure thrall he had over me, over both of us, fucking us like this, I gave myself up to it, guiding Alexei’s dick to grind against my belly, my skin slick with his pleasure.
It was fucking everything. I’d never been so close to coming and yet scared of it happening, cos this would be over.
I held Alexei’s hands, wishing for nothing except for him to raise his head and look at me while Saint took us apart with his endless dance, a pace so slow and hypnotic I was driven to madness by it.
Alexei too, and I saw the moment he lost it. Saw his wits and composure desert him, leaving him with nothing but sensation and the love Saint bore down on him with.
The sharper cadence.
Deeper .
The clawing hands and gravelled moans.
Alexei detonated, his whole body convulsing as he jerked his head up in time for his wild gaze to meet mine as he came.
His release coated my hand.
The other, I hooked around his neck, clinging on for dear life as Saint booted me off the edge too.
I set my jaw as my climax roared through me, fighting to keep still as Saint’s dick pulsed against mine, his tortured groan ripping from his throat, the shake of his thighs reverberating through every goddamn nerve.
“Fuck.” I pressed my forehead to Alexei’s, a legit growl escaping me. “Fuck, Lexi. We love you. We love you so fucking much.”
It was all I had, but it was all they needed. Alexei lay in my arms for a long time while Saint cleaned up. I thought he might sleep, but he eventually drifted to the bathroom and shut the door.
We let him go.
Let him breathe .
Saint lay down beside me, eyes heavy, but this fucker didn’t sleep either. He traced a tattoo on my chest, head resting on his folded arm, the book he and Alexei had been reading somehow uncrushed between us.
It was the book Folk had given me. About learning to live with peace. “Is it good?”
Saint shrugged. “Good for Lexi.”
The first words he’d spoken since I’d come upstairs.
I tucked a lock of chestnut hair behind his ear. “I could watch you fuck him forever.”
“Why?”
“How you love each other keeps me alive.”
Saint took a breath.
I gave him a minute.
He found my hand and laced our fingers together. “I used to hate it when you said shit like that. Made me think of you dying. But it feels different now.”
“Everything’s different now.”
He nodded as the bathroom door opened and Alexei ghosted back into the room, skin damp from the shower instead of the cooled sweat on mine and Saint’s.
I wondered if he’d leave us.
Feared it for the split second it took for him to crawl into bed at my other side, his body warm against my back. “Are we ever going to talk about your red-haired woman?”
Lord, I’d been wondering when he’d bring that up.
I met Saint’s amused gaze, knowing he was gonna sit this one out. Then I faced Alexei again. “You want to talk about Lena?”
“I wanted to hear you say her name.”
“Why?”
His flinty gaze drilled into my soul. “Because you never have before, either of you. Not to me.”
“We told you we fucked women together.”
“She is not women, Cam. She is a queen. Why is she not yours?”
Saint chose that moment to rise from the bed and disappear, not to the bathroom, but downstairs. Deliberate, obviously. Cos maybe he didn’t want to hear that how I felt about him, even then, had destroyed any chance I’d had of loving Lena the way she’d deserved. That I hadn’t even tried.
I refocused on Alexei. “It was never like that with us. Lena’s not a one-man lover.”
“Neither are you.”
“Didn’t know that then, did I?”
“You did not?”
“No. I just knew I loved Saint and I couldn’t be with him, so I shagged around, even though it fucking hurt.”
Alexei shifted onto his stomach, propping his chin on his folded arms. “You were in love with Saint from the start?”
“Head over heels. Not sure I knew it, though. And Lena was a good distraction. She was so easy to be with... like, she didn’t care if I fucked other people. She didn’t expect anything from me but a wild night in, and it was... I don’t know, release, maybe? Escapism. It was everything I needed for a while.”
“What changed?”
“Lots of things.” I sifted through memories that had been buried to make room for new ones. “For one, she clocked Saint and how I felt about him. And then she met a girl that turned her head, and the mad sex we were having?—”
“With Saint?”
