I’d heard it in my sleep. Smelled the smoke from the crash and the blood staining the earth around it. I’d smelled Viktor, even before his orange-blossom scent had made a lick of fucking sense to me.
I smelled himnow, through the diesel fumes from the trucks—Ifelthim, cos the bike of my nightmares... it was a fucking Ducati, and the rider was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
13
RANGER
I’d never run to someone the way I charged at Viktor, not even as a joke. But I barrelled into him as if a god I didn’t believe in had commanded it, and I didn’t give a shite if Rubi mocked me for it for the rest of my fucking life.
Viktor smelled of the road, that orange-blossom scent hard to detect beneath the petrol fumes staining his skin. And he was cold, his hands, his lips, and the crook of his neck where I buried my face. But his arms were home, and not even the worst winter gale could suck the warmth from his laughter as I swept him off his perfect fucking feet.
As heletme. “You missed me this much?”
“Shut up.” I set him down without giving an inch, breathing like I’d run a marathon.Trembling, if I looked too closely at myself—fuck that. “Just... shut up.”
Viktor held me tighter, his hands finding their way beneath my clothes to my back and my neck, his magic fingers rubbing a soothing rhythm into the base of my skull that had me swaying on my feet.
I straight up groaned. “You can’t be fucking real.”
“Asher, I am real. I promise.”
Asher.
The next sound that fell from me was too wretched to be a groan, and I felt like I could bawl my eyes out in the middle of this shitcan truck park, just because he washere.
It’s why I needed him to not talk. To give me a fucking second to acclimate to the spell he cast on me. Tobreatheand saturate myself in the orange-blossom scent buried deep beneath the grime of the road. And to make peace with the bewildering reality that I loved him more now than I had ten minutes ago.
I took another grounding inhale and my heart slowed, settling into the steady contentment I’d never known until I’d found peace with him. Only then did I find the equilibrium to pull back and meet his meadow-green gaze. Hisamusedgaze, though something that looked an awful lot like concern lingered there too. “Hey.”
Viktor smoothed his thumb between my brows. “What are you wearing?”
“Clothes.”
“Whose clothes?”
“Dunno. Found them in the rig. Where’s Lida?”
“With Orla.”
“She okay?”
“Which one?”
“Both.”
Viktor rubbed the cinch between my brows again. “They are fine, but I think Locke and Nash breathe a little easier with Lida on guard.”
Made sense to me. This didn’t, though. Viktor,here, in my arms, feeding the unhinged daydreams that had kept me upright the whole time I’d been gone. “I should ask what you’re doing here, but I don’t really give a fuck.”
“That is lucky. I do not have a tangible reason save that I could not be anywhere else, and River O’Brian is my new best friend.”
“Done a runner together, eh?”
“Something like that.” Viktor brushed his lips over my cheek, too fleeting to be a kiss but so fucking sweet it hit me like a wrecking ball. “And, I would have come sooner if I’d known Alexei had left you.”
“You know where he went?”
“Only because Jake enjoys the challenge of tracking him.”