For the laugh I’d been dreaming of. “No, Asher. They are not myhorses.”
[ 11 ]
RANGER
Because they were donkeys, I discovered three days later, on Viktor’s eighty-seventh walk around the property. “Fucking ears on them.”
Viktor leaned against a fence post, his grip as subtle as the discomfort lining his face. “That means they are big?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you say words in strange ways.” Viktor clicked his teeth. A donkey ambled over and he fed it mint leaves from his pocket. Cos apparently he was a secret donkey whisperer on top of presiding over an orange farm that kept half the island in juice.
Didn’t have that shit on my bingo card either. But the donkeys were cool. “How many do you have?”
“Twenty-five, I think.”
“You think?”
Viktor rubbed the donkey’s nose. “I have not paid attention recently. It’s possible Ivan has collected more and I have not noticed.”
“Collected?”
“From the mainland. See here?” Viktor skated a hand over deep marks embedded in the animal’s back. “This one was a tourist ride at a beach. They did not care that he was broken.”
“Did you kill them?”
“Me? No. But the donkey and all his friends live here now, so you can make of that whatever you like.”
The sun was beginning to sink in the sky, casting Vik’s face in that golden glow—the one that made it impossible to hold it against him that he’d given me the run around for three days straight. That he hadn’t eaten or slept since the first night and the morning I’d forced him to share the breakfast he’d cooked for me, and I was pretty fucking sure he was trying to break me.
So he can sneak off and score.
Not happening.
I snacked like a beast every time he took a shower, and catnapping was my superpower. If he wanted out, he’d have to go through me, not round me.
Viktor shivered, sudden and out of context. My hands itched to rub the goosebumps that prickled his skin, but I settled for moving closer, sharing body heat without actually touching him.
Cos I was a professional.
One who asked questions I already knew the answers to.
“Cold?”
Vik was still leaning on the post, chin resting on his folded arms. Not answering, but I didn’t take it personally. He drifted a lot, like Locke used to when we pulled him out of Priest’s pits in the bad old days. Unseeing, unhearing, lost to shit the rest of us would never understand. Made me wonder if Jakov should’ve tapped him up for this instead of me. Or Folk. Then again, as nice as they were, they wouldn’t have come. They had lovers. Kids. For better or worse, Viktor got me, and the demon who lived in my belly and chose that exact moment to rumble like a troll.
The lucky fucker raised his head, frowning.
I looked away, gazing at the sea in the distance instead. It was weird to be so close to the ocean and not have felt it against my skin yet. I wasn’t a legit merman like Folk, but I liked to swim. To sink beneath the waves. It was fucking freeing, and I reckoned Vik needed that as much as me.
Viktor called the dog and started walking again. It was early evening. Katya and her family were eating dinner on their patio.
The kids ran out to see their uncle, like they always did. His nephew gave him an orange he wouldn’t eat. His niece came to me, waitingfor meto pick her up cos somehow she knew Vik was having the kind of day that meant he couldn’t.
Fuck my life.
Like, seriously.
