Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) (22 page)

I stroke her hair, heart breaking. I get a crazy thought—what if I took her back there?

For a moment, I imagine how good it would feel to grant her that wish, to make her happy. Just for a moment, though. I would never do it. I’m not a good man.

She clutches the book and the bottle to her breast. So like Tanechka. A pale, beautiful creature, feeling so wildly. So deeply.

I sit and draw her to me, holding her. Times like these, I would just be there. She would rage or cry and I would sit with her and kiss off her tears.

“It’s never an easy thing, killing.”

“Answer me, Viktor. Is this how I’d overcome it?” she asks between sobs.

“No, Tanechka. You can never overcome it. That was never the goal.”

“What then?” she asks.

I settle her against me and take the bottle from her fingers. I drink. “This poem of Vartov, it let you feel the wound, the darkness, but you knew there was something good, too. Something nice somewhere else.”

She listens, a silent, deadly flower.

“When you’re a killer, you have to find a way to stay human. That’s the thing.”

“How did
you
stay human?” she asks.

You,
I want to say. I don’t. “Best I could.”

She sniffs. It sounds almost like a soft laugh.

I drink some more. I want to be drunk like her.

“Some men in our gang would grow hard with killing. A crust and a shell. The kind of people where, when they walk into a restaurant, nobody wants to be near them. Not because they’re scary, but because they’re…
oni zhutkiy
.” I can’t think of the American word for it. Maybe
yucky
.

I feel her smile.

“There were many in our gang we didn’t like. We didn’t like to have to work with them. We preferred to work together, you and I.”

“You think we were a superior class of killers?”

I twirl my finger in her hair. “I don’t know. I think it is always better to feel it than to be a shell against it.”

She snorts. Does she understand how like Tanechka she is being?

“I think if we didn’t stay human like that, we couldn’t have felt the love for each other that we did. We were hard to the world, but human to each other.”

“I feel sad,” she says. “I’m sorry you can’t have your old Tanechka back.”

It breaks my heart that she says it. “You’re not so different from her,” I say. “As the old Tanechka, you believed in things so fiercely. When a plan went wrong or when one of our gang was wounded, you’d hang on to hope after everybody else lost their faith. You’d hang onto grudges, too…” I pause.

The old Tanechka was not so forgiving, but this one is.

What if I
did
tell her? What if I confessed?

I hand her the bottle, and she takes another drink. Is this the nun drinking, or is it Tanechka?

“I want an update on Valhalla. Have you rescued my sisters there yet?”

“We’re close,” I say.

“It’s taking too long. I can’t stop thinking about them.”

“I’ve told you why it can’t be instantaneous.”

“It’s making me mad.”

“I know.”

A long silence. It’s a good silence. We always could be silent together.

“You know what else is the same,
lisichka
?”

“What?”

“You always saw the sky. You were always looking up. You’d point things out to me. ‘Look at that cloud, Viktor. Look at the sunset. Look at the sky, how blue, how pale it becomes at the edges.’ You’re still looking up. As a nun.”

“Almost a nun,” she says.

“As almost a nun.”

I think, suddenly, that she’s beautiful in her doomed desire to be a nun. She’s like a fish, swimming and swimming in a tiny dark bowl with us other fish, imagining a beautiful ocean beyond. And then one day she leaps out, escapes the confines of that little bowl, finds a new land.

But it’s not what people like us do. We don’t escape what we are. We can’t live outside the bowl. I won’t let her.

She gazes at the fire. Fire, sky, stars. Tanechka loved pure things. She loved Vartov’s poem about the prison and the darkness and something pure elsewhere.

“Give me the bottle,” I say.

She hands it over, and I drink deeply. I should take her back to that place. I really should.

She lowers her voice to a whisper, as though to confide in me. She says, “I wish I was almost a nun, but I think I’m starting to forget. I feel so cold.”

“Let me warm you,” I say, pulling her close.

Tanechka

T
here’s blood on
his shirt. I don’t say anything because I don’t want him to change. The blood reminds me of what he is.

It doesn’t work, though. It feels sweet when he pulls me to him. I can smell the blood, mixing with the muskiness of his sweat. Instead of pushing him away, I breathe it in.

