Chapter 4

Alexei listened with his arms folded, then gave a measured nod. He slanted a sidelong glance at Cherriot.

“You heard him, Mr. Client.”

Cherriot blinked as though he genuinely could not understand the problem. “People usually like it when I talk this way.”

Yuri declined to respond.

“Usually, they would,” Alexei said with a snort. “But we aren’t ordinary people, which is presumably why Mr. Client came here.”

“That’s a shame. I was being sincere.”

In a gesture oddly doglike for a man his size, Cherriot tilted his head and stepped back. The hand around Yuri’s arm finally fell away. When Yuri’s cold gaze followed it, Cherriot allowed his smile to fade.

“I apologize for making you uncomfortable. But before you refuse me, shouldn’t you at least extend me the courtesy of hearing my request?” His tone remained mild, but the levity had vanished from it. “If only for the sake of our mutual acquaintance, Heather.”

Once Cherriot retreated and straightened, the atmosphere around him changed completely. Perhaps he had been born with a smiling face, because the elegant curve of his eyes still lent him an air of gentleness. Yet an unexpected gravity settled into his upright posture, broad shoulders, and unsmiling mouth. He no longer resembled the frivolous man who had seemed light enough to drift away on the wind.

“Now, why don’t we sit?” Alexei glanced at Yuri. “Standing around to talk like this brings back old memories, and I find them unpleasant.”

By old memories, he meant Saratov, when organized crime had held the entire city in its grip and everyone beneath it had been compelled to participate in crimes both great and small.

Yuri and Alexei had been pawns assigned the larger jobs. Their fathers had been forced into the organization, and their sons had been made to follow. In those days, unless a man was a boss or one of the boss’s trusted associates, he did not sit at leisure and make conversation. Even lingering in an alley long enough to light a cigarette, with the wind cutting to the bone, had sometimes been a luxury.

Cherriot followed Alexei’s gesture toward the dining table. “Is Alexei always rude to his clients?”

“If they aren’t women, usually.”

The question might have been a joke, though Cherriot’s expression offered no certainty. Alexei’s nod, however, confirmed that the answer was entirely sincere.

Yuri reluctantly followed them. It felt as though he had become a visitor in his own home. The day had been unlucky ever since lunch.

“Ah. So women are your preference, regardless of designation?”

“I have exactly one preference.”

Alexei’s reply was firm. Yuri knew the person hidden inside it. Only one man had truly mattered to Alexei for a very long time, and that man was now his lover.

“But since you asked about designation, Mr. Client…” Alexei glanced at Cherriot. “Are you what people call free type? Given all the creepy compliments you keep throwing at Yuri.”

At the term, Yuri frowned. Free type was one of those concepts he had never quite understood, though it was openly accepted in large cities such as Vancouver. It described someone attracted to designations that did not conventionally complement their own, such as a Beta pursuing an Alpha or an Omega.

“I wouldn’t call myself free type.” One corner of Cherriot’s mouth lifted. “I simply believe anyone can be appealing.”

“That sounds like the same thing.”

Alexei sat with a snort, then used one long leg to push out the chair beside him. For Heather’s sake, and for Alexei’s, Yuri accepted the invitation.

“That’s enough small talk.” Yuri settled beside his friend. “Get to the point.”

With Cherriot no longer pouring nonsense directly into his ears, Yuri recovered his composure. His head cooled, and he realized how much energy he had wasted by engaging with the man at all. He should have let Cherriot’s words pass him like a dog barking in the distance. Allowing them to take up residence in his thoughts had been his own mistake.

“All right. This is what I heard from Heather.” Alexei’s expression shifted as he turned to business. “As I mentioned, our client is Cherriot Goodnight, captain of the Vancouver Red Maple and, as you know, a very famous man.”

“Oh, and I’m twenty-eight,” Cherriot added. “My public profile says twenty-seven.”

Answering a question no one had asked, he winked at Yuri.

A crease of displeasure crossed Yuri’s pale brow, which had only just returned to its usual blankness. His pheromones stirred with the irritation, drawing both men’s attention.

Cherriot raised his brows. “Don’t tell me winking is forbidden too.”

“Alphas generally don’t enjoy being winked at by other Alphas,” Alexei answered for him.

“Even when the other Alpha is this handsome?”

Alexei ignored the question. “According to Heather, Mr. Client is in grave danger. I heard he made an enemy of a fairly powerful group, and his life may be at stake.”

Cherriot, who looked nothing like a man in mortal danger, nodded. “That’s right. I was searching for someone capable of resolving the situation. Heather heard I needed competent fixers and told me about you.”

