By his love.
Tell him.
I lifted my head in the same moment his hands stopped moving. His gaze met mine and he mirrored the gesture I’d forced on him last night, silencing me with a finger to my lips.
“Not yet, Vityasha.”
He said with a wink, perhaps not realising that calling me that,Vityasha, was as good as confessing his undying love.
Or maybe he did know.
Either way, I sealed my lips together and lay down.
Ranger was quiet for a while. His busy fingers let me know he hadn’t gone back to sleep, but his eventual soft sigh still caught me off guard. “Were you serious about the history lesson?”
“I am always serious.”
He rolled his eyes. “Not for a Russian. Told you before, you’re way more fun than Alexei.”
“You do not fuck Alexei.”
“That’s not why you’re fun, Vik.”
Warmth caressed my heart—such a broken place before him. “How much did you know about the Rebel Kings before you became one?”
Ranger had a tell when he wanted to smoke. A twitch in his fingers. A darted glance to wherever he’d left his cigarettes.
He never forgot.
Never lost them.
But he never smoked inside either, even though I’d told him I didn’t much care if he did, and the moment passed.
He propped himself up on one elbow. “I know what I heard, filtered through the Crow grapevine. What I saw when we fought. But that shit was nothing like the reality of riding with them.”
“How so?”
He shrugged. “They care so much, about everyone and everything. I don’t know how they fucking do it.”
As if Ranger didn’t care about anything, when I knew his heart to be as big and warm as any Rebel King I’d ever met. But I let that go and considered how to tell a story I did not know in its entirety myself.
I went back to the start as I knew it and traced a shape on the bed between us. “I meant it when I said Cam and Alexei changed the landscape of mob rule in Europe.” I sketched a line down the middle. “It is two decades ago. Over here, the Sidorov family rule, so other organisations—the Sambinis, the Aldea cartel, the Albanians—have to operate far out of their traditional territories. Like the UK and Ireland, which brings them into the path of the Rebel Kings who seem to cause trouble whatever they do.”
Ranger snorted but narrowed his gaze, listening.
I pieced it together, streamlining twenty years to explain how the lives of other men had led us here. “They did not know each other,” I explained. “Pavel Sidorov and Cameron O’Brian Senior, but for a long time, they fought the same war from opposite sides. Not for power, money, or product, but against the evilest trade in our world.”
“Trafficking?”
“Yes.” I shifted onto my stomach. Ranger did the same and the movement brought us shoulder to shoulder—as if he knew I needed to feel him, but more than the lightest touch would derail me. “It was the life work of both men, and eventually, it cost the Rebel Kings their patriarch.”
“I remember. Frank Crow thought Cam was too young for the gavel. Scared the shit out of him when he proved him wrong and brought all his nutter mates to the table.”
“He was right to be scared. Cam is a fearsome leader, but it was not until he happened across Alexei that everything changed.”
Ranger’s frown deepened. I realised he did not know Alexei’s story, and to share it with him felt like the betrayal of a man I had revered from the moment he’d breached the ceiling of my first captor’s home and killed him in his bed. “Alexei and I share a history.” I trod carefully. “He came to Jake’s father a few years before me, but we did not cross paths. And by the time he met Cam, he was free of the life that had saved him.”
“What brought him back?”
