Grinning as I let him, his rough voice a whisper against my lips. “That’s enough heavy for now. Take a shower with me, Vik.”
[ 22 ]
RANGER
Life in the sun became crazy busy. If we weren’t fighting, we were flying. If we weren’t sleeping, we were rolling around on Viktor’s bed.
That was the simple version of it, anyway. If I didn’t think too hard about everything in between. And I tried not to think too hard about anything, except keeping my dick to myself when Vik wasn’t in the mood. Or when he was, but the life he’d survived worked against him, and his gaze hazed over, pulse spiking too hard for comfort.
It happened less as the first week of fight training flew by. His anxiety faded as mine grew. Most nights he couldn’t get enough of me. Like a fucking dam had broken. But some we lay in the dark, his heart pounding beneath my palm, he talked, and I learned more about him than I’d ever dreamed. Nightmare shit that he shared like he was narrating a wildlife documentary, but I felt every hit like a poison arrow, and my mood started to buckle under the strain.
“We are here.”
I jerked to awareness, the noise and motion of the chopper gone, Viktor’s voice a real thing, not a robot in my ear. “We landed?”
He sent me a wry glance. “Unless we are floating in the sea and you were too asleep to notice.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“I am never sure. Do you dream?”
Only of him. But that hadn’t happened since I’d crossed a continent to be by his side. These days I shut my eyes so infrequently that I wasn’t sure what happened in between.
I got out of the dickbird without answering. Viktor did a load of shit I didn’t understand while I leaned against the warm heli, eyeing the darkening sky like it held the answers to questions I hadn’t thought of yet.
“What is wrong?”
Viktor made me jump for the second time in as many minutes, revealing that he’d exited the chopper without me noticing. Either I was getting worse at this gig or he was getting closer to the kind of form where I had no hope of keeping up if he got away from me.
Tell him the truth.I always did. “I’m worried you’re gonna switch up sneaking off to get high for legging it when I’m asleep to go die in a gangster war.”
He frowned. “I will not run away in the night to fight this war. You will know before I leave you.”
And there it was—the devil my conscious self didn’t want to acknowledge. That whatever mobster party Jakov and Viktor were gearing up for, I wasn’t invited.
“You do not want to look at me?”
I turned my head, unaware that I’d let my attention slip from him in the first place.
Viktor stared back at me, saying nothing, and all I fucking heard was the low murmur of his voice last night, when he’d told me about the night he was taken and given to Priest and his goons.
“That close to the Kings’ territory, I was complacent. Distracted, maybe. Lost in my thoughts.”
“What were you thinking about?”
Viktor tore his gaze from the ceiling. “I was thinking about you.”
“Come.” He touched my elbow. “Let’s go home.”
Home. To his house on the mountain. To the kitchen where he cooked for me for no other reason than he liked me. The shower that no longer made us clean. To his bed for the next six nights until he was fucking gone.
I shrugged off his touch. “You’re the boss.”
Viktor was one of the cleverest people I’d ever met. And I’d met some clever bastards. But somehow, little old me had nurtured a way of bewildering him.
With a deep frown, he pushed off the chopper and walked away, heading for the car we’d driven to the airfield.
For the first time ever, I hesitated to follow him, my legs heavy with a feeling I couldn’t fucking name. Dread. Fear.Love. Man, this shit would be easy if I hated him.