“Hmm.”

Alexei leaned back and folded his arms.

“Isn’t this something you could take to the police? If a celebrity were involved, they’d be even more inclined to handle it properly. You could also go to the press.”

“There are complications…” Cherriot leaned over the table and propped his chin on one hand. Tapping his cheek with long, pale fingers, he began to explain. “I have a trust. I haven’t inherited it yet because the conditions are strict, and one of them prohibits me from creating a scandal. More precisely, a scandal that ‘causes public controversy and damages the honor of the family.’”

A trust.

Yuri had never cared about the private lives of celebrities, so naturally he had not known Cherriot Goodnight came from a family wealthy enough to leave him a separate inheritance. The very concept of a trust, something Yuri had encountered only in books and films, made the athlete seem alien all over again.

This was a man whose life should never have touched Yuri’s. They belonged on opposite sides of an invisible but unmistakable wall. How someone like Cherriot had managed to wander so close to the gutter was beyond him.

Then again, perhaps it was not so strange. Alexei no longer occupied the same place in life as Yuri. He had found work he enjoyed, and Yuri’s dearest friend, good by nature and exceptional in ability, was steadily carving out a place for himself in the world. Something like this had been bound to happen eventually.

The only problem was that Yuri had been dragged into it with him.

“But if I go to the police, I may violate that condition,” Cherriot continued. “The moment I explain how this happened, the story will get out. Simply walking into a police station would bring the paparazzi down on me.”

The explanation remained vague enough that Alexei raised one brow.

“Does that mean you did something that ‘causes public controversy’?”

After a brief silence, Cherriot assumed the pure, guileless expression he had worn earlier. With his large, innocent eyes, he looked almost like an overgrown puppy.

“I swear, I didn’t know anything.”

“I don’t like the sound of this.”

“Honestly. If I’d done something truly rotten, someone as righteous as Heather wouldn’t have introduced me, would she?”

Heather made her living exposing corruption and crime. She was the sort of journalist who dug into a case even when doing so endangered her life. Her principles made it unlikely that she would bring them anyone truly vile, yet Cherriot’s words left Yuri distinctly uneasy.

He had listened long enough.

“Talk.”

The quiet command struck the table with more force than a shout. Most people would have flinched at the threat in Yuri’s voice, but Cherriot merely turned toward him. Perhaps pleased to have been addressed directly, he smiled faintly and finally revealed why he had come.

“Please listen without prejudice. The person I’d been seeing for the past few months turned out to be the lover of a crime boss well known throughout British Columbia.” He paused, allowing the implication to settle. “In other words, I had an affair with a criminal organization leader’s lover.”

Trash, then.

Not impossible to deal with, but hardly a man of quality. Even Heather could not meet only decent people. Yuri reached the judgment calmly, then glanced at the old alarm clock on the table. Realizing that he had wasted twenty minutes to hear this pointless story made hunger strike him all at once.

He had eaten nothing all day.

“That person called me the day before yesterday and confessed everything,” Cherriot continued. “They also told me their lover had sent people to kill me. I was already in danger before I came here today. I went out for a quick jog, and when I returned, several men were loitering in my apartment lobby. No charitable interpretation could make them look like anything but criminals. That’s why I ran out without so much as bus fare.”

Alexei’s frown deepened as he unfolded his arms. He must have reached the same conclusion as Yuri, because he checked the time before replying in a tone Yuri had not heard from him in years.

“I understand that you’re in danger. But we help people trapped in circumstances they could not escape on their own. We do not clean up stupid messes people like you create for themselves.” Alexei’s blue eyes hardened. “It’s unfortunate about your trust, but you must have earned plenty throughout your career. Why not be satisfied with that?”

Fortunately, Alexei appeared to have decided the case was not worth accepting. Relieved, Yuri prepared to stand and throw Cherriot out.

Then a voice colder than anything they had yet heard from him cut through the room.

“I am not trying to protect the trust because of money.”

Every trace of laughter vanished from Cherriot’s pale face. His green eyes, so gentle and luminous moments before, turned as cold as evergreens beneath a cutting winter wind.

As his voice lowered, the pheromones that had hovered faintly around him surged with sudden aggression. His deodorant had kept them muted until then, but their presence rapidly thickened.

Discomfort, old anger, and emotions far too heavy for his smiling appearance churned together within the scent. It carried the rain-soaked wind of a forest caught in the heart of a storm. Without his smile, Cherriot possessed the silent, overwhelming force of a beast standing upright against the gale.

