“I’m here for my sister.”
“You didn’t give a fuck about your sister when you went out the other night.”
He spoke with no judgement. Only the monotonous logic Jake had weathered to death before him. Reason that scratched my conscience enough to drive a snap from my lips. “Do not tell me what I care about.”
I walked away, back to my bedroom, and kicked the door shut. My head buzzed—tinnitus of the brain—noisy in a way it always was these days, and yet it had been quiet in the kitchen with Ranger.
Lida pushed the door open and clacked into the room, pushing past me to jump on the bed before she turned her soulful gaze on me.
Her eyes weren’t as dark as Ranger’s, but her stare pierced as deep, and it hurt. “I am sorry.” The Russian words bled me dry. “You deserve better than the man I have become.”
The sanctuary of her neck called to me. I went to her, but my heavy pulse and tingling skin would not let me forget that I had left Ranger in my kitchen.
How was hehere? Jake, obviously. But the semantics gnawed at me. I’d shared... something with Ranger—withAsher—that I had never shared with anyone. But he was not family. He was notkin. And yet here he was, in my home. A place no one outside of Jake, Katya, and Ivan had ever set foot.
I kissed Lida’s head and moved to the unit beside my bed. The top drawer held a handful of benign phones. I snatched one up, dizzy again now I was away from Ranger’s hypnotic aura, and typed a message to Jake.
Viktor:What have you done?
Jake:What I needed to. Going dark. Do not fight it.
He was offline in the blink of an eye. Invisible, the number erased from the chat app as if it had never been there. As if he’d been waiting for me to wake up before he hit the kill switch on communication.
It was not a new experience to watch my brother disappear from the world, but it didn’t get any easier, and a new pang of guilt and worry scratched my chest. Jake and I... we had been apart before. For months, for years at a time. But whatever he was doing now, it was barrelling us towards the end, and I should have been with him. Iwouldhave been if I had not grown complacent enough to be caught by Gianni Sambini.
The phone powered down. I dropped it in the drawer and shut it away.
From the bed, Lida huffed, restless, and I knew why. She liked Ranger. I had heard this already from the Rebel Kings who had cared for her when I’d been gone, and for me when Locke and I had escaped. And I understood. I liked him too, and I wanted more than anything to go to him, but what would I say? What would we do? I’d had many thoughts of what would become of Ranger and I if we ever saw each other again, but him bearing witness tothiswas not a reality I could contemplate.
Locke.
Like she’d heard the sudden concern flare in my jumbled mind, Lida jumped from the bed and nosed the door open. She wedged her body through but stopped short of abandoning me like I had abandoned her.
She waited, the fur on her back bristling with whatever emotion being caught between Ranger and I was giving her. Frustration, perhaps. She did not like it when I was rude to Jake either. If nothing else, this dog of mine was a stickler for manners.
And Ranger is hungry.
The thought was sudden. Intrusive. And paved the way for a slew of recollection that had slipped my mind every moment I had thought of Ranger before now. A wave of certainty that however empty his belly was, he’d struggle to find anything he wanted to eat if Katya had stocked my fridge the way she usually did.
Ranger was beautiful.
Fierce.
Fascinating.
He was also the pickiest eater I’d ever met, and the thought of him glaring into my fridge for however long it took me to face him again felt worse than the creeping itch lurking under my skin.
“You win.”
The whisper was for Lida. And it was all she needed to set her in motion, hustling back to the kitchen, to where Ranger had indeed returned to the refrigerator.
His back faced me, his tall frame hidden by a dark T-shirt, his legs encased in ripped jeans that would become too hot if he truly had plans to stay here—a thought that failed to manifest as my attention latched on to every inch of skin not covered by clothes.
His long arms.
The graceful curve of his inked neck, more visible to me now with his shorter hair.
I reached the counter and gripped it for support for no reason other than the sight of this man, unguarded and so human, unravelled me. I could not see his face, but I knew the expression it was scrunched in. I knew the boyish discontent that seeped from his gaze. Because I had seen it before, when I had offered him anything but chocolate or fried things to eat. When I had taken to peeling oranges around him for entertainment more than sustenance.
