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“Yes. I think one day he’ll tell us.”
Ben apparently didn’t hear this reply. Over their fourteen-year relationship, Ben had gotten used to asking questions he didn’t expect a reply to, and was therefore now poking at the fire, deep in his own thoughts.
Aleksey didn’t want to go out into the rain any more than Radulf apparently did. But old habits died hard, and he wanted to check the grounds and the cottages before bed. Sure, he employed top-notch bodyguards these days, but as he knew their boss was currently otherwise occupied, probably doing something also with the word top in it, then who knew if they were all safe?
“Do you think he understands what happened today? It was so weird he was lying watching them like that. Guarding them, as you said.”
Aleksey started a little at Ben’s seemingly incongruous question. A habit he really needed to kick: both being so far gone in his own, separate thoughts that he lost the thread of those in this life, but also finding anything Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen ever did or said odd. Ben had proved lately that his brain too worked in mysterious ways. They were a matched pair. He’d always thought so.
Aleksey Rider-Mikkelsen.
Ben had not yet worked this out, but he had: his new name was himself pierced right through the middle by Ben.
It was so fitting it made him chuckle every time he thought about it.
Ben, right through his middle like an arrow.
“Hello! Earth to Nikolas Aleksey Rider Mikkelsen Primakov Wanker?”
Aleksey flung his arm around Ben’s neck and knuckle-rubbed his hair in punishment for the mocking, disrespectful tone, a far more familiar gesture than the dancing or singing had been.
“Yes, I believe he knew exactly what was being buried today. He understands he is my recompense to the universe.”
“Huh?”
“Come. We will walk them together.”
Ben glanced at the large windows. “It’s really chucking it down. Take your cane.”
“I turned fifty today, not—what’s wrong?”
Ben was still staring at the darkness, but he shook himself lightly. “Nothing. Only…” He glanced over. “I don’t know. Seems like...tempting fate.”
“What? To take two cantankerous mutts for a piss in the rain in their own garden?”
“No, of course not, but...get lost, Nik—Aleksey, stop laughing at me. Oh, bugger off.” He dodged Aleksey’s rib poke of amusement and toed Radulf instead to wake him up. “It wasn’t hundreds of years ago we let this old faker out for a last walk and he dug up a body, which nearly got us both killed and caused an earthquake. Who the fuck knows what’s out there? We have the strangest luck sometimes.”
Now in the kitchen, being circled by the wolf, who wasn’t put off by the cold and the rain at all, relished it in fact, cajoling Radulf to move, his paws slipping on the tiled floor as they pushed him and he resisted, Aleksey suddenly pulled Ben into a fierce hug, laughing and kissing him at the same time, so his amusement and the thought was, for once, outward and shared between them.
“Not at all—we have the verybestof luck, Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen. Ready?”
Ben nodded ruefully to the kiss and the question both.
As if it were merely a momentary thought of no consequence, Aleksey grabbed his pack of cigarettes off the counter. He could hear Ben’s snort of derision in his head before he heard it for real. Busted. Dog walking had never been the true agenda for his plan. He’d lied.
Rather a feature of his life, when he thought about it.
Old life.
He was a new man now.
A man formed entirely by the unshakable love of this man who was...huh, scowling most unpleasantly at him. “For fuck’s sake! Are you ready?”
Of course he was—ready for whatever was out there, whatever their future held.
Theirfuture.
He was hungry now for its bright promise.
Aleksey was pretty sure, where this beautiful man was concerned, he always had been.
* * *
The End
