Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) (18 page)

“I’m not a good man, Tanechka,” I say into the kiss.

She presses her hand to my chest, pushing. Perhaps she’s angry now.

“I’m the man who’ll make you wet whether you like it or not,” I whisper, hot into her ear. “I’m the man who’ll shove apart your legs and destroy you—with just the tip of my tongue.”

“Get away,” she pleads.

“You think I’m being brutal with you? When I get brutal with you, you’ll know it. You’ll know it because you’ll be screaming my name, begging for more.”

I kiss her neck, now, merciless with my teeth. I want to mark her.

“Every curve, every breath, every nook, all of you is mine.”

She hisses out a breath. She’s softening. The breath is always a sign.

“You’re feeling it now, aren’t you?”

She doesn’t answer, but she’s soft to me now. I pull away, pull us apart.

I stare into her eyes. “I’m the man who will keep you from your god until you remember you’re a devil.”

With that, I turn and leave.

Viktor

I
spend the
next day at Konstantin’s with Aleksio, Yuri, and Tito. We focus on our many operations—the brothel pipeline, the money-laundering robbery. These things we can affect.

But when I think of my Tanechka trapped inside that nun, I feel helpless.

And when I think of that clerk behind a desk somewhere keeping us from the information that will lead us to Kiro, my face feels hot. Wherever he is, Kiro is vulnerable.

It’s a good thing I don’t know this desk clerk’s name. But I tell myself,
Leave him alone
.
We’re protecting Kiro by moving under the radar.

I don’t truly believe it.

I bring the old man a quilt to put over his legs, and I push him outside to feed his ducks. He gets cold. He wears an old man’s hat over his bald head. “You’ll meet her soon,” I say. “You’ll like her. She’ll remember who she is soon. I’m sure of it.”

“It’s only been a few days, Viktor. Give it time.”

“It’s…frustrating. To have what you want most in the world in front of you. But it’s an illusion. Like a mirage in the desert. I surround her with her favorite things, and she resists. Her favorite poetry.”

The old man throws bread. The ducks come, quacking.

“They sound always like they’re complaining,” I say.

“Ducks. Whadya gonna do.” He throws out more bread with the unsteady hands of an old man. “Maybe she needs to feel like you understand her,” he says. “You bring her books the old Tanechka liked. What about the Bible? Why not bring her the Bible and ask her to read you her favorite part.”

“I will not encourage her delusion.”

“But you give it power when you oppose it. You give things power when you oppose them—you understand that, right?” Konstantin is a great strategist, but I can’t abide this advice.

“In Russia, some crazy people think they’re Stalin. We’d never think to cure them by playing along.”

“It’s a little different, becoming a nun. Don’t you think?” This he says in a voice like I’m a child.

I sigh. “Even if I thought it would help, I’d feel like I was betraying the old Tanechka. She’d hate this nun, Konstantin. I didn’t fight for her before, and sometimes I feel like she’s calling out to me to fight this nun.”

I stop at a different Russian bakery on my way back. The Russian
Mafiya
guys here tell me it’s the best, where all of their wives go. They have many lemon things for Tanechka.

I choose a selection of lemon jellies shaped like stars and lemon wedges, then I pick up a bottle of pink champagne. We used to drink vodka mostly, but in certain moods, Tanechka would drink pink champagne like soda. She never considered champagne to be an alcoholic beverage on the level of vodka.

Once she starts drinking pink champagne, she doesn’t stop. Can’t stop. Such a sweet tooth.

It’s wrong. I no longer care. I need to get past the nun, to get to Tanechka. Her mind doesn’t remember, but her body does.

At home, I set the bakery bag on the counter and loosen my tie. Pityr comes up and tells me she’s been quiet, except to ask for a Bible. This she is not allowed to have—I don’t care what Konstantin suggests. She gets only the volume of poems by Anatoly Vartov. She also asked for water, but he gave her none, as I instructed.

I want her thirsty. Yes, she could drink from the bathroom faucet, of course, but the old Tanechka would not like that so much.

I take a belt of vodka, then I grab the champagne bottle, two glasses, the bag, and the rest of it, and I trudge upstairs.

I stop at the doorway. She’s lying in front of the fire.

She wears the black jeans still—she has no choice, being that she’s chained by her leg to the radiator, but she changed her top. She wears an oversized white button-down shirt.

