He finished our shared cigarette.
I offered him a chocolate bar from my pocket, devouring the light that flared in his obsidian eyes. The belligerent grin still hiding behind his menacing features.
“Cheers, Vik. You’re more fun to sit in a hole with than that other mad bastard.”
Ivanov.Alexei. He had been everywhere I turned for the last decade.
He’s not here now. “You think I am fun?”
Ranger unwrapped the chocolate and shoved half of it in his mouth, passing the rest back to me. “Don’t get too excited. I think you’re more fun than a dude who made me sit behind a motorway bridge for a week and not smoke. And he definitely didn’t feed me Lion bars.”
I laughed, low and dark, in keeping with our surroundings. Again, it seemed to confuse Ranger, and I derailed my obsession with the way he sucked chocolate from his thumb by casting my thoughts back over every interaction we’d ever had. Granted, most had been when he was a soldier of the Dog Crows, but had I never laughed or smiled then?
Maybe not.
The men we were watching called it a night and left the port. I tapped orders into an encrypted burner phone, saving myself the task of following them for now, though I would catch up with them later.
Ranger sensed the shift in the air and dug out his own phone, swiping at the screen.
I did not pretend to not look, and the artwork on his music app caught my eye. “The third album is better.”
His brows ticked up. “How do you know?”
“How do you think?”
Ranger regarded me, curiosity dancing through his coal-dark gaze. “You don’t seem like a music bloke.”
“No?” I powered off the burner phone and tucked it in my pocket. Tomorrow I would crush it and drop it in the sea, but for now it was my most treasured possession. “What kind ofblokedo I seem like then? To you?”
“One who slots people for a good time.”
He said it like it was nothing. And to me it was. It had to be or I would not walk this earth. “This is my job, not my hobby. You understand the difference, no?”
“How old are you?”
I had dirt on my clothes. Stones embedded in my knees and elbows. Shifting onto my side, I brushed them off. “That is not an answer.”
It was a moment when Ranger could’ve unfurled his long body from the ground, but he stayed where he was, facing me. “I’m trying to figure you out.”
“Why?”
“There’s a lot of fighting to do up here. If we don’t get killed, we’ll be around each other a lot.”
“You already think I’mfun.”
“We’ve been over that.”
“We have, but your definition of fun concerns me.”
His gaze intensified. I was used to staring down the barrel of a gun—metaphorically and literally. But his depthless stare gripped me. His rough voice, as it wrapped around a single syllable. “Yeah?”
“Smoking and snacks?” I clarified. “This is your bar?”
“Sounds all right to me.”
“That is my point.”
Again, Ranger could’ve moved.Again, he didn’t. He leaned closer, a challenge rising in his eyes. “You’re only gonna win this if you tell me what you get up to in your spare time.”