“That was only a couple of times, but yeah. With Saint . Just as I was starting to realise I lived for those little glimpses of him as much as a whole night with her, she left, and me and Saint went back to staring at each other in the dark.”
“You still do that.”
I hummed a laugh. “Yeah, but we do everything else too, and that’s because of you .”
Alexei shook his head, but I couldn’t tell if he disagreed or just didn’t fucking know how important he was.
Quiet fell over us, even without Saint. I wondered if he’d leave the house. Come back with another giant tree. But my heart knew he wasn’t going anywhere tonight, this morning, whatever goddamn time it was, and I let myself sink into the bed, sliding easily into that lazy place between awake and asleep.
“Did you know she had become Joe Carter’s surrogate?”
Oh yeah. We weren’t done with that.
I opened my eyes. Alexei hadn’t moved, but he seemed closer, like he was inside my brain and already knew the truth. “Joe told me he was having a baby with Lena before it happened. It was the right path for him and Harry, and he didn’t want it tainted by bad feeling with me.”
“This is the same Joe who calls you a prick at every opportunity?”
“Eh, he doesn’t mean it.”
“You are friends then?”
“Probably.”
“It did not affect you that he and Lena shared this?”
“Why are you asking me that?”
Alexei held my gaze as if I had any hope of ever reaching the bottom of his. “I see you with the other children and it makes me wonder if you ever wished to be a father.”
“I have enough responsibilities.”
“That, I do not dispute, but it’s not what I’m asking.”
I knew it wasn’t. But I also knew the answer to the question he wasn’t tangibly voicing. “I love the kids we already have, but when I look at their parents—their fathers—and see the fear in their eyes, it gives me fucking hives. I don’t have the capacity to be scared of anything else.”
“You really do not want children of your own?”
“No. I never have.”
Saint reappeared as I spat that truth. He had water and coffee, and he didn’t blink as he caught the end of a conversation I’d had with him a decade ago.
He got back into bed, his body heat warming my spine as Alexei had before him.
I leaned into it. “The little girl’s cute though, eh? Looks just like her.”
“She looks like Harry.”
Okay. Maybe I didn’t know everything. But I knew well enough that biology didn’t matter when it came to raising kids. “Did Rubi get to have his cow over that too?”
Saint’s rare laugh vibrated through me, the only confirmation I needed.
Alexei, though, he still seemed troubled.
I reached for him, hauling him into my orbit. “One of the reasons I never told anyone about Lena being Joe’s surrogate was that I pretty much forgot about it. I’ll always care about her, but it just didn’t matter to me.”
Not in the way he’d maybe worried about. Lena had taught me lessons I’d never forget, but my heart was too full to hold onto the past.
Saint fell asleep.
After a while, Alexei did too, and I found myself missing the cat as I lay still, hardly breathing with them both so peaceful beside me.
I dared to shift onto my back and glared at my dick. Despite fucking Alexei earlier, I was hard, apparently aroused by life in general, and he wouldn’t sleep long before he was on me again.
An hour or so.
I knew the second he was awake. Before his slate-grey eyes even opened.
We collided. No romance, but all the love in the goddamn world. I fucked him fast and dirty, biting down on every groan while Saint either slept through it or ignored us, threatening the bolts he’d bound the bed with to stop it shunting through the wall and into the next room.
It didn’t last long.
I didn’t last long.
Thank the Lord, neither did Alexei.
I put him on his belly and held him down, drilling into him with the barely contained violence he craved. Orgasm battered me. I fought it but lost the battle as he shattered beneath me, his shout muffled by a pillow.
My release splattered his back. So he wouldn’t have to get up again.
Alexei shivered, shoulders heaving with laboured breaths. “You did not do this to me the first time we fucked, but the spell you cast on me is the same.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant literally—I hadn’t come on his back the first time we fucked. But I was too sex-addled to figure it out. I cleaned up and rolled over again, bringing him with me.
Beside us, Saint sighed. “All day?”
As in, were we going to fuck all day while he tried to sleep?
“Probably.”
