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VIKTOR
THEN
I was fifteen when I found myself alone in a windowless room with nothing but an unfinished book for company.
A French novel.
I did not speak French. Not then. And without the sun, the room had been too dark for me to see the words. But it still bothered me more often than was logical what could’ve happened if I’d read that book instead of burning it for warmth.
“I thought Russians liked the cold.”
Back in the present, I turned my head in the direction of the gruff voice, gifting myself a face-on view of my companion in the dank dirt. He’d been by my side for barely an hour and I was already, as always, entranced by this piercing contradiction of a man.
Onyx eyes.
Raven hair.
A mouth as coarse as the concrete beneath my knees, and yet his beauty was as clear as the crystal waters I could see from my bedroom a thousand miles away.
Beauty.A strange thing to contemplate in the grimy cold of the industrial port. In a world as ugly as this. But this man, this outlaw biker by the name ofRanger, he made it easy. A phenomenal distraction that was nothing new. He had caught my eye a year ago, maybe two, and this was the fourth night in a row we had manned this look-out post together.
“I do not like the cold.” I answered a question that was likely rhetorical. “I am used to it. There is a difference.”
Ranger blew on his hands, ink as dark as his eyes staining his skin. As dark as the sky above us and the shadows drowning this damp concrete pit. “Why do these fucked-up wars always happen in winter?”
“Wars happen in the sunshine too.”
“Not up here, they don’t.” He slid me a glance that turned dry as I returned it with a ready smile, his stare laced with bemusement. As if he expected me to be someone else.
He expects me to be Ivanov.
Of course he did. Discord gripped my chest. Ranger was not the only one who looked at me and saw the man that had come before, but somehow, it lanced deeper coming from him.
Because you like him. I did. He was easy to like. Easy to look at when the target that demanded my attention was over the wall and across the port. “This is the last night.” I broke the silence that had stretched between us. “Tomorrow we strike.”
Ranger paused in the act of lighting a cigarette, the filter caught between teeth that were remarkably straight and white for a man who did not seem to take much care of himself.
A lock of his inky hair fell into his face and I itched to brush it back.
I took his cigarette instead. Ranger did not like to share.Get your ownwas his response to most people who tried. With me, he did not seem to mind, and I exploited it almost as much as I wanted to know how his hair would feel between my fingers.
He bewitches you.
I shut Jake out.Shh, brother. Mostly because he was right, and I did not need his smugness tonight. I needed my own for when I told him the cartel responsible for the murder of his father had been removed—for now—from the ports we controlled in northern England, obliterating a trafficking route we had targeted for a long time. Bringing us breathing space we desperately needed. AndIneeded this to be over, so I could eat, sleep, and take my dog for a walk in the mountains.
We are a long way from that.
Ranger didn’t answer my decree for tomorrow. He hunkered down again, not lighting another cigarette, trusting that I’d give the first one back.
I did. And knowing that his lips were somewhere mine had already been helped keep out the cold.
So did his nearness in the narrow space we’d commandeered. The smoke and sandalwood scent that clung to him, reminding me of the crystal shop across the street from the closest thing I had to a home in this country.Remindingme that I had not been there in weeks.
I would like to sleep soon.
And perhaps the only thing stopping me was an unwillingness to leave the body heat radiating from the man beside me.