The transformation sharpened the tension in the living room. Every Alpha instinct in the room rose at once. Yuri’s expression hardened, and the blue eyes beneath his dark brows fixed on Cherriot, ready to strike at the slightest movement. Alexei planted one hand on the table, prepared for whatever came next.

The room held taut and silent for several seconds.

Cherriot, who had created the dangerous atmosphere, was also the one who softened it. He slowly settled against the back of his chair, allowed the coldness to drain from his face, and lifted one corner of his mouth.

“So perhaps you could accept that I have circumstances of my own.” His voice had regained its composure. “I’ll guarantee a success fee substantial enough to satisfy you. As Alexei said, I’ve earned plenty from my career apart from the trust.”

As Cherriot relaxed, the dense pheromones filling the room gradually lost their force. His frivolous behavior had made Yuri suspect that he had come without thinking, but clearly the man carried a history of his own.

That did not transform Yuri’s opinion of the young celebrity, but it complicated it.

It would be wiser to hear the rest. Remembering that no living person was without a past, Yuri acknowledged that he had judged Cherriot too narrowly. Not that Cherriot had done anything to discourage the mistake.

“Hmm.”

Alexei broke the silence and looked at Yuri. When their eyes met, he tipped his chin toward Cherriot, silently asking for an opinion.

Yuri nodded.

“Let’s hear everything before we decide,” Alexei said. “But why come to us? If the payment is good, plenty of people would solve any problem you put in front of them.”

Alexei had voiced the question, but Yuri had wondered the same thing.

Cherriot smiled. “Heather said you were good people.”

The unexpected words drew a frown from Yuri.

“I don’t want anyone badly hurt because of my problem,” Cherriot continued. Although he smiled, something cold moved behind his eyes. “Skilled mercenaries aren’t afraid to get blood on their hands, even when that means killing.”

Contempt lay beneath the explanation. Yuri sensed an older hatred there, something too personal to be explained by a simple rejection of criminals. Whatever Cherriot despised, the feeling had deep roots.

Yuri’s hands went cold.

The word good always lodged in his throat like a piece of hard candy he could neither swallow nor spit out. He had been born a sinner and willingly crawled through filth to survive. Yuri Kiselyov was not someone who deserved that word, not even as a careless mistake.

His jaw tightened. The hand resting on his thigh curled into a fist until his trimmed nails bit into his palm. The sting climbed through his hand and needled at something deeper.

Letting him believe that without correcting him would be the same as deceiving him.

But Cherriot had ultimately come to Alexei for help. Yuri’s dearest friend deserved to be called kind, and Yuri did not want to step forward unnecessarily and tarnish that truth.

Even so, he could no longer remain seated. He opened his mouth, partly because he needed an excuse to leave the room.

“Alyosha, I’ll get something to drink.”

Yuri pushed back his chair and rose. He had almost turned toward the kitchen when he remembered that, for the moment, Cherriot had been accepted as a guest.

His voice had gone low and hollow when he asked, “Do you want anything?”

Deliberately avoiding eye contact would have looked unnatural, so Yuri glanced at him. Pale green eyes, clear as polished glass, stared directly back.

Under that gaze, Yuri felt as though the lie inside him had been exposed. Nausea rose in his throat. It had been a long time since he had felt this way.

Even ordinary people could still make him ashamed. He had thought himself beyond that.

“Anything Mr. Yuri chooses for me would be lovely.”

Perhaps Yuri had not grown shameless enough after all. He smothered the bitter thought and twisted one corner of his mouth.

“Answer properly before I bring you lye.”

Cherriot blinked. “That’s a metaphor for coffee, right?”

“Unlike me,” Alexei replied without hesitation, “Yuri doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean.”

“Truthfulness is one of humanity’s virtues.” Cherriot’s smile brightened. “Charming, isn’t it?”

The moment he seemed to regain his balance, he began spouting nonsense again. Yuri almost reminded him of the earlier warning, then decided this must simply be his nature. Ignoring him consistently would require less energy.

“I’ll bring tea.”

“That was exactly what I wanted.”

Cherriot apparently did not know how to stop speaking. Leaving him to chatter, Yuri turned to Alexei.

“You’re having tea too.”

“Gladly, if you put whiskey in it.”

“You sound like an Englishman.”

Yuri knew perfectly well that Alexei liked to put alcohol in coffee and tea alike. He tossed out the small joke and left the living room.

Only after walking down the corridor and entering the kitchen did peace settle over him.

Fatigue arrived all at once. Yuri closed his eyes and released a weary breath, then scrubbed both dry hands over his face several times before opening a cupboard.

