Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) (11 page)

I set down my glass. “Would you have us shutting it down in a violent way, then? Would you like that instead?”

“A false choice,” she says. “There are more options than those two.”

“Maybe pray?” I challenge.

“You tell the police and trust in that. You find the good ones and tell them.”

“Police,” I sniff. A comment like that is beyond childish. Tanechka would never say it.

“The police are there for a reason,” she says.

“The police are for rent in this town,” I say. “Have you heard nothing of what Aleksio said? It’s not so different in Russia. You just don’t remember.”

She gives me a challenging look. She’ll have none of my shit. It warms my heart.

She turns to Mira at one point. She’s rightly identified her as a possible ally. “Surely there’s an Orthodox church here in Chicago.”

“You’re not going to a fucking church,” I say.

“They’d let me contact my sisters in the convent.”

“So will I,” I say. “As soon as you change out of that nun costume.”

“I told you I won’t.”

“Well then,” I say.

An awkward silence falls over the table. Yuri tries with more stories of Sky World, but the fun is lost.

Later in the kitchen Mira scolds me, tells me that this is a horrible choice I’ve left Tanechka with.

I shrug. “It’s done.”

“What if I call her convent?” she says. “You said she couldn’t, but I could.”

“If she cares about talking to her sisters there, she’ll change out of her nun clothes.”

“You’re pushing her. You’re making her dig in. And you’re acting like a jackass. Why would she even want to remember anything if you’re the guy she’d end up with?”

I grab the box from Petrovsky’s and begin to arrange the
orehi
on a colorful plate.

“What are those?”

“Nuts, we call them.
Orehi
. Cookie dough with brown custard inside. A silly child’s treat, but Tanechka loved them.”

“She won’t give in on the clothes now.”

“I know.” I know it better than Mira.

“So stop trying to make her change by taking things away from her,” she says. “Why not give her things she loves instead?”

“What do you think I’m doing?” I press my fists to the cool marble counter. “What is this dinner? This whole place?”

“She didn’t choose this,
you
did. If you give a little, maybe she’ll give a little.”

“This is the lawyer talking?” Mira’s a lawyer, starting a new practice in Chicago these days. She loves the law. Not so convenient for Aleksio, but their love is strong.

“No, it’s your friend talking, telling you not to be an asshole. Think about letting me call her people at least. Tito says she gave him the number. I could call and let them know she’s okay.”

I say nothing.

“Maybe letting those sisters know she’s okay will help her relax. You want her to let go of that life, but don’t you see? Worry makes her cling. Yanking things away makes her hold tightly.”

“I know,” I grumble. “Okay, do it. I’ll send in Tito. And Mischa in case you need translation.”

“Good man.”

I storm out feeling angry and upset. “Dessert,” I say, setting down the plate in the waning candlelight. I tell Tito and Mischa that Mira wants them.

Yuri and Pityr are excited. We didn’t so much love
orehi
—far too sweet for us—but we would tease Tanechka about it. We start passing around the plate. Everybody takes one or two. I set three on the small side plate in front of Tanechka.

“Are these Petrovsky’s?” Pityr asks.

“Yes,” I say. All of us fight not to stare at Tanechka. She doesn’t recognize the orehi, though. This I can see.

Mira and Mischa come out a few minutes later. Mira announces she called Tanechka’s convent.

Tanechka stands, stunned. “Will you let me speak to them?”

“I hung up, but Mother Olga has a message for you. They’re all healthy and well, and something about a rooster looking forward to seeing you.”

Tanechka tears up. “
Petushik
,” she whispers. “What else?”

“They’re happy to hear you’re okay, Tanechka. They were worried.”

Mischa nods. “They sounded good. Well.”

“What about the fighting on the border? The attacks—there was an old guard, and he was not so strong. You’re sure they’re okay?”

“It’s what they said.”

“They wouldn’t want to worry me. Did you tell them I want to talk to them? That I’m trying?”

Mira casts a glance at me, the ogre. “I told them that you wanted badly to talk to them and that you would, soon.”

“Thank you.”

I shove an
orehi
into my mouth. One small kindness. I couldn’t have shown this one small kindness to the woman I love?