My shirt.

I suck in a breath and imagine the scent of my shirt on her skin.

I want to drop everything and take her in my arms and press my face to her breast. I want to pull the shirt off of her and kiss every inch of her.

She makes no sign that she knows I’m there—she refuses even to look at me.

Angry.

Just as well; my hands are trembling. I take a deep breath and stroll in casually. I put down the bottle and the glasses.

Did she change into the shirt to mess with my mind? Or is it because it’s the least form-fitting thing in her closet? Either way, I love her in it. I love her.

I need her back.

This is what I did to my Tanechka. It’s my fault she’s a nun, and it’s up to me to undo it. I owe it to her. To yank her back.

I take off my suit jacket and holster and set them on the bed. The gun I set on a small chest well out of her reach.

“Come here.” I spread the rug back out.

She refuses to move from her place on the hard floor.

“Fine. I’ll pick you up and put the rug under you and set you down on it. And if you kick it away again, I’ll repeat. I’ll spend all day doing it if I have to. I enjoy holding you in my arms. I think you enjoy it, too.”

She glares and stands up. I put out the rug. She sits on it with distaste. I open the bottle.

“No, thank you.”

I pour two glasses anyway. I always have perfect control over my emotions in the field, no matter the danger. Always cool. But here in this room with her in my shirt after so long, I feel nearly crazy to touch her. Just to be near her.

I arrange the sweets and pastries on a plate. I set a colorful cloth napkin in front of her. It’s an Indian-style print. Tanechka loved such prints.

“How’s the hunt for your brother going?” She gazes into the fire. “Any new leads?” She knows about the fake professor’s house with the cage. It was a main subject of conversation when Aleksio and the gang were over for dinner that first night.

“We’re very close,
lisichka
. But we have to move slowly. It’s frustrating.” I tell her about how our investigator is pretending to be an author. I tell her about the man behind the desk who controls the filings. “A little man playing little power games.”

She hasn’t moved to take a treat, so I set a lemon wedge and two jelly stars on a small plate. The lemon wedge has a sugared lemon on the top of it. She always picked it off and ate it first.

“A little man behind a desk stops you.” She turns the plate clockwise, but doesn’t touch the treats. “Let me guess; you wish so badly you could beat it out of him.”

“I wish it so badly.” I kick off my shiny dress shoes and sit next to her, letting my toes warm by the fire. “But I can’t. We have this lead, this head start that’s ours to exploit. We can’t draw attention to it, or we might squander it.”

She takes her lemon wedge and looks at the top of it.

“Bloody Lazarus’s organization gains in power every day,” I continue. “They outnumber us by hundreds of men. We have money now, yes, but they have the empire and the connections our father built. They have strong warriors who are accustomed to working together. If they knew where our poor
bratik
was, they could swoop in and take him out from under us. They could pluck him from a supermax prison with a word.”

She picks the sugared lemon off the fluffy pastry. Only half comes up, but she puts it in her mouth and sucks with keen concentration. Then she breaks off a corner and eats it.

My fucking heart soars. Tanechka loves food. Back when we were together, she had more meat on her bones than this nun. Better for fighting, better for fucking. Still, she’s beautiful to me. When we were together I’d always be holding her hand, touching her arm. I loved the feel of her skin. Sometimes I couldn’t believe she was mine.

“Drink your champagne,” I say, taking a sip from my own glass, though it’s not my kind of drink.

“I really would rather have water. Or tea.”

“Maybe so, but you’ll drink champagne instead. Jesus lets you drink wine, doesn’t he?”

She stares at the fire. “It’s not about that.”

“You’ll drink it, Tanechka, or I’ll climb on top of you and press your hands above your head and dribble it into your mouth little by little.”

“I’ll close my lips.”

“You think I can’t get around that?”

In truth, I probably can’t, but she doesn’t know. There are some advantages to her lack of memory.

“I’ll stretch out warm on top of you and make you drink, little by little. Maybe I’ll tie your hands. You always loved that.” I take a sip. “It’s a slightly perverted way to drink champagne but very erotic.”

She eyes her glass. If only I could get her to take a sip, the battle is half-won. She won’t stop. It’s how she is.

