“Fuck yeah.” Cam shot me a dark look. “You had me worried for a second. Then Alexei told mewhy, and I knew no fucker was walking out of that ring except you.”
His words sank in.Why. “He told you? Git. I thought he’d keep his mouth shut.”
“Maybe he planned to. But we’re working on that instinct to keep nasty shit from each other. It doesn’t do us any good.”
“All right. Don’t need your life story, boss.” Head still pounding, I leaned forward, arm braced to the slashJakovhad repaired. Before he’d asked me to think about beingViktor’sbodyguard. “Do you think he knows Jakov came here to ask me that?”
Cam watched me shift around on the chair, hands twitching as if he wanted to help me more than he already had. “Who?”
“Viktor.”
“Honestly?” Cam scraped a rough hand along his jaw. “I don’t know. Jakov didn’t tell me much more than he told you.”
“Muchmore?”
The door opened before Cam could answer. Rubi stuck his head in and tossed a pile of cash on the table.
It was more money than I’d ever seen in my life. I was a scrapper, not a banker. A grafter. As long as I could pay Jean’s bills, I didn’t give much of a fuck.
“It’s yours,” Rubi said when I didn’t react. “Seems only fair when we’ve been wanting to fuck up those idiots since forever.”
I shook my head. Regretted that too. “That shit was on the house.”
Rubi came closer, peering at me. “You dizzy?”
“No.”
“Pukey?”
“Never.”
He exchanged a loaded glance with Cam. “Needs watching.”
“I know.” Cam lit his cigarette. “I’m on it.”
Rubi gave me another once-over. “Gotta say, Rangie Roo, I’m impressed. You fight like that on McDirt nuggets, you’d be the fucking terminator with a proper dinner in your belly.”
Thinking about food made me a liar. Nausea rocked me. Motion sickness. It would come to nothing—I’d never puked in my life—but I couldn’t fucking wait to go to sleep. “Can I have more water?”
Rubi passed me a bottle and left.
I was alone with Cam again and apparently he wasn’t done uncle-ing me. “That war you were fighting up north. You know it’s not over, don’t you?”
I frowned through a haze of smoke. “I just came from up there. It was quiet.”
“In the north-westmaybe. We just spent three months making it so. But the east is a different story since the Russians gave up the ports.” At my frown, he expanded. “Without Viktor, they didn’t have the manpower to hold them.”
“They’ll take them back.” I didn’t know shit about the finer details of mobster business, but I’d spent enough time around Viktor defending those ports to know they mattered to more than just him.
They’ll take them back.
But Cam shook his head. “I don’t know if they can. Jakov’s a powerful motherfucker, but he doesn’t have as many friends as his father before him, and trust me, I know how that feels.”
“To be a powerful motherfucker?”
“The rest of it.”
I nodded. But thinking so hard about the world Viktor came from made my bruised skull throb harder. “Vik always gave me the impression the ports were the endgame. That’s why he fought so hard to take them back the first twenty times.”