I close my eyes, and I’m back at the edge of Dariali Gorge with her clinging onto me, the vast space below.

Predatel!
I call her. Reminding myself why I must kill her. She betrayed the Bratva. A traitor.

She calls out to me as I shove her. Even as she falls, she reaches for me, terror and disbelief in her eyes. Her face is burned into my mind, into my dreams.

The talk rumbles on, but perhaps I’ve had too much to drink, because I feel only like weeping. The hatred for myself is so close to the surface, the hatred for what I did.

I should be happy that the beautiful brightness of her is back in the world, but it’s not enough for me, no. I watch the light waver on the thick red tablecloth.

“So delicious,” Tanechka says.

I look up to see her staring at her empty plate. Her gaze lights on the plate with the rest of the
orehi
. “Delicious.”

“Would you like more?

She looks down. She looks like she wants more. My heart pounds. Finally she waves her hand. “Gluttony,” she says softly.

Viktor

I
let Tanechka
have our bedroom—alone. I sleep in a guest bedroom, or at least I try to.

She comes down in the morning neat as a pin, still in her nun’s dress and head scarf. I leave her to herself, giving her space. She requests again to search for a Russian Orthodox church in town.

“No, Tanechka. There’s a limit to the ways I’ll indulge you.”

She regards me with her burning blue gaze. Only a matter of time until she tries to get out—I see this now.

I decide we’ll go on a picnic. We used to picnic in a park near a lake, and she liked it. Lake Michigan is larger and windier, but I think she’ll enjoy it.

Before I head out for supplies, I talk to Sander, one of our new guys, who’s stationed outside the door. We have plenty of money to hire new muscle like Sander. If they prove their loyalty, they’ll have a hand in the business our father built—once we take it back from Bloody Lazarus.

“Don’t let that nun costume fool you,” I tell Sander. “She’s every inch a killer under there.”

He nods. He understands, or at least he thinks he does. Nobody truly understands Tanechka.

I start off down the sidewalk. This is the old part of town, lined with brownstones. The trees blaze with yellow leaves. A block away, I turn back.

“Four men around this perimeter still?” I say to Sander. He nods. “Find another and make it five. She’s going to try to leave, and I don’t want her hurt.”

I instruct Mischa and Yuri to tell the Americans how good she is at escapes. Mischa insists they have it under control. “Tell them,” I say. “They need to hear it from you.”

I don’t like leaving, but I need to choose these supplies. To look at things through Tanechka’s eyes.

When I return, I find none of the men out there. I burst into the house, and there they are, all in the living room. Tanechka’s sitting on the floor, cuffed to a radiator pipe.

“She’s okay,” Mischa says, standing.

I kneel next to her. “You’re okay?”

“Aside from needing to leave?” She yanks on her cuff.

I step outside with Mischa, who fills me in. It seems she tried to get out as soon as I was around the block. The group of them grabbed her. “Very gently,” he assures me.
Ona nasha dorogaya podruga,
he calls her—“the one we love the most.”

I thank him and send them back out, then I unlock Tanechka. “If you have to pee, go now. We’re leaving for a picnic.”

She rubs her wrist, glaring at me.

An hour later we’re parking on the lakefront. It’s a sunny, brilliant fall day, the sky a bright, almost electric blue—candy sky, she used to call it. I’ve brought her a sweater, but she doesn’t wish to put it on. Nuns back home are famously ascetic.

No matter. I get out, grab the picnic basket and blanket, and go around to her door.

She looks up at me warily.

It is all I can do to stop myself from taking her cheeks and kissing her. I love her so much I can’t think.

She doesn’t wish to get out.

“You want me to carry you?”

This gets her out. I give her the sweater and lead her across the pale, cool sand toward the dark water, rough with whitecaps. The beach is deserted today. People aren’t so interested in the beach in autumn. Always everything needs to be perfect for the Americans.

She gives me one of her challenging Tanechka looks. Just this look fills my heart with love. She addresses me in Russian. “Aren’t you worried I’ll try to run off?”

“Maybe I’d like it. Maybe I’d enjoy catching you.”

Quickly she looks away. Sander and his men tailed us, just in case she decides to run and I can’t catch her for whatever reason. You never want to underestimate Tanechka.