I have drunk too much. All I could think of all day was what he said to me about how we were together. The way we’d dress up and pretend to be strangers. The way he’d hold my neck.

It’s not just the killing I want to erase from my mind. I want to erase the wild feelings I have for Viktor. The feelings are too big, too confusing, at once dark and light—so much love shot through with so much horror.

It’s too much to be with Viktor. Too dangerous, too beautiful.

I need to get to the convent, to reconnect with my kind. There has to be a key to the iron cuff somewhere, but he knows not to bring it into my range. You never bring the keys around the prisoner. I know this the way I know you never put your hand into the fire.

Because I, too, am a killer.

I push him away and force myself to look at his bloody shirt. This is a person’s blood.

He notes the direction of my gaze. “Tanechka! I am so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?” With a jerk he rips off his tie and fights off his shirt, as if it’s an octopus clinging to him. He pulls it all off himself and tosses it angrily aside. His chest is formed of hardened curves and dips. Two rosy nipples. A smattering of dark hair leading down to his belly. He sits back against the end of the bed.

More beautiful. More dangerous.

I snuggle up next to him. His skin is warm and smooth against my cheek. The touch of him nourishes me in a way that food never has. Something wicked inside me wants the nourishment of Viktor.

He strokes my hair. My eyes drift closed. It’s a comfort to me, the way he strokes my hair, sliding his fingers down the smooth surface of it. “It breaks me apart when you’re sad,
lisichka
.”

Without thinking, I grab the bottle and drink more. The drink has given me a good feeling I find I want more of. More vodka. More Viktor.

The muscles of his chest shift as he takes the bottle from my fingers, takes a swig for himself. The movement feels ancient. Like old times, probably.

The bare skin above his belt looks softer than the rest. I know exactly how it would feel to place my palm there—smooth and silky warm with just a little roughness from those wiry hairs.

The memory is in my hand.

The memory is in my face, too, because I know how it would feel to press my face there, my lips.

I say, “Back at the convent I had a tiny room with just a bed and a desk. It was a tiny life. I cared for the goats. I was happy.”

He holds the bottle loosely, tilted, the edge of the base resting on the rug, the diamond liquid inside tilted to be parallel to the floor, reflecting the firelight. Deep thoughts in his mind. “Tell me more. Tell me what you loved about it.”

I consider telling him about the icon—I want to, but I hesitate. Instead I tell him about the beauty of the place. How I felt so lost, always so angry and grieving, and the patience and love the mothers there showed me. And how brave they were in the face of the soldiers who would take so much from us. I tell him about the things they’d do to us.

The stories make Viktor angry on my behalf, as though he’s truly united with me. It makes me feel less alone.

“I even loved the goats. I would loll in the grass in the sun while the goats grazed. They would come to me and nuzzle me. They would play.”

“It sounds beautiful,” he says. “So peaceful.”

“You would love it. You would love the mothers there too.”

“Hmm…”

I snatch the bottle from him. “You would.” I drink. “The most amazing thing was when I found the icon.”

He tips his chin to the shelf. “That one?”

“No, it was an old one, thought to be lost. I was on a hillock with the goats, and I saw such a sweet bright light. Like nothing you’ve ever seen, Viktor.”

I don’t know what makes me tell it. I think because it feels so natural to be with him. I tell him how the light shone from Jesus’s face. How the goats gathered. How it felt in my heart. How I ran back to show the mothers, and what they said.

He smooths his thumb along my cheek. I close my eyes. The pull of him is so fierce. The need of him. I want suddenly to be skin on skin with him. I want to drink him up with my body. “You were happy?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to go back?”

“I will go back. But only after rescuing the women. I won’t leave until they’re safe. But then, yes. To go back is my heart’s desire.”

There’s a long silence. He takes the bottle and drinks. He looks so troubled.

My heart pounds. I want to soothe him. Touch him.

I settle my palm onto his chest. He’s so thick and hard with muscle. I feel myself turning to him, like a flower. I don’t feel lost when I touch him. When he kissed me roughly that time, I didn’t feel lost.