“You’ll enjoy the way I help you drink it,” I say. “I’ll move on top of you in a way that you’ll find very pleasurable.”

She takes up her glass, finally—and sips.

Yes.

She holds it in front of her face, regarding it with just a tinge of wonder. Staring at the bubbles. Pink champagne. An old friend. Does she remember the taste?

“See? It’s hardly strong at all.” I take a lemon wedge and break off part. “You first had this champagne in Hotel National off Red Square. I wore my best suit—not like this one, but a fine one, the sort to fool people who see such things. We knew how to blend, you and I. You wore a pink skirt suit—you called it your Taylor Swift outfit. You had a picture of her, and you’d style your hair like hers when we would go out pretending to be American newlyweds, our favorite cover.”

I stare at the bubbles in my own glass, remembering.

“The time you first tasted this, we were in the hotel bar hoping to pick up a trail on somebody. We had rings. We had the look right, but we didn’t know what to order for drinks.” I fight to keep my face neutral as she sips again. “We knew that vodka would give us away as Russians. ‘What would Taylor Swift drink?’ you whispered to me. You ordered pink champagne to go with your outfit. I had a Manhattan.”

She’s silent for a while. Then, “Did you pick Manhattan for its name?”

“Of course,” I say. “But it was wrong. Too sweet. A cherry in it. Not right.”

Again she sips. Faraway eyes. Marveling over the taste, perhaps.

“You’re a million times more beautiful than Taylor Swift.”

She frowns. “Were we there to kill somebody?”

“Just scare,” I say. “We followed them to their room and did a push-in.”

“We hurt them?”

I pause, but I won’t lie to her. “There were four others in the room we didn’t expect.”

“What happened?”

“We handled them.”

“Six against two?”

“Numbers like that were never a problem for us.” I keep my eyes on the fire as she sips again. “Remember that colorful cube I gave you at the picnic yesterday?”

She says nothing, but I can see she remembers. She itched to finish it. She probably still does.

I swirl the liquid in the glass. “We used to love the Rubik’s Cube. We each had one. We’d do them side by side, up on the Borodinsky Bridge. We’d race. We came to see scenarios as Rubik’s Cubes—planes of action moving this way and that. Our thinking was very aligned in this way. We could hold even a large group when we went to it as a Rubik’s Cube. Five men and a woman in a hotel room. That was nothing to us.”

“Did we hurt them?”

“Just one. But not so badly.”

She
hurt one, actually. A man. She dislocated his shoulder while I held the others at gunpoint. That was always a bit of icing on the Tanechka cake, to have her do the hurting, delivering both pain and emasculation. “They were very bad people,” I say. “Worse than us. They needed a message from our superiors.”

The story troubles her. She drinks some more.

“Just a message,” I say.

“Great.”

“Afterwards we walked through the square, window-shopping, pretending to be these newlyweds still.”

“You can’t keep me chained up.”

“Maybe I like you chained up.”

She looks at me wistfully.

I take the volume of Vartov from the table. “I understand you have requested the Bible to read.”

She takes another lemon wedge.

“Too bad.” I open to “Cages.” “This poem, you loved it so much.”

She shakes her head. “This will not work.”

“You clung to this poem. You’d think of it when terrible things happened to you. So many people, when they have terrible things happen to them, they become small. Not you. You became fiercer. More loving. You turned to art. This poem, it spoke to your heart. It’s about a man in prison, but he’s able to see such beauty. His heart’s utterly free. You would read this poem over and over, and you’d weep.” I run my finger over the Cyrillic letters, so much more elegant and dramatic than English. It’s not the edition she had, but it’s similar. A bit older than the one she had. Just as beat up.

She swirls her champagne, watching the play of light, mesmerized. It is nearly gone.

“Americans have such a different relationship with art,” I say, concentrating on the book, giving her the space to enjoy the champagne without my watching over her. “You haven’t been here long, but you’ll see. They’re like bees, going from one thing to another, tasting widely, always seeking the next thing. Not like us Russians, standing in front of one picture at the museum for hours, wild with feeling for it, standing there until they have to drag us from the place. Or reading a poem over and over. We are never content with the surface. We could live a whole lifetime caught in the spell of a beautiful poem.” Out the corner of my eye I see her drink again. “That’s how you are. You like the other poems. But ‘Cages’ is your heart’s poem.”