The door opened. I lurched to my feet, but it was Nash, struggling on crutches, his battered knee heavily strapped.
“There you are. Thought they’d chucked you all out.”
“Nah.” Rubi got up to help him. “Skylar put us in here so Mats didn’t scare the children. You okay?”
“High as a fucking kite on codeine. I’ll live.”
Nash found a chair and crumpled into it. I wanted to reiterate Rubi’s question. Push Nash for the honest answer he’d failed to give, but I wasn’t their president right now or even their brother. I was fragmented bones and scorched ash.
I was nothing until I knew Saint was whole.
Nash passed out, his head on Rubi’s shoulder, mumbling to himself the way he always did when booze or weed got the better of him. Embry dozed too, but he was quieter about it, leaning on Mateo, his pale, exhausted face half hidden in his black hood.
My enforcer glowered at the wall, spinning a lighter in his restless fingers. At some point, he’d have to leave to check Viktor’s crew had done our jobs for us, but I hadn’t asked him to yet. Couldn’t. Saint and Mateo were close, and Mateo wore his pain in his anguished eyes and tense jaw. He needed to be here, and I needed to let him.
“Cam?”
I jumped, awareness seeping back into me. Viktor stood in the doorway, clean clothes and damp hair. Jaw shaved. He looked like a different person. Like a doctor, almost. Like he belonged in this awful, sterile place.
“Cam,” he repeated. “I need a minute.”
Alexei.I pried myself from the chair, joints clicking and cracking, and stepped outside the room.
Viktor led me to a fire exit and pointed at the ceiling.No cameras.
I waited for him to speak, but he regarded me first, a softness in eyes that I belatedly realised were a strange yellow-green.
“There is no news?”
I shook my head, channelling my inner Saint as the words wouldn’t come. “Where’s Alexei?”
“He took the girls with your soldier. I did not ask where.”
Decoy. Somehow in the madness, I’d forgotten about him and the impossible position I’d dragged him into. “McGif?”
“You do not want to know what I did with him.”
Beyond the fact that Mateo had killed him, for Embry, Viktor was probably right. “The fight scene?”
“Clear.”
“Why?”
I didn’t mean the fight scene. I meant everything else, and the stranger in front of me knew it.
Viktor propped a shoulder on the wall, stance casual, but his stare intensified, taking him somewhere else for a moment. “I am aware of how Alexei came to this world because I was rescued in the same way. The fate that awaited those girls was something I could not live with, and I will fight this fight as long as I am alive to do it.”
I drew a breath, matching Viktor’s roots with Alexei’s. Kidnap. Slavery. Forced prostitution. Empathy rose in me, fierce and fast. In another time, another place, I might’ve hugged this dude. As it was, I gave him a vague up-nod and walked away.
He called my name.
Still walking, I turned.
“Alexei,” he said. “I have been where he came from. Do not ever blame him if he cannot always be the man who wants to love you.”
Saint would’ve understood. I wanted to, but I had no fucking rope.
I left Viktor alone and sought refuge with my brothers.