An old tin used for tea bags sat inside. Whenever they finished the Russian cookies his mother had supposedly loved while she was alive, his father always found another use for the container instead of throwing it away.

Yuri looked down at the lid, painted with matryoshka dolls, and felt suddenly estranged from everything around him.

His father had been born in the Soviet Union, and that identity had remained unshaken despite his having spent more of his life in North America. Yuri, by contrast, had never felt that he belonged anywhere.

He was not American.

He was not Canadian.

He was not Russian.

And he was certainly not a good person.

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Chapter 5

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Despite his porcelain-fine features, Cherriot seemed to relish liquor every bit as much as Alexei. He had developed a peculiar fascination with black tea laced with whiskey, and after insisting that he simply had to know what such a monstrosity tasted like, he badgered Yuri into making some.

Alexei, mellowed by the alcohol and in high spirits, egged him on.

Within an hour, half the bottle of bourbon was gone.

Cherriot Goodnight’s request was neither especially simple nor particularly complicated. The people entangled in his affairs belonged to a biker gang with reach across British Columbia, a sprawling syndicate that had pushed north from the United States. A major investigation had curbed their influence, but they still made much of their money through drug distribution.

Calling the police would have been the cleanest solution. Cherriot, however, wanted mediation because the gang had leverage over him, though it was less a true weakness than something that could be made to look like one. He believed they were merely after money, and Yuri and Alexei had reached the same conclusion.

Even so, criminal schemes had a way of exceeding ordinary expectations, and none of them felt optimistic. Most people had no idea how greedy, shameless, and conscienceless human trash could be. They would have to investigate before deciding anything.

“How much are you willing to offer in negotiations?” Alexei asked as he picked up a piece of chocolate from the table.

Cherriot dropped four sugar cubes into a fresh cup of black tea and stirred them with a silver spoon. “How much do you think they’ll ask for?”

“Who knows? They haven’t made any demands yet.” Alexei bit into the chocolate. “What exactly did the man you were cheating with tell you?”

Cherriot wrinkled his nose, looking wounded, as though Alexei had chosen the cruelest possible way to phrase it. “Samuel? Sam only told me it was dangerous and that I should get help. I haven’t contacted him since.”

“Do you remember his number?”

“Yes. I memorized it.”

Alexei whistled, “Must be the love of the century. Memorizing someone’s number in this day and age.”

“I tend to do my best for the people I’m seeing,” Cherriot spoke lightly, then scratched between his brows with one finger. “Though if I’d known I was the one he was cheating with, I would’ve cut him off much sooner.”

“If someone sets out to deceive you, there’s no easy way to know. But surely plenty of people approach you with strange motives. You’re a superstar, and you meet them without even running a background check?” Alexei gave him a long look. “Naive, aren’t you?”

With liquor in his blood and his usual wariness softened, Alexei treated Cherriot with uncharacteristic kindness. He had always been soft on civilians, and he was even more vulnerable to guileless people like Cherriot, who seemed wholly unaware of the world’s darker currents. In Alexei’s mind, Cherriot probably overlapped with the lover he had practically raised and spent years protecting.

Yuri listened in silence.

The fixer business was Alexei’s, after all. Yuri was only a collaborator who stepped in whenever Alexei needed another pair of hands. Whether to accept the job was Alexei’s decision; Yuri was there to support his friend. The fee mattered less.

“I didn’t want to meet people that way,” Cherriot protested. “It’s not as though I was dating them. They were short flings, so their backgrounds shouldn’t matter that much.”

Fair enough. Cherriot certainly did not look like the sort of man who settled down with one partner for long. Yuri had realized as much the moment he saw him sidle up to a stranger on the street and begin flirting by bluntly calling him handsome.

Alexei did not challenge Cherriot’s innocent defense. He sipped his whiskey-laced tea, considered the matter for a moment, then set down his cup. “As for the request…”

Yuri felt Alexei’s gaze settle on his cheek. He had been watching the living-room ceiling tremble in the reflection on his cooling tea, but now he lifted his head and met his friend’s eyes.

“Heather introduced him, and given his circumstances, I’m willing to take the job.” Alexei leaned back. “Yuri, can you help? Impressive as I am, taking on an entire biker gang alone would be a little much, even for me.”

The decision had been made from the beginning.

“Fine.”

Cherriot brightened at once. “Does that mean you’ve decided to protect me?”

