He shook his head. “Not for pleasure, no. It is like sleep—neither appeals to me much.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing, mate.”
“I do.”
“That makes no sense.”
Alexei shrugged. “What does? Is Saint going to stay outside the whole time I am here?”
“What do you think?”
“I think it would pain him to leave you unprotected. Whatever else he is to you, he is a loyal soldier, no?”
Soldier.The pretence that my life beyond the respectable business Alexei had cleaned the accounts for was all but gone. I nodded. “It’s his job to have my back and he’s committed to it.”
“How did someone find a way to sever your brake lines then?”
“He can’t be everywhere.”
Alexei hummed, his gaze more speculative than I was comfortable with. Or maybe I was comfortable with it and that was the problem. I wasn’t used to pillow talk, especially about club business.
“That’s the point... that you wouldn’t have a clue.”
“What are you thinking?” It came out sharper than I’d intended.
Alexei didn’t flinch. I didn’t suppose he would if I held a blade to his throat. “I am wondering why someone wants to kill you. What is your business? Plasterboard and concrete? Some muling on the side? Who have you offended so much?”
“I’ve never said anything to you about muling.”
“It would be foolish to assume you were not moving something illegal this close to the coast, and you do not strike me as a man who would traffic flesh and bone.”
My hackles rose.
Alexei smirked. “I am right.”
He seemed to be speaking to himself as much as me. I lay down beside him, enjoying the fact that he was in my bed despite his apparent need to pick holes in me. “We don’t move people. We don’t allow it on our turf, and we’ve lost good men defending our principles. Is that good enough for you?”
Alexei rolled to face me, bringing us together in a pose that was for lovers, not pseudo friends with mind-blowing benefits. “I am not important. Instead, I am wondering if this causes you problems. Your territory is remote, with coastal access and main roads inland. I’d take it from you if I was an organisation that wanted to move sex workers from Europe to America.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“An organisation. You’re asking me a lot of questions for a random hook-up who likes counting money.”
“I never said I liked counting money. Just that I was good at it. You understand this, I think. To excel at something that isn’t part of you?”
I bought myself some time with a slow breath. He hadn’t answeredmyquestion, and he wasn’t going to, but the answers to all of his were bubbling up my throat, spilling out of me before I could stop them.
“There’s another MC in our county—The Dog Crows. They’ll do anything for a few quid, no fucking morals. If they had the resources to wipe us out and take our turf, they would, and then you’d see the trucks with the girls in the back, hundreds of them.”
“They have the resources to move hundreds of trucks but not to take you out?”
“It wouldn’t be their trucks. It’d be the cartels that run the roads—the motorways and the construction rackets.” I pursed my lips, willing myself to shut the fuck up. The hell was happening to me? I didn’t talk. Ever. Even to the people who mattered.
Alexei matters.
But so did the Crows and they wanted my head on a platter. They just didn’t have the balls to try.
