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

The Valhalla handlers force Nikki to wear the white dress of a little girl. Advertised as a virgin. Perhaps she is. But she is not so innocent; any predator could see that she is a predator herself, 100% hoodlum. She would tear a man apart. Even tied, she would find a way. She would bite your cock off, I think.

Tanechka could do even worse than that, but she remains perfectly in character, kneeling at her bedside. Bidding for the nun who prays nonstop is
off the charts,
as the Americans say. High six figures now. Maybe it will get to a million. She closes in three weeks.

What are you doing, Tanechka? How are you alive?

I aim to destroy this operation from the inside out before Tanechka’s auction closes. I didn’t protect her before. I have a second chance now.

The plan: I go as Peter the software engineer to Nikki’s room. They promise to turn off the camera when a customer comes to claim his prize. I will ensure this is done, of course.

I will not fuck her. I only need to get to the servers to plant spyware. We’ve decided that I’ll request that Nikki be gagged and tied for me, so I don’t have to do it myself. This will save time. I’ll convince Nikki to tell a tale of how I fucked her. We’ll hope that she’s grateful enough to cooperate in exchange for her eventual freedom.

Hard to wait.

I force myself to stand. Sitting on the couch all day, it is not so good. I bring last night’s pizza box and a few glasses into the kitchen, where I also have a monitor showing the Tanechka feed.

I should clean. After this is over, I’ll bring Tanechka here, and she always liked things clean and bright. She loved sunflowers and daisies and soft lighting from lamps—never overhead lighting; only lamps.

Tanechka gets cold easily. Back home, we could never have enough comfortable quilts and furs and blankets. She likes big slippers. Thick shag carpets. She was such a fierce soldier out in the field, never complaining; it was as if she saved up her warmth-seeking, comfort-loving self for later.

Back in the living room I study her. Now and then the girls all cock their heads or change the directions of their glances in response to sound—a scream. A siren.

Only Tanechka stays still. She gives the camera nothing.

So often I picture myself finding this place and storming in. I imagine going to Tanechka’s bedside. I would pull her up and tell she can rest now, that I will do anything for her. What would she do? I knew her so well when we were together, but two years have passed. What’s more, the man she loved and trusted with all her heart cast her into Dariali Gorge.

I walk around to the back of my couch and study the screens.

I’m recording them, but it takes so many hours to review and catch up that I watch them live as much as possible. I look for anything. A hand with a telltale ring coming into view. A reflection on glassware that I can run through facial recognition.

I need to know everything.

I grab a barbell and do curls as I watch. Curls are good for keeping awake.

I cringe when I hear the knock at my door. Yuri. My best friend, one of the men I brought from Russia. I’ve been putting him off. Always too busy to see him. Now here he is. I cut the light on Tanechka’s screen. I can’t let him see. He’ll think I’m crazy, believing this is Tanechka.

Worse, he’ll tell my brother Aleksio. They would pull me from this mission. I would do the same if I were them.

“Come in,” I say.

He walks in, addresses me in Russian. “What are you doing?”

I nod at the barbell.

“Do you have your phone off or what? You’re not answering.”

I grab my phone and see that it’s dead. “Ah.” I plug it in.

“
Chto eta
…” He gestures at the monitors. He wants to know what’s up with the monitors.

“Preparing,” I say. “Getting ready. Confirming the relationship of rooms. I’m more convinced than ever that Nikki’s room is in the center of the basement.” I show him my diagram, the gap where I believe the server closet is.

“Well, you look like fucking hell.” He switches to English with “fucking hell.” More and more he speaks in English. He opens the curtains.

I squint.

“Aleksio wants to know why you missed the meeting.”

“I’m getting ready to be software engineer Peter.” I move Tanechka’s laptop down alongside the others so Yuri won’t think it’s special. “I’ve arranged the monitors according to where I believe they are, relative within the structure.”

“Mmm.” Yuri comes round and looks. In Russian, he says, “It’s a simple infiltration. Do you need such a thorough layout?”

He knows I don’t. My job is simple: get spyware on the server. If I can’t do that, I must get to one of the girls’ computers. I wave off the question. “I’m hoping for a clue to the location of this place…”

“We’ll know the location when you get there,” Yuri says.

