But the room was chaotic enough that no one noticed.
“I’m not telling you anything.” Rubi kept talking, playing fast and loose with his balls. “I just think there are better ways of talking about this, if only that we don’t wake up Roo.”
Ranger.
The warning came too late. The door pushed open again and Lida slipped into the room, an irritated northerner not far behind her. “This had better be good tea or you’re all cunts.”
Rubi gave him the good news.
Ranger scowled, ready for carnage without missing a beat. “What’s his fucking name?”
Thank you, brother. And I felt like telling him, I really did, but an eviscerating glare from my queen shut me up.
“All right.” Rubi brought his hands together as if he was praying for calm. “What do we actually know?”
“Why don’t you ask River?” Orla retorted sweetly. “He’s the one with all the information.”
River rolled his eyes. “All I did was tell Alexei that Willow was knocking around with someone older. I figured he could take a look without her knowing about it andthenwe’d decide if he was a problem. I never said he was, and Locke, if you’d been here or anywhere that wasn’t where you were, I’d have come to you first.”
I knew it. And I was grateful he’d done what he’d done. Orla, though, she was still seething.
“You don’t get it—noneof you get it. It’s up toWillowto decide if her boyfriend is a problem. We don’t get to choose her relationships.”
“But we have to protect her,” Nash countered. “Being one of us means she has enemies she’ll never fucking know about, and this dude could be anyone.”
Orla pursed her lips. “Okay, you’re right about that. But what if he’s just an idiot? How’s she going to learn what the world’s really like if we sanitise every encounter she ever has? How’s she ever going to know good from bad? If anything, she’ll bemoreat risk, and that’s if she doesn’t rebel to escape this bullshit and you never fucking see her again.”
Ouch. I felt that in my fuckin’ marrow and it rendered me mute as Rubi conceded the point.
“Valid.” He wagged a finger, ignoring the very real risk of Orla biting it off. “Your dad worried about that until Nash’s pretty face turned your head.”
“Whose pretty face?” The new voice in the room was Viktor’s. He filled the doorway, taking it all in. “What are you fighting about?”
I banged my head against the wall behind me as he got Ranger’s version of events. How had a simple conversation with my lover turned into this fuckin’ pantomime?
Cos they care.
All of them, including Viktor as I watched him mull it over.
“My sister’s husband is older than her. Twelve years.”
I expelled a stressed breath. “You like him?”
Viktor nodded. “He is the best man for her, and she chose him herself. In a life where she has not had much free will, that means something. Who does not like Willow’s boyfriend?”
“No one’s met him.”
Viktor turned to me. “Even you?”
“Nope.”
“But you do not like him anyway?”
Out of words, I shook my head, and Viktor appraised me with the same cool gaze Alexei had outside. The same silent offer of a permanent solution, and fuckin’ hell, for whatever reason, it was tempting tonight. But the spectacle we’d made of this conversation was starting to do its job. Orla’s stance gained a stronger foothold in my brain and I silently stood Viktor down.
He nodded and said something Russian to Lida.
She tilted her head.