“It isn’t for you. It’s for Alexei.” Yuri cut him off before he could launch into more nonsense and laid out the plan he had already assembled in his head. “We’ll need about two days to use our contacts and investigate the gang’s internal situation. In the meantime, hire bodyguards. Your residence appears to be compromised, so stay in a hotel and keep your outings to a minimum. Until this is resolved, the safest option would be to leave Vancouver entirely. You’re out for the season anyway, so going away for a while shouldn’t be a problem.”

The moment he finished, Cherriot and Alexei looked at him in perfect unison. Yuri narrowed his eyes and glanced between them.

Cherriot’s green eyes gleamed. “How did you know I’m out for the season? I don’t remember mentioning that.”

“Good question, Yuri.” Alexei’s smile turned wicked.

Yuri had only heard the news by chance on the radio, but both of them were reading far too much into it. Rather than answer and feed their speculation, he decided to end the gathering. “I’ll grab you a taxi. Stay at a hotel tonight.”

“But what about a bodyguard?” Cherriot asked. “Wouldn’t it be dangerous to go back into the city?”

That degree of surveillance was usually reserved for a planned hit, and what Cherriot had done did not seem serious enough to warrant it. Still, they had not investigated yet, so letting down their guard would be foolish.

After a moment’s thought, Yuri turned to Alexei. “You take him back. It’s on your way.”

“That’s easy enough,” Alexei shrugged.

Cherriot watched the exchange, planted his long legs against the floor, and tilted his chair backward, his brows pinched like a sulking boy’s. “I’ve never hired a bodyguard to protect me from something like this.”

“Call a security company. Don’t you have connections everywhere?”

“I do, but the fewer people who know, the better. Plenty of people around me would sell information for the right price.”

Yuri stared at him. “So?”

“I’d like one of you two to protect me until this is over. You said the investigation would take about two days, and if negotiation is possible, you would only need to stay with me a few days after that. It won’t be long.”

“No.”

Yuri refused without hesitation, but Alexei immediately countered. “He has a point. The whole reason he came here was to avoid a scandal, right? What happens if he starts asking other people for help and something leaks that he doesn’t want made public?”

Alexei had apparently decided to help Cherriot properly. Yuri knew better than anyone that once his stubborn friend made up his mind, changing it was a fool’s errand. That left Yuri to find another option.

“Then call T-Mac.”

“Are you serious? T-Mac?”

T-Mac was another friend who had left Saratov with them when they emigrated. His name was Taylor McDonald, shortened to T-Mac, and despite being an Alpha, he was timid and hopeless in a fight. His size was entirely wasted on him.

When Yuri ran out of candidates and fell silent, Alexei slowly reached over and patted his shoulder. Yuri narrowed his eyes at his childhood friend, and Alexei gave him an apologetic smile.

“If I stay with him, well… I don’t think Valeri would appreciate it. And this one seems to have taken a liking to you. Can’t you put up with him for a little while?”

It was better for Yuri to spend a few nights away than for Alexei, who had someone waiting at home, to do it. He understood that perfectly well, but he disliked the idea enough to hesitate.

Cherriot, who had been listening, drove in the final nail.

“One hundred thousand dollars.”

THUD

The front legs of Cherriot’s tilted chair struck the floor. He leaned far across the table, his long shadow stretching beneath the living-room light until it reached Yuri.

“As an advance, I’ll pay each of you one hundred thousand. The success fee can be calculated separately.

“U.S. dollars, not Canadian. Cash, if you prefer.”

It was an absurdly large advance. The ease with which Cherriot named a sum Yuri could never have gathered, no matter how hard he worked, made Yuri’s expression harden with discomfort. At the same time, it stripped away his last excuse to refuse. On the merits alone, the job offered far more gain than loss.

Yuri sighed, dragged a hand over the crease between his brows, and forced down the bitter taste in his mouth. Nothing was more idiotic than allowing emotion to carry him away. It was time to be rational.

“…Do what you want.”

The reluctant answer slipped free.

Cherriot leaned even farther forward, as though he had been waiting for those exact words, and extended a hand. The pale hand was as large as his build suggested and, despite his pretty face, covered in calluses. Unlike Yuri’s, however, the back of it bore no scars. Only the marks of relentless training remained.

“I’ll be in your care, Yuri.”

The uninvited guest who had appeared out of nowhere offered his hand, and Yuri accepted it with reluctance. Now that Cherriot was a client, reason told him he would have to tolerate the man to some degree.

The instant Yuri took his hand, Cherriot closed powerful fingers around it, as though he had been waiting for the chance. Unlike Yuri’s cold skin, Cherriot’s hand was warm, warm as the color of his hair.

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