Turn back,
I say to myself.
Reverse. You are drunk.

I say this to myself even as I slide my hand across his skin. Even as I touch his rosy nipple, puckered in a swirl of hair. He sucks in a breath as I touch the other, pulse hammering.

He puts his hand over mine—to try to stop me? I drink in the feel of him. He holds me with his gaze. His belly rises and falls as his breath comes fast.

Then I realize my breath is coming fast, too.

“What do you want?” His breath has gone ragged. It sounds staccato to my ears. I slide my hand lower, fingers under his belt. He clamps a hand onto my wrist. “
Lisichka
.”

I want this man—all of him. I shouldn’t, yet I do. I climb onto his lap, my arms around him, hands clinging to the massive muscles of his shoulder. “I want what the old Tanechka had, just for a moment.”

He shudders out a breath and sets his hands on my cheeks, cradling my head like it’s the most fragile thing on earth.

“I want to feel you around me.”

Suddenly he’s flipping us around so he’s on top of me, laying me out like a dark feast below him. “Are you sure?”

“No,” I say. The truth. “I’m not sure. When I touch you, I want you. And I feel lost.”

His brown eyes soften. “You’re never lost when I’m in the world.” He dips his head to mine for a kiss.

He slides his body against mine as he kisses me, sending pleasure between my legs. Again and again he slides against me, forcing the pleasure through me. Slowly he sits up, straddling me, looming above me.

I slide my hands up and down his hard thighs, spread over me like mighty tree trunks clad in fabric, taut from bearing his weight. He watches me carefully as he moves his hands to my collar. In one wild motion he rips my shirt in two, baring my breasts.

I laugh in surprise. I think about how he said I don’t like smiley sex, but I like this.

He kisses a line down my belly to my waistband. He unbuttons my jeans and shoves them and my panties all the way down, off the ankle without the metal iron. He kisses back up my bare legs.

My heart pounds as he nears.

He pauses at my sex.

I gasp as he licks me there once and again. I hiss out a breath as he spreads my legs even farther apart, licking there.

I grab onto his hair as he licks me, teases me, nips me, a horrible, perfect, wonderful torture. I don’t want him to stop this magic.

And he doesn’t.

Even when I cry out and break apart, spinning in feeling, he keeps on. He keeps me spinning in pleasure. I’ve barely come down when he’s over me, putting on a condom onto himself. He holds himself over me, caging me with his massive arms.

He runs his fingers over the underside of my forearms, gliding gently over my skin.

It feels like sparkles and light.

But his expression is savage. He is not a good man. I look away.

“Look at me,” he says.

The command makes my sex throb. I turn my gaze up to him. He is not a good man, but I want him to make me do things.

Watching me, holding me with his gaze, he brings his arm down between us and guides himself to my entrance, pressing his manhood between my legs. I feel the fat bulb of his head, pressing at my entrance.

I suck in a breath, stunned by the hugeness of him.

A little warning bell goes off. I can’t have sex with him. A nun is supposed to be betrothed to Jesus.

“Wait!”

He doesn’t wait. He fits his hand around my neck—and he squeezes. He squeezes my neck with the claiming pressure he promised.

My pulse bangs against his fingers. My sex pulses with electricity. It feels like magic goes through me.

He squeezes harder.

The squeeze is like a hypnotic command. This dangerous pressure that tells me I’m his. That he’ll take me in whatever way he wishes.

“More,” I gasp.

He squeezes my neck and shoves my legs further apart, spreading me open wide. Then he thrusts inside me, filling me with his hugeness, with pain and possession.

The feeling of him inside me is perfect beyond imagination.

I cry out in agony.

Viktor

I
fuck her
fast and hard, spearing her. I’m the man who doesn’t deserve her, but I take her anyway, working her body as if it belongs to me. It’s what she loves, to be pounded into oblivion.

“You belong to me,
lisichka
.”

She whimpers and digs her nails into my shoulders. I growl and hold her, take her, giving her everything I am. I close my eyes as I give her everything.

On and on I go, slow and savage now. I slide against her clit. Her orgasm likes to run and hide. But I’m a lethal hunter.