“Best to know it ahead of time.”

He furrows his brow. “Does Aleksio think this is the best use of time?”

“What are you saying?” I sound belligerent. Unreasonable.

He comes near. “
Chto eta?”
he asks again.

Insolently, I grab a vodka bottle. Beluga, our favorite. “A Boy Scout is always prepared.” Yuri loves the American phrases. When I remember it’s morning, I put the bottle down.

“No, something’s wrong.” Yuri’s looking at the monitors. I know the instant he zeroes in on the laptop with the dark screen. He looks from me to the screen and back. He wants to know what he’ll see if he lights it. The question is, does he want to know enough to defy me?

When he makes his move, I pull him back. “Is this my operation or yours?”

“What’s on the dark screen?”

“
Idi nahuy,
” I say. “Go fuck,” it means in Russian. “This isn’t your home.”

“
Chto eta?
”

“I don’t have to explain anything to you.”

Yuri is fast for such a large man, and he’s been getting a proper amount of sleep, unlike me. No surprise, then, that the second I release him, he’s able to get to the monitor and turn the screen on. I can’t stop him.

“A nun.” He eyes me suspiciously.

“Satisfied?” I sit back down. “It disgusts me. Auctioning off her virginity.”

“You don’t give a fuck about nuns.”

“Anything else?” I demand.

“No…” He turns back to the screen. And then he sees it. “Wait,” he whispers. “Wait…”

“What now? Did you come here for a reason or…”

“Her hair…”

My heart pounds.
Does he see it?
“What?”

“Her hair. The cheekbone.” He turns to me in shock. “She reminds you of her. This is why you watch?”

“Look really close,
brat
,” I say. He is not my
brat
—my brother—by blood, but he is a brother in every way. We came up together in the orphanage in Moscow before the men of the Bratva took us and trained us.

Again he looks. How can he not recognize her? It makes me crazy. I loop an arm around his shoulder. “Don’t you see it? Look, Yuri. Look harder.”

He studies my eyes instead. “What?”

“Look at her!”

He looks at her.

“Do you see?” I demand.

“What?”

“It’s
her
.”

He turns to me.

“Look at her, not me!”

“It’s not possible, Viktor.”

“It’s her.”

“Do you have a shot of her? Her face?”

“No.” I let him go, and I kneel in front of the monitor. “She never turns.”

“You haven’t even seen her face?”

“I don’t have to. It’s her. It’s her body. Her style of movement. Look.”

He doesn’t look at her. He looks at me—sadly. “It cannot be her,
staryy drug.”
Staryy drug—old friend, he calls me. “You
know
that.”

“I know what you think, but it’s her. You think I wouldn’t recognize her? Twenty hours a day she prays like that. But I don’t think she’s praying; she’s meditating. Remember how Tanechka used to do that? She would focus her mind to a tenacious point before a kill. Tanechka’s perfect icy calm. Look at the way her hands are. Do you see? I think she is doing a form of isometrics in the guise of praying…”

He grabs my shirt collar and pulls me away from the monitor. “Listen to yourself!”

I try to push him off.

He is too strong, too angry. He shoves me to the couch, gets in my face. “Do you hear yourself?”

“It’s
her
. You don’t know her like I do. It’s her.”

“Tanechka is dead. You killed her. You threw her into Dariali Gorge.”

“We never saw the body.”

“Dariali Gorge, Viktor! She cannot be alive.”

“It’s her.” I push him off me.

“What do you imagine she’s doing? Is she there to bring the brothel down?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Probably.”

“Think. If Tanechka wanted to bring this thing down, she’d bring it down. She has access to a computer in there. Tanechka could make five kinds of weapons out of a computer. She wouldn’t kneel and pray. Tanechka kneels before no one!”

I stand and glare. I’m sure he didn’t mean to put that picture in my mind, but there it is: Tanechka, big blue eyes, hair like sunshine, light freckles across her face, kneeling, looking up at me, hungry for my cock.

I swallow, pull myself together. “Perhaps she waits for somebody she has a contract on. Maybe even Bloody Lazarus. She loved to take advantage of her looks. Remember how she’d do that? Remember her white dress and high boots? Those clothes she’d wear for the fancy jobs?”

“
Brat
,” Yuri says sadly.

