“I’m not reasonable about my kids.”
“And I do not expect you to be. But I do expect you to listen.”
I wasn’t sure when I’d woken up under the thrall of a dude as young and fuckin’ small as this one, but it had happened. I gestured for him to carry on.
“She met him in Porth Luck when she went into the Joker and asked if she could perform there.”
“Who did she ask?”
“The fisherman who sings. Sol Bosanko. But he thought her too young and refused and she left with this man. Oscar saw them and told River.”
I pictured Oscar Kuznetov. Liked him. Trusted him. “What’s the problem with this mope?”
“Oscar says he is twenty-five.”
I blinked. “What?”
Alexei repeated that monstrosity, leaning forward, poised to grab me.
But as much as I wanted to fly to my bike and hunt down my kid, I knew I couldn’t. Not yet. “Tell me everything.”
“I already have.”
“What?”
The nearby flames glowed silver in Alexei’s grey eyes. “This information came to me last night. I did not want to invade your daughter’s privacy without speaking to you first.”
He’d said shit like that before. But his stance had been fluid enough in the past that the tracker fitted to Willow’s car had been activated in time for Nash to get flattened by a lorry instead of her, a memory I did not fuckin’ need right now. “You don’t know anything else about him?”
“Only that he drives badly. Is this that brought me to you.”
“You didn’t think his age was a problem?”
“I thought it might be, but I do not know your mind, brother. Is seven years, not twenty. The gap between you and Orla is bigger.”
“Orlaisn’t eighteen.”
“Willow will not be forever either.”
I knew that. But Willow was nothing like Orla. She’d never shanked a man. Or slept with a blade under her pillow. She’d neverkilled, and I didn’t want that for her. I wanted her pretty head to stay in the clouds her whole damn life, and atwenty-five-year-old dragging her up too fast had no place in that.
“You know,” Alexei filled the silence. “He is not that much younger than Embry or River. Viktor even.”
I cut him a dark look. “And what do you think I’d do to them if they fucked my daughter?”
“I know what you would do to them. I was thinking out loud.”
“Good for you.” A brood settled over me. I crossed my arms to stop my hands balling into fists. Twenty-five. Twenty-fuckin’-five. This cunt was a grown man and my kid was barely out of school. “I want him dead already.”
I spat the words without considering my audience.
Alexei sat up with a shrug. “If that is what you want.”
He wasn’t joking, and I didn’t entirely hate it, a sure sign I needed to calm the hell down before I unleashed a professional assassin on my kid’s love life.
I took a ragey breath. Tried again with another that put actual air in my lungs. “Don’t murder anyone yet. I need to speak to Willow first. She with him now?”
“No.” Alexei relaxed a little, dropping hissay the motherfuckin’ wordstance. “She does not have enough fuel to drive to Cornwall tonight and his car is mysteriously broken.”