Because he is a beautiful man who loves Cam too. It is logical for you to be drawn to him.
Perhaps. But I was more than drawn to Saint Malone. Watching him come had made Cam’s cock inside me surge hotter. The sounds he’d made—the soundsCamhad made as he’d watched his friend and brother come apart at my hand. Their dynamic was fascinating. More than hot, it was mind-altering, soul-shattering, and it should’ve unnerved me more than it did, but I had no nerves left. Not today. I couldn’t, or I’d turn tail and run back to Cam, and then I’d have to live with the truth: that I could’ve saved him, but I was too scared to try.
I cancelled the Russian call and switched off the phone, just in case Saint had achieved the impossible and bugged me there too.
If I didn’t like him, I’d kill him.
Or I would try. There weren’t many men on earth that made me doubt my abilities, but he was definitely one of them.
Another was on the other side of the hotel room door I found myself outside sometime later, having incapacitated the goons guarding it.
I knocked. It was polite, and I was nothing if not that.
It swung open seconds later and my blood turned to ice, freezing over the parts of me that Cam and Saint had managed to thaw.
A face I knew as well as my own stared back at me, the only sign of Pavel Sidorov’s surprise an infinitesimal twitch of his cold blue eyes.
Then the smile came, the one that made grownmafioziweep. “My boy,” he said in Russian. “You have returned.”
I shook my head, fighting to keep my trembling within. “I have come for a favour. Maybe two. May I have a moment of your time?”
Sidorov peered around me, noting his guards slumped at their posts, and a wryness reached his sardonic smirk. “You do not change, eh? A phone call would have saved them whatever injuries you have left them with.”
“They are not injured. Justresting. And I did not want them to see my face.”
“Ah. You are still a ghost, Alexei.”
I could not deny it.
Sidorov waved me into his suite. I stepped forward warily, scanning every inch of the space we occupied while Sidorov moved to the antique decanter that held the vodka he drank like water. I’d often wondered what would happen to him without it.
Then I’d stopped thinking of him at all.
I waved the vodka away.
Sidorov nodded as if he’d expected me to. “Will you sit? Forgive me, but you make me nervous when you prowl around like this.”
“Liar.” I stopped pacing and forced myself to stand in front of him. “You are not afraid of me.”
“I should be, perhaps? Have you come to kill me?”
I snapped my gaze to him. “What?”
“It is the only reason I can think of for you to be here. It has been years since I last saw you.”
“You have missed me?”
“Of course.” Sidorov sipped his vodka. “You are one of a kind. It takes an army to do the job you once did.”
“Perhaps you need a better army.”
“That, I do not deny. Will you return to me? I would make it worth your while.”
I shook my head again, resisting the urge to step back and widen the distance between us. “You would not, but that is not your fault.”
Sidorov eyed me, and his scrutiny, so different from Saint’s, made me feel dirty. “You are... not the same. Is your new life not treating you well?”
“I do not need it to. I look after myself.”
