21. Twenty-One
I drove down into Fin slowly.
The light through the blinds had gone from black to gray.
My thighs burned. My knee had been complaining for an hour, and I'd been ignoring it.
The blankets were somewhere on the floor, and Fin was under me on his back with his hand fisted in mine on the pillow and the maimed one resting open beside it.
He'd gone quiet under me for a stretch, the only sounds in the room his small grunts and the wet sounds of us fucking. But I was determined to break him.
"Look at ye," he managed, ragged. "Ye great fucking — Christ. Ye dinnae quit, do ye?"
"No."
"Course no. Stupid question." His good hand left mine and slid down my arm, fingers digging into the bicep. "C'mere."
I lowered onto my elbows over him. His cock was trapped between us, hard and dragging slick across my stomach.
He'd been leaking on me for the last twenty minutes.
I'd seen what he had to give twice already tonight. Once I’d sucked him off while he ran his mouth at me.
Once made him come with nothing but three fingers in his ass.
This was the third orgasm I was working him toward, and I'd give it to him whether he asked for it or not.
"That's it." His voice was a wreck. "That's the angle. Aye. Right — fuck — right fucking there, dinnae move that—"
I did my best to stay where he wanted me. I’d say this much for the man. He knew what he wanted in bed and made damn sure I gave it to him.
"Quick study, vor," he gasped. "For a man who didnae know what he was doing two months past."
"Shut up."
"Make me." He gritted his teeth on a moan. "Don't ye dare move it. I mean it. I'll —"
"You'll what?" I pulled out and slammed into him hard enough that he’d have bruises on his ass tomorrow.
"Cannae remember. Ye fucked it out of me."
The pillow under his head had a wet patch the size of my hand, and I didn't know if it was sweat or spit or what he'd cried out of himself somewhere around the second time. The room smelled like sex and him, and I wanted to roll in it and never leave.
If someone had told me a year ago I’d be fucking a mouthy Scotsman in my own bed, I’d have shot him dead. Yet here I was. I hadn’t even finished round three, and I was already planning rounds four, five, and six. Fin and his tight ass had turned me into a fucking addict.
"Aleksi—" He bit my lip, and the split from last night opened up. I tasted blood. Mine. "Aleksi, get yer hand on my cock, c'mon."
I didn't reach for him. I bent down instead and bit his throat where I'd already left a mark an hour ago, and he keened. It was an ugly sound. I'd heard him make it twice in our lives, and the other time he'd been bleeding.
"Beg."
"Cunt." He laughed, broken. "Ye absolute cunt — fuck — Aleksi, please, ye great Russian bastard, please—"
I wrapped my fist around him. He was so wet my hand slipped on the first stroke and I had to tighten my grip.
He swore at me and dug his heels into my lower back.
His hole was clenching around me in irregular beats now, the way it went when he was close and trying not to be.
I jerked him roughly, out of rhythm. I wanted him to come, and I wanted to feel the difference, and I wanted the mess.
He came on me like that, messy and weak, the cum gone all watery from having already emptied himself twice in the hours before.
He lifted his maimed hand and gripped me by the hair. "Don't stop." He could barely get it out. "Use me. Finish. Inside."
I didn't need telling.
I drove into him four strokes, five, and when I went it was with my lips on his and my tongue in his mouth.
We lay there, panting against each other, trying to catch our breath. His hand had gone soft in my hair.
I lifted my head.
His freckles were gone in the flush. His mouth was open, lower lip swollen, and there was a streak of his own cum drying on his chest. I pulled most of the way out and stayed there a second, and a slow line of cum came out of him onto the sheet.
He winced. "Aleksi. Mercy. I mean it now. I cannae feel my legs and my sugar’s probably in the shitter.”
“You need something to eat?”
"Aye. Ye've broken me proper this time, ye Russian fuck."
I pulled out the rest of the way. He hissed and his hole clenched on empty air and another slow pulse of my cum ran out of him onto the sheet. Fuck, I’d never get tired of watching that.
"Stay there," I ordered, and got out of bed.
"Cannae move if I wanted to."
"Going to get you orange juice."
