Kiss me or kill me.
Viktor curled his lip, nose flaring, and it ruined me. The back and forth between keeping how I felt about him locked in a blast-proof box and kissing the hell out of him left me dizzy, and only his earlier words playing on a loop in my head kept me from choosing one side—the best fucking side—once and for all.
“I don’t know what to do . . .”
Me too, mate. Me too.
I settled for staying still and surveying the dead-end alley while Vik worked through whatever had driven him to sling me against the wall in the first place. His favourite move, apparently. Would he pull it out if he was fucking me?
Dear God, make it stop.
Dear God,
Don’t ever let him stop.
“If you died for me, I would not even try to survive it.”
I tuned back into Viktor. “You’re not trying that hard to survive now.”
“That is rude.”
“True, though, ain’t it?”
Viktor made thissound. Couldn’t even say what it was. Just that it reached parts of me only Finch had with her big blue?—
“Come with me.” Viktor was in motion again before the words had fully left his mouth, but this time, he took me with him, he took my fucking hand, and towed me to a door I’d had half an eye on the whole time I’d been Vik-pressed against the wall.
He pushed a brick. It slid aside, revealing the same high-tech keypads that littered the property up the mountain. “Let’s see how far ahead Jake thought when he sent you here.”
“What?”
In answer, Viktor jabbedmythumb at the pad. For a hot second, nothing happened. Then the door clicked open, and Vik’s wry smile fixed every broken thing in the world, except maybe him.
We slipped through the door.
It shut behind us with a quiet snick and I locked it, reacclimatising to a dim corridor that instantly set my teeth on edge.
Nope.
Despite almost dying for it a few minutes ago, I rooted my boots to the floor, claiming both Vik’s hands in my own. “What are we walking into?”
Viktor smirked. “Now you are nervous?”
“Cautious. There’s a fucking difference. See earlier notes about living and dying.”
Viktor squeezed my fingers, rubbing his thumbs over my knuckles before he seemed to catch himself doing it. “No one’sdying here. Apart from our farm, this club is the safest place on the island.”
Club. Distant music breached my senses, and it was abruptly obvious that he’d snuck us in the side door of one of the dozens of venues along the main strip. Except this one was set further back, away from the bars, bakeries, and jewellery shops, and off my fucking radar until now. “How is it safe?”
“You’ll see. If you trust me. Do you trust me, Asher?”
Asher. At some point, I was gonna have to ban him from saying my name like that. But his question caught me off guard. The response that bubbled up my throat too complex to form actual words, and it pissed me off that if he’d asked me a year ago, when he’d had me half naked on his living room floor, my answer would’ve been an unequivocalyes.
Viktor stepped closer. “I am not trying to die tonight. And I am tired of putting you in danger. If you believe nothing else I say, believe that.”
He was asking me to believe that he cared about me more than he cared about himself. And it wasn’t that hard to do. That stupid fucking orange. I knew he’d only eaten it so I would too. I knew he only ever went to bed so I could. And yet here we were, running around town letting bullets chase us—cos he cares more about Jake too.
Put like that, nothing made sense. But if I’d learned anything from kicking around with the Kings, it was that loving people, whether you lived or died for them, was simple as fuck when you just let it be.