He made a sound that might’ve been a groan. Then he raised his head. “You owe me fifty quid.”
Right. For the bet I’d lost over when Decoy and Folk would get married. But I owed him something else too, something that crept back into my mind as my heart rate returned to normal.
I slid Alexei a glance.
Reading me, he nodded.
It’s time.
I turned back to Saint. Found his forest-green gaze already clouded with apprehension. “I want to ask you something about your parents.”
Those eyes narrowed. Why?
“Viktor told me something he and Jake found out when they looked into our shit before Sidorov agreed to vouch for us, and I don’t know if you know it yourself.”
Saint was already leaning away from me, that fight-or-flight instinct so painfully fucking sharp, and I knew he wouldn’t deck me.
I searched for the words to make this easier for him. “Fucking years ago, you told me you didn’t remember your mum’s name or the name you were born with. It would’ve been pretty easy for you to find out, so I’m wondering if it’s something you made yourself forget. Or if you lied to me to shut me up.”
Saint frowned, confusion heavy in his face. Not fighting for words but for answers. “I don’t know.”
“You can’t remember?”
“No, I just don’t know. There’s...” He rapped his fist to his skull. “It’s not there.”
I believed him, as much as I accepted he might’ve deflected me with bullshit all those years ago. The shit that had happened to him—it was unthinkable, and rage festered in my gut for all he’d lived through, every hurt and scar that had nearly taken him from me.
Alexei’s cool hand grazed my back. Then he slipped from the bed and round the other side, wrapping his arms around Saint. “Would you like Cam to tell you?”
Saint leaned into his touch, his reaction to it so fucking simple while his distant gaze was too complex to read. “I don’t want to remember her.”
Because she’d tried to kill him.
And he’d almost killed himself because of it.
Images of a young child slashing his own neck bombarded me. I blinked them away, but I wasn’t fast enough for either of them to miss it happening.
Saint took my hands. “Tell me my name.”
“You sure?”
He nodded. “I think I did know, and I want that part of myself back.”
I took a slow breath, hating that even a tiny fragment of his decision was for me.
He squeezed my hands harder. “Please?”
“You were born Saint Zielinski . You’re as Polish as Shay.”
His foster brother.
“Maybe that is why you were placed together.” Alexei nuzzled Saint’s throat. “You are not blood related, though. I checked.”
News to me. “When?”
“When you told me what Viktor had said. I never wanted to know something Saint did not, but I thought it might be the first thing he wondered if this conversation ever happened.”
Saint had gone quiet, even for him. I searched his face—I searched for him , and something inside me settled as I found his clear gaze.
“You’re okay?”
He nodded.
“Promise?”
Saint kissed me, startling me enough that he stole my breath, and he didn’t give it back until my head was spinning and my dick was hard enough that it was his turn to shatter me the way I’d shattered Alexei, albeit in his own way.
It was a while before we came up for air. I had boundless enthusiasm, but Saint was the one with the stamina.
He ruined me.
Then he ruined Alexei too. I couldn’t say how much time had passed when I found myself splayed in a sweaty heap, face to face with the gold-wrapped Christmas gift Saint had placed on Alexei’s chest.
“You forgot to open it.”
“I did not forget.”
Saint tilted his head.
Alexei scowled and untied the ribbon on the package. “It is from Jonah,” he clarified for my benefit. “Wingman, I am not in the mood for this.”
Saint’s stare didn’t falter.
He nudged Alexei until he unwrapped the gift, revealing a crystal tumbler that looked a lot like the one that lived in my kitchen.
“He got you a matching vodka glass?”
Alexei narrowed his gaze, a sigh escaping. “No, he sent me back to the start.”
I had no idea what that meant, and he didn’t explain. He set the glass aside in the same moment something flared in whatever realm Saint occupied.
He surged upright, wrenching his gaze to my phone, dark and abandoned on the bedside table.
It buzzed.
Alexei snatched it up, sending the glass clattering to the floor, his face illuminated by the message on the screen, his expression faltering to expose a fear I’d never seen. “Get dressed. Your sister needs you.”