"Aleksi Laskin." He turned his head on the pillow. "If ye fuck me half to death and bring me orange juice after, I'll marry ye in a kilt."
"Don't say things you don't mean."
"Who said I didnae mean it?"
I didn't answer that. I pulled my sweats off the floor and went for the door.
I heard him laugh into the pillow on my way out.
The hallway was cold. The thermostat ran low at night because Nikolai liked it that way, and I'd given up the fight. Niko's door was shut. The strip of light underneath was on. Past midnight, my brother was either on his phone or watching something French on his laptop with the volume up loud.
He’d turned off the shows hours ago.
I went past his door to the kitchen and put the light on over the stove, not the overhead, because the overhead was too much for four in the morning and I didn't want my half-brother in here while I was eating.
I yanked open the door and sighed. Niko’s shit was everywhere.
He had his nasty, stinky cheese and his imported meats and his weird little peppers, all just laying there next to the half-eaten sixty-dollar pizza he’d ordered because it was authentic.
Fucking lunatic. There wasn’t anything authentic about green shit on pizza.
I built two bologna and Kraft sandwiches and left the expensive pizza for him.
And then I heard it: Niko’s voice pitched low. It wasn’t a whisper. The man didn’t know how to whisper to save his life, but he was clearly trying to keep it quiet. “Non, but listen to me, étienne…”
I dropped the sandwiches on a plate and went to listen through the door.
“I have been patient. I’ve been…” A pause.
“You said by the end of the month. It’s the end of the month.
There have been two ends of the month, and I am still here, in this American shithole, waiting for you to…
” Another pause. “No. Non, of course not. You know I love you. Of course I trust you to do it. Oui. That is true, mon c?ur. I would never.”
The voice on the other end got louder. Then it dropped, and whatever name étienne called him made my brother's voice go soft as a girl's. He hated it. I could hear him hating it and answering to it anyway.
“étienne, please. I just want to come home.”
Then Niko's voice came back, smaller. I caught oui twice and a d'accord and the long exhale that came after.
Then quiet.
I frowned. I might not have been the best at relationships, but I knew what gaslighting sounded like, and étienne? Whoever that French fuck was? He had my brother buying his bullshit, hook, line, and sinker.
I went back to the kitchen quietly so the boards wouldn't give me away.
Niko's door opened anyway, and he came down the hall in a robe I'd never seen before, silk, dark, embroidered at the cuff like something out of a boudoir, the kind of thing a man buys himself when he wants to remember what he used to be.
I didn't ask. With Niko, you never asked.
His hair was up. His face was scrubbed clean.
He saw me at the counter and went still for a half second, and then the easy mask snapped back into place.
"Taking a break, are you?” he said, half amused. “Surprised you’ve got the energy at your age.”
I finished pouring the orange juice in silence, then set the glass down and turned to him. "Who’s étienne?"
Niko's eyes flicked. "You were listening at my door, bratishka?"
"I’m not fucking around, Niko. Who the fuck is étienne?"
"étienne is…" He glanced away. "étienne is looking after some things while I am here."
"Mm."
"You disapprove of my friends now?"
"He's not your friend, Niko."
"You don't know him."
"I don't have to know him to know he’s fucking with you." I pointed at my brother. “Whatever you think he’s doing, he’s lying.”
“Please.” Niko rolled his eyes. “I don’t need my big brother to look out for me, Aleksi. I can handle myself just fine.”
“Tell me the truth about Paris, Niko.”
He was silent, glaring at me with our father's eyes.
“Last I heard you were running the whole operation over there,” I continued. “Well, if you’re so big and important to the organization, why the fuck are you sleeping on my couch? Why the fuck are you kissing Nikita’s ass when you could go back to fucking Paris and be him?”
“Fuck you,” he said and looked away again.
“Unless you can’t go back.” I closed the distance between us.
“Unless this étienne fucker is sitting on my brother’s throne, pretending to keep it warm, while usurping it out from under him.
And for what? What is it, Niko? How’d you get here?
Saw a pretty face and couldn’t see the knife coming for your throat? ”
That got him. His eyes snapped back to mine. “Fuck. You.”
