But I wasn’t afraid now.
Couldn’t explain it.
I just wasn’t, which made no fuckin’ sense when I had more to lose than ever. A reality that hit me harder than Priest and his pipe, and I rubbed my chest, coughing it out.
The motion and noise roused Viktor. He opened his eyes to look at me. “You are sick?”
“Nah, just missing my smokes.”
“The air is damp and your clothes are wet.”
“Sweet of you to notice.”
Viktor hissed through his teeth. “You are as annoying as your other friend.”
“Which one?”
“The nomad with the hair.”
“Ranger? He cut that crazy barnet off.”
Viktor moved with more purpose than I was prepared for, arching his neck to shoot me a frown that was so incredulous I nearly laughed. “Barnet? What does this mean?”
“What I said. He got bladdered and hacked his hair with some rusty scissors.”
Genuine offence arched Viktor’s brows. “Why would he do that?”
“Why does Ranger do anything? Bloke’s a nutcase.”
“You like him, though.”
Sounds like you do too. But I kept that thought to myself.For now. Like the good news about Lida, I was saving nuggets for when I needed everything I had to keep him upright. “Everyone likes Ranger.”
“What is his real name?”
“Seriously?” Viktor was a gold-star mobster. There was little to no chance he didn’t know the legal name of a dude he’d spent so much time with over the last few months. Unless Ranger had been yanking his chain.
“Is a game,” Viktor confirmed. “He wanted me to guess and I swore I would not cheat.”
“Asking me isn’t cheating?”
“Perhaps. But I do not know if I will see him again, and it is a mystery I cannot die with.”
“No one’s dying.”
“This is why Ivanov calls you the bear. Though, where I come from, Mishka islittlebear, so perhaps Alexei is funnier than he looks.”
I scowled, as unimpressed with Viktor’s humour as I was with the nickname that made me think of the creepy mechanic Nash had decked fordaringto walk near my kid. Which made me think of him, and ofOrla, threatening the eerie tranquillity that I was fast realising was the most fucked-up defence mechanism I’d ever had.
And I’d had a fuckin’ few.
“We’renot dying,” I clarified, in case Viktor hadn’t got the message the first time.
He took a ragged breath.
A nearby crash cut him off.
Neither of us flinched, but I scrambled away from him. I knew how this worked. If Priest twigged that we gave a fuck about each other’s fate, it gave him a brand-new game, and I wasn’t sure how much more Viktor could take.