I turn and walk backwards. “This isn’t your first time in America. Did you know that? Twice we were here.”

“In Chicago?”

“No. Once in Omaha, once in San Francisco. You liked the old houses in San Francisco. You said they looked like frosted cookies.”

“Hmmph.” She looks away as she so often does when I remind her of our old life. I tell myself it’s a good sign that she runs from these memories. You only run from something if it’s a threat.

“You said you wanted to eat those houses right up.” Both times we traveled to America it was to chase and kill those who betrayed the Bratva, but I don’t say that. Omaha got quite bloody. We had to kill one person extra before it was over.

“We were put together because we both knew English. I was born here. You didn’t know that—neither did I, until a year ago.”

She simply watches me.

“I was born here in Chicago to an Albanian family. I was two years old, just learning to talk, when the man my father trusted most attacked our family. Our father ran a business dynasty that stretched across the entire middle of the nation. But this man—Mira’s father—he drugged our parents and killed them.”

“Mira? The one Aleksio loves?”

“Yes. Her father and a man called Bloody Lazarus did it. They drugged our parents and chased them up to the nursery where my brothers and I were. My parents wanted to protect us. Instead they were slaughtered in front of us.”

“You saw it?”

“I remember only…impressions. Aleksio saw it all, in the reflection of a window. He was nine.”

“No.”

“This old hit man, Konstantin, a veteran of the Kosovo wars, he held Aleksio in the shadows, hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t scream. Konstantin saved Aleksio’s life. Our enemies spared me and Kiro, our baby brother, but they would have killed Aleksio. They tried to. All his life, killers were after Aleksio. Me, they sent me across the world to that orphanage in Moscow with no identification. They sold our
bratik
Kiro into an adoption ring. We still can’t find him.”

She regards me with a look of concern, even tenderness. A nun’s compassion. Nothing more.

“We’ll find him—we have to. Bloody Lazarus doesn’t want the three brothers to be together. He wants to kill Kiro, but we’ll find him first. We have to. He’s very vulnerable at the moment.”

I turn and walk by her side. She sighs, as if it my nearness pains her.

“You were always a little bit jealous of my English abilities, Tanechka. You thought I was so smart, the way I could think and even dream in English. It’s because the language was inside me from that time. I didn’t remember, but the pathways in my brain had been created for English. Because I was a little boy here.”

“Mmm,” she says.

Again I turn and walk backwards. I like to watch her face. “Do you want to know how you came to learn English?”

Behind her are the trees in their fall colors and Lake Shore Drive, gleaming hotels and skyscrapers soaring above.

“You don’t want to know?”

“It’s immaterial.”

I stop when I decide we’re at the perfect spot. I spread out the blanket. I sit and open the basket. “Sit.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“You prefer to stand?”

She sits stiffly, like the nun she wants me to take her for, but a small, bright lock of hair has broken free from under her scarf, flying and waving at me like a small flag. I wonder how long her hair is under there. She used to keep it long—she said it gave her a greater diversity of styles. All the better to be a chameleon. A good killer is, above all, a good chameleon.

“You learned English easily because of your obsession with rock and roll,” I say. “That’s how you came to know it. Memorizing songs.”

She frowns.

I take out the bottles of sparkling lemon water, unscrew the top of one, and set it down on a platter. She loves anything citrus. Flavors with bite. Everything with an edge, even sex. She liked to be held tight, to be held down.
Make me know you’re there,
she’d whisper.
Make me know,
Viktor.

That was code for her wanting me to be more forceful.

I remove a small box from the basket and open it, pleased to see that the honey cake I bought just a few hours ago survived the trip. I place a piece on a small painted plate and set it in front of her next to her fizzy lemon water. She used to enjoy such water with vodka.

She thanks me politely. “
Spasibo
.”

“
Nezashto
.” I take out the book, the poems of Anatoly Vartov.

“A book,” she says.

I grit my teeth.
A book
. This isn’t just
a book;
it’s her favorite collection of poems in the world. She had a fiercely personal relationship with each and every one of them, especially the poem titled “Cages.” There was a dark time in her life when she would read it and cry for the beauty of it. Like a gift to her, this poem. “I thought we would read.” I stretch out on my back. “I could read to you if you like.”