“I’m right, aren’t I? That’s why you’re here.” I almost laughed. “All this talk and you’re here hiding like a coward because you couldn’t keep your dick in your—”
I didn’t see the punch coming, but I sure as hell felt it when his fist connected with my cheek.
My head snapped to the side, and I staggered back.
I half expected him to keep coming, but instead he stood there, breathing hard, fists clenched, eyes watering like a toddler who’d been put in time out.
I rubbed the sore spot on my cheek. “You’re just like him, you know. You know what the last fucking thing I said to him was before he ate a fucking bullet? I called him a coward, too. Called him a womanizing bastard. He hit me too. And then he fucking got shot by some… some…”
Niko’s face softened. “Aleksi…”
“No. Shut up.” I shoved him and he let me, so I grabbed him by the robe and held him. “I don’t give a fuck who étienne is or what you think he’s doing for you. If that fucker ever shows his face here, I’ll fucking kill him. Do you understand? I’ll kill him.”
Niko closed his eyes. “Aleksi, the man who shot our papa is already dead. River saw to it. You cannot kill a ghost.”
I released him, and he stumbled back a step. “Screw you, Niko. You can be stupid if you want. I’m not going to save you this time.”
I walked out of the kitchen and didn’t look back.
The hallway was cold. The bedroom door was open the way I'd left it.
Fin was on his side, facing the door, blanket pulled up to his ribs, eyes already on me when I walked in. He pushed up when he saw me. “Christ, that’ll be a shiner. Tell me ye at least earned that one.”
“Probably,” I muttered and went to set the plate and cup on the nightstand. "He's an idiot," I said, getting back into bed.
"Aye, that's a given. What did the idiot do?"
"He's on the lam from Paris. Some asshole back home has him convinced he’s taking care of business for him, but he’s not.
That étienne fucker he was on the phone with is screwing him.
I know it, Fin. My brother’s a sap for a man who gaslit him and worked him over.
Just like my pop. He falls in love and he can’t see it’s going to get him killed. "
Fin picked up the juice and chugged it. I watched his throat move and tried to forget about Niko. When he was finished, he set the glass aside and turned to me. “Yer not yer brother’s keeper, Aleksi Laskin.”
“Half,” I corrected. “He’s my half-brother.”
“Aye, and yer no your half-brother’s keeper either.”
“I just…” My fingers closed over his maimed hand. “I don’t want to watch anyone in my family die over something stupid.”
“Ye think love is stupid?”
I met his eyes briefly before rolling onto my back and staring at the ceiling. “I think it makes good men make stupid choices. Like what I did with Pavel.”
He could’ve said it then. So could I. Part of me wanted to put those three little words out into the world, but I couldn’t.
Not yet. Not until they meant something.
My pop had been liberal with his love, passing it around like candy at Halloween, and now Niko was probably going to die doing something stupid because he’d loved someone.
I’d watched my cousins all fall for men too, and burn their lives down in the process.
That couldn’t be me.
I had to be better. Smarter. Stronger.
So I didn’t say it. I let the confession sit between the words, even though I knew that wasn’t enough. Someone like Fin would want to hear those three little words. Even then, I knew if I wanted to keep him, I’d have to say it, eventually
But not tonight.
Not now.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand, and I jumped to retrieve it to break the awkward silence.
Boss: Thursday. 21:00. Your op. Don't fuck it up, Aleksi.
“What is it?” Fin hooked his chin on my shoulder.
“Nikita. He’s giving me the op to run.” I breathed out a sigh of relief. “He’s trusting me again.”
“Aye then,” Fin said and kissed my cheek. “Good for you.”
But there was something cold about the way he said it that I didn’t like, and even as we lay there after, trying to fall asleep at dawn, I couldn’t shake it from my brain.
Thursday gave us four days to get ready.
It also gave the Italians four days. Bianchi's had been dark since the day we walked out of it, and a man like K counted his Thursdays.
If word reached him that his tailor had stopped answering the phone, that timetable was worth nothing.
I pushed the thought down and pulled Fin closer. Four days. We'd be ready in two.