“Their bond.” I rubbed my foot to Ranger’s bare leg, revelling in his closeness. “Like a wolf joining a new pack, no? For Alexei to be with Cam, first he had to keep him alive, which was difficult, considering the threats to his life at the time. Second, he had to navigate a war that had begun before either of them were born.”
“Cam said that to me.” Ranger fiddled with the woven thread he’d tied to my wrist. “That this shit was years old and it needed to end.”
“He was not wrong.” Ranger’s fingers brushed my skin. I was so attuned to him now, so into him, that the ghost of sensation was a wrecking ball to my nerves, but we were not done. “Like their fathers before, Cam and Jake share a dream. To be free. But legacy holds them back. Unfinished business. Vengeance. You can call it many things, but the ties that bind them remain.”
Ranger slid me a dry look. “I love how you speak like a poet, but I’m a regular fucking idiot. You need to break it down better than that, cos all I’m getting is that a lot of cunts need to die before anyone’s dreams come true.”
Dreams. The bite mark on his neck reeled me in, breaking my focus. One day, if I survived the tipping point I had yet to reach, I would tell him that these quiet moments with him were the only dreams I’d ever need.
“Vik.”
“Yes?”
“We can talk about this later. Or never. I’m not the bloke who needs to know everything. Just give me a gun and tell me where to aim.”
He did not seem keen on firearms, so I could not tell how literal his words were. And in any case, it did not matter. If I was to take the advice of Alexei Ivanov, Ranger deserved to know why.
My brain was still an alien landscape to me, a barren land it took me a moment to traverse, while Ranger grounded me, like he always had, by doing nothing at all. “Pavel Sidorov was Jake’s father. To Alexei, and to me, he was a man who saved us from the very thing he had devoted his life to eradicating. That is not to say he was a saint, but he mattered to us. And Cam’s father was murdered for the same reason, yes?”
Ranger nodded, still listening.
“Cam’s father was killed first.” I drew an X on the bed, on the western side of my imagined sketch. “Leaving the Rebel Kings to fight a war within their ranks as much as without. But Pavel was still alive. He hadAlexei, his sharpest weapon, and so they carried on, unaware that their faceless allies had faltered.”
“What about you?”
“I was not there.”
“Where were you?”
“In the military, and then overseeing Sidorov interests in other wars. I did not serve Pavel in Europe until after Alexei moved on.”
“What about Jakov?”
“If you want Jake’s life story, you will have to ask him. All I can say is that every cartel and family that has crumbled in recent years has done so from the inside.”
“Cos he’s a hacker...” Ranger surmised with a dark smirk. “But... I heard he was a bodyguard in the Esteban cartel. How did that work?”
“Not all hacking is virtual.”
Ranger shook his head, bemused. “All right. I don’t give much of a fuck about all that. Take me back to what this means now.”
For him.
For me.
For the families we had chosen. Who had chosen us.
“Losing Pavel meant Jake lost the ability to be invisible. He spent a long time infiltrating cartels and families, breaking them down one by one. But when his father was killed, he had tolead—he no longer had the option of working in the shadows. He had to fight out in the open, and in your country, we have been fighting there ever since.”
“The UK ports?” Ranger guessed. And he was correct. “That’s why they’re so important to you?”
“I think so.”
“Youthink?”
“It is hard to explain.” But for him, I tried, digging deep into the heart of who we were. “These wars...” I took his hand, lacing our fingers together. “They never end. It is kill or be killed, unless you run out of enemies. So what do you do? You draw a line in the sand, no? What you can live with if you do not want to die, and for Jake—for our family—it is to destroy the last organisations that colluded with the Sambini family to murder Pavel, and then dissolve everything he built in the hope that whoever fills the vacuum left behind lets us go in peace.”
“That’s the endgame here? To walk away?”
