Andfuck, I was growing to love Viktor Petrenko. I had to be, for even considering the bullshit that came out of his mouth next.
“Take your shirt off. Lose the gun.”
“You talking to me?”
Viktor’s smile was rare these days, but it glimpsed at me now, turning his face into this magical thing that could convince me to do just about anything as he walked backwards, still clutching my hands, towing me with him. “I’m talking to you. Is that okay?”
It was beginning to be. I let him tug me through door after door, using my thumbs and his to open them, until we came to what I recognised as a boss room. Screens and gadgets. A glass wall that looked out over a sea of colour and joy.
I stepped towards it before I caught myself,mademyself stop and shut the reinforced door behind me. “The fuck is this place?”
“I told you.” Viktor was already ditching the gun at his waist and another I hadn’t noticed him strap to his thigh. “Is a club.Myclub.”
“I thought you and Jakey owned the island?”
“Not all of it. And this... is just mine. Is where I would come, no? If I was a different person with a different life, and I had nothing to worry about but music and maybe some top shelf vodka.”
“Who runs it?”
“Someone who has never seen my face.”
Course it was. Again, I had to remind myself that this was a world I was never meant to understand. “Just so we’re clear: you’re invisible to everyone who works here? No one else has access to the entrance we came through, the corridors, and this room, except you and Jake?”
“You are learning.”
Vik tugged off his tee, throwing skin and scars in my face like a motherfucker.
My mouth went dry. I flattened myself against the door, muscles bunching, fists clenched, and not cos I wanted to punch him.
He wasn’t joking about the shirt.
And somehow that bothered me more than watching him disarm. Than disarmingmyself, when every fibre of my existence was screaming at me to protect him. Maybe I was about to learn there was more than one way to keep someone alive.
I gave up the gun and the knife in my boot. And the fun-sized chisel I’d swiped from my jeans a split second before we’d left the house to drop Lida with Katya and Ivan.
“The razor.” Viktor pointed to my other boot. “This is no place for blades. You will see.”
“You keep saying that, but all I see is you and me with no fucking weapons.”
“That is the point. Besides...” Viktor spread his loot on his big boss man table, lined that shit up like surgical instruments, before he came back to me. “Your greatest weapons are not those you can carry in your pocket.”
“There’d better be a compliment in there somewhere.”
“Or what?”
I latched onto his gaze, holding it as I dragged Jake’s shirt over my head. “Or I’ll be proper fucking miffed, and you don’t want that shit in your life—what the fuck is that?”
Viktor unscrewed the cap on a small tube. The contents leaked out, immediately staining his fingers with neon paint. “Your invisibility cloak.”
He moved closer.
Closer.
I felt his body heat. The thrum of his pulse. I felt him everywhere, from my tingling scalp to my curling toes.
And he wasn’t even touching me.
My throat remained clogged with sawdust. I swallowed as Viktor squeezed paint into the palm of his hand and brought it to my ribcage.
