“Most things are, eh?” He was near enough that I could touch him. Smell him. Feel his body heat, though he still looked fucking cold. “What are you eating these days?”
“More than you, maybe.” Viktor gave me the same once-over he had the night we’d met, but his tired gaze lacked the potency it’d packed back then. I didn’t feel like he maybe wanted to eat me alive. I felt... I didn’t fucking know. And it wasn’t important. “You want to eat now? Jakov told me your sister keeps your fridge stocked.”
Viktor blinked. “What?”
“Breakfast. Jakov. Your sister. Which one’s tripping you up?”
Lida slipped by me as Viktor chewed on his answer. She hopped onto his unmade bed and made herself comfortable on the pillows.
His bedsheets were as white as the walls, punctuated by a throw the same colour as the amethyst rock I’d lugged around for the last decade. Call me fucking weird, but as he drifted in front of me, it struck me how beautiful he would look sprawled out on those sheets, that copper-streaked hair. Those green eyes?—
Viktor barged past me. He bolted through a nearby door and slammed it shut.
Bathroom.
I’d expected it.
“It makes him sick, afterwards. And this is what I do not understand. The relief is so fleeting for him, shorter every time. And yet he cannot stop.”
Jakov’s voice was distant company. The look in his eye, though, would haunt me forever. Cos it was the same look I’d seen in Rocco and Finch when Folk had got fucked up on Oxy, and it made me wonder if I’d have come here regardless of who he’d been talking about. If I’d have crossed literal oceans without the barbed yank in my chest for everything Viktor.
In the bathroom, the shower turned on, no light flickering from under the door. I glanced at Lida. She licked her paws, watching me, watching the door, watching everything, like she always did. But she seemed calm—content, and I took that for what it was. I’d spent enough time with this dog to trust her canine barometer.
Besides, the bathroom was windowless. Andclean. Vik was a fucking mess, but he never brought junk in the house. Jakov had been more sure of that than anything.
Children, remember?
I found a wall and slid down it, settling in to wait as my gaze drifted through the open hallway window to the house further down the mountain. It had been locked down for the night when Lida had emerged from it to greet me, but it was coming to life now. A man and woman sitting on the porch, watching two kids play in a pool that looked a lot warmer than the ocean-fed pit Folk pushed me in every once in a while.
High-pitched laughter filtered uphill, a sound that usually ground my gears, but I found myself distracted by movement even further down the rocky hill-scape. Grey-brown smudges with big ears.
Horses?
Ugly fuckers if they were.
The bathroom door opened. Steam escaped, orange-scented, like everything else in this fucking place. Then a pair of perfect feet swallowed my attention. Damp, masculine legs, scuffed kneecaps and a towel, and then a pale, scarred torso that was as beautiful to me as the beefier version that lived in my dreams.
He’s naked under that towel.
I felt naked too, huddled on the floor staring up at him—at Viktor, as he studied me with more tangible comprehension than he had since he’d stumbled down the mountain.
“You are still here.”
“I am.” I propped an elbow on my bent knee. “Was beginning to wonder about you.”
Water dripped from Viktor’s hair, running down his collarbones and ribs, beading on skin that bore the same marks as Locke’s. I zeroed in on one that disappeared beneath his towel. Different to the others. Tidier. More civilised. “That from surgery?”
Viktor glanced at his hip, the one that had separated on the inside, due to blunt-force trauma, exposing the nerves. “No more questions.”
“All right.”
“Is it?” Viktor padded past me, dipping into his room and snatching some clothes from the floor.
Not for my benefit, luv.
“Is what?” With excruciating effort, I fixed my gaze on the tiled floor, letting him dress in relative privacy, though he didn’t seem to give much of a fuck. “You want me to ask you shit so you can tell me to fuck off?”
He chucked the towel at me. Damp and glorious, it landed on my head and I triedeverythingnot to think about the fact that it had been a hairsbreadth from his dick two seconds ago.