“It’s her. You haven’t been watching.”

He points. “Message her, then.”

“A message,” I spit. “She’s undercover. I might as well put a bullet in her brain.”

“Or a message could prove that it’s not her.”

“I won’t endanger her. Don’t ask again.”

“You used to have those codes between you. What was that one—‘coffee with ten sugars’—that meant, ‘do you have an SOS?’ Try it.”

“Are you crazy?”

“That’s not so strange a thing to say. That way, you could test whether she’s Tanechka.”

“She’s Tanechka.”

I don’t like the look that passes over Yuri’s face now. Worry.

“You don’t have to believe me,” I say. “Find it out for yourself. You knew her. Come. Sit. Watch her. You’ll see.”

“
Blyad!
” He sits by me in a huff. “This is psycho.”

“Look how she breathes. Remember how Tanechka would do that? She wouldn’t breathe for a long time, and then this lift of her shoulders.”

“You see a ghost.”

We watch in silence.

“You see this woman with your eyes, but I see her with my heart,” I say. “A superior form of knowing. There are forms of knowing we can’t explain, I think. But I know, I know…” I lose my train of thought here.

“Viktor…”

“If only she would turn, you would see.”

He sighs. His attention goes to the other women in their cages. He points to Nikki. “That one’s yours?”

“Yeah. She just sleeps.”

“She looks like a
bednyazhka
from a little village. What is that in English?”

I shrug.

He looks it up on his iPhone. “Ragamuffin,” he says. “Nikki looks like a ragamuffin from a little village.”

“Perhaps.”

After a long silence, he says, “It’s not Tanechka. You don’t see her with your heart. You see her with your guilt.”

I shrug. “You’ll see.”

“Viktor—” He rest his hand on the side of my neck and makes me turn to him. “This is a ghost here to say that you need to forgive yourself for what you did. You had no choice.”

“If I’d truly loved and trusted Tanechka, I would have fought for her. Believed her.”

“Then you would have died too.”

“Don’t make excuses for me.”

“
Blyad!
” he says suddenly.

“What?” I tear my gaze from Tanechka.

He’s pointing at the curtains. Sunflower curtains. “
Blyad, Viktor!
” He stands and walks all around, looking at the furniture. He picks up a fuzzy blanket and throws it across the room, knocking over a vase.

I turn to watch Tanechka praying through it all, powerful and immovable as a mountain. Sometimes I wonder whether she feels me.

“You’re making a nest for her.”

“I want it nice for when I bring her back here.”

He goes to the front closet. I sigh, knowing what he’ll find. Still, I cringe when he comes back holding the white leather jacket. It’s identical to the one she used to wear when she wasn’t trying to be anybody else. The Tanechka trademark. He hurls it at me.

I catch it, regard him defiantly. “It’s
her
.” I squeeze her jacket in my hands. I want to press it to my chest, but not in front of him. I wish very much that he would be happy for me.

I’m just so tired.

“
Brat
,” he says softly. He comes and sits next to me.

I close my eyes, still holding the jacket.

I flash on her expression—the surprise, the shock, the terror—as I threw her into the dark gorge. Even brave Tanechka was frightened of death. She reached out to me, even as she went over, eyes wild, grasping for my arms, nothing but cold wind whistling below her.

I hear him unscrew the cap from the bottle.

“It’s morning,” I say.

“Not for you, I think.” He drinks and hands it to me. He is a good friend, Yuri is.

I take it and drink. Together we watch Tanechka.

“I didn’t believe enough in our love,” I say. “I didn’t believe enough in her.”

“We thought she betrayed our gang. Our family. So much proof.”

“Proof.”

“Tanechka was playing a risky game. You say you didn’t believe in her enough, but she should have had enough faith in you to tell you the dangerous thing she was doing. She betrayed
you
by not trusting you with her plan. She should’ve trusted you.”

I shake my head. “I would have tried to stop her.”

“She should have had faith in her own gang, her own family.”

“Do not
ever
say she brought it on herself,” I growl.

Yuri sniffs.

We had this very argument so often in those dark months after I killed her. Me in my room, drunk. It was only because of Yuri that I didn’t hurl myself into the gorge. We traveled back home to Moscow a few months later. Things only got worse.