Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) (26 page)

In a flash, she grabs my arms and cuffs them to the metal chair back. I stand, chair and all, swinging wildly, trying to wrench free. I succeed only in smashing cupboards. She and Nikki grab the chair. They anchor me to the floor with their combined weight. Nikki cuffs each of my ankles to each leg as the dog barks. Then she tapes me.

Wildly I look up, yanking at my restraints. “What are you doing?”

“We need to take those women out of the brothel.”

“We have a plan for them!” I say. “We’ll have them out within the week. You can’t go now. You can’t do this.”

“You have most of the pipeline shut down. I’ve heard you. I am weary of your words.”

“Don’t do it.”

“We’ll call the police after we have the women out,” she says.

Nikki hauls a semiautomatic from the duffel, dark hair swinging around her shoulders. “How do you use this?”

“You don’t.” Tanechka takes it from her. “No killing.”

“You’re going to take that place down without killing anybody?” I say. “Without me? No. You can’t.”

“We can,” she says. “All that time when I was in there, I could’ve broken out of that little room at any time. I should’ve pulled those girls out weeks ago. I didn’t remember, but I do now.” She turns to Nikki. “You know where Tito keeps his toolbox?”

“Basement utility room. Last door on the left,” Nikki says.

Tanechka takes a 9mm from the pack and hands it to Nikki. “Watch him. Yell if he tries to get free. The chair won’t hold him; it’ll only slow him down.” Tanechka strolls out.

“This is suicide,” I say to Nikki once we’re alone.

“No talking.” She stands across the kitchen from me and studies the black glittery nails of her non-gun hand, hair falling once again in her eyes.

After a while, I nod at the 9mm in her hand. “You know how to handle one of those, but how well?”

She snorts and looks away. A brave front. The shape of her brave front shows me she is frightened.

“You can’t do this, just you two,” I say. “Tanechka’s feeling fucked up. She’s not thinking straight—she does big things when she’s upset. You and her can’t do this alone.”

Nikki flicks her hair from her eyes. “I’m not worried. Tito told me all about her.”

“Who got you out of there? Me. Not her—me.”

She just shrugs. The cool little street urchin.

“You didn’t even like her before.”

“I sure like her now.”

“You need to hear me. You need to trust me.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she says. “That would hold more weight if you hadn’t tried to cut off Mira’s finger and kill your girlfriend.”

Tanechka’s back. She slings an assault rifle around her shoulder. “Hurry. The switchover time is soon.”

“What’s switchover time?” I ask.

“You are not in this.”

“Let me be in it. Let me back you up. Let us be a team. Let me take the dangerous parts.”

Nikki heads for the door with the duffel bag. “Tell Tito
yo
for me and whatever you do, don’t let the dog out.”

“Let me kill for you,” I say. “I’ll take it all on myself, all the darkness. Let me take it all on for you.”

Tanechka turns back, eyes shining.

“Some part of you wants to trust me,” I say. “Trust me, Tanechka.”

Her words are a whisper—“Too late.” She walks out and leaves me.

Wildly I jerk my arms, jerking at the joints of the chair. I can’t let her go—she really isn’t thinking straight. The chair is metal, but it’s held together with little screws. I only have to be stronger than those screws. I have to get out. I focus my mind on getting out, and not on the bleak reality of everything.

Because if I look too hard, I see Konstantin, our guiding light, dead in his foyer.

I see one brother bereft. My other brother in grave danger.

I see our Russian allies turning on us, becoming dangerous enemies.

And I see the woman I love, walking into a fight she can’t win.

Tanechka

O
ur raid on
the virgin brothel starts out well.

We park the SUV in the back, keys in, doors unlocked. I hotwire a van and get it running.

We get there with five minutes to spare before the guards have their staff meeting at switchover time—in a windowless room with a door that can be bolted from the outside. It was converted from one of the women’s room. The bolt they keep taped open. It will be so easy to imprison them. They’ll see how it feels.

We wait in the bushes at the front of the place. The staff room is the second door in the front.

“We have this,” I tell her. “These guards are soft, sloppy.”

She nods, but I can see Viktor wobbled her a bit.

We go over the plan. We’ll slip the knockout gas canister in and bolt the door. Nikki will keep cover behind the line of metal lockers in the hallway and shoot low when she sees shadows underneath.

She nods. She is not relaxed. She needs to be relaxed.

“Your part of this operation will be like a video game. See a shadow and shoot,” I say.

She nods.

“But if they start to escape, if you feel scared, you end it, just like a video game. You run. You’ll help me most by running if things go wrong. Do you understand?”

Again she nods.

“They’ll be slow in their thinking from the knockout gas, and you’ll have the mask. They’re more scared of you than you are of them.”

She smiles uncertainly. “That’s what they say about bears.”

“With that gun you are more dangerous than any bear.” Simple truth.

When the time comes, I take the canister of gas from Tito’s duffel and make her hold it for me. The writing on it is Hungarian, but the ingredients I recognized when I saw it in Tito’s basement.

We hide the duffel in some bushes with some extra weapons, just in case. I steal up and pick the front door lock, and we slip in.

The hallway is dark, hushed. Voices inside the room. The smell of something spicy—Albanian food. Quiet as a mouse, I pull the tape from the bolt and make sure it slides. I ease the door open. I gesture to Nikki to put the mask over her nose and mouth.

I pull my scarf over my mouth and nose, snap the canister open, and roll it in.

I slam the door and bolt it.

There’s no time to wait to see what happens. I start down the hall.

I unbolt the door of Natasha’s room just as the shots start. Natasha is one of the most capable of the women here. “There’s a black SUV and an idling van outside,” I tell her in Russian. “We free them and send them out. Don’t wait for me if there’s trouble.”

“What’s the shooting?”

“The shooter’s with me. We locked the guards in the break room.”

She gets going. Next I free Mavis, the most bossy of the women. I give her the same speech and lead her to the back, propping the door open. “Two vehicles. Fifteen in each. You figure it out with Natasha.”

She nods.

I go back in. There’s a faint smell from the gas, but not so bad with the front and back doors open. My old brothel mates are surprised to see me, frightened of the shooting, but everybody’s orderly. Ten minutes it takes. A quick operation.

The first van rolls off, then the second. The women are out just like that. Easy.

Or so I think.

Not all of the guards were in the staff room, as it turns out.

I didn’t know that.

I go back in and hear something in the TV room. I think maybe a woman is hiding there, and I go in.

That’s when they ambush me.

I take two without killing—both knocked out against the refrigerator. This is the beauty of the nun’s outfit—the element of surprise.

When they stop treating me as a nun, I pull out my weapons, one in each hand.

By the end, I hold two men at gunpoint. And they hold me.

A double Mexican standoff. One of Viktor’s and my worst nightmares. There was no good solution for such a situation. No Rubik’s Cube way out.

Only crazy ideas.

And I haven’t yet called the police, told them all these culprits are locked in a room. I should’ve done it.

Shots from the front of the building. Nikki. How are the guards in there still awake? But I have worse problems here in the TV room.

The rules of a double Mexican standoff are obvious, but it never hurts to state them. I want the guards to understand this situation as I do. “If you so much as move, I pull both triggers,” I say. “If you shoot, I pull both triggers. If one of you drops, I pull both triggers.”

All bluffs, of course.

“Open your hands and we won’t hurt you,” the guard with freckles says. He’s on my left.

“If I open my hands, I’m dead,” I say. “So then, why not take both of you with me?”

No good solution. We all know this.

I take a deep breath.

I’m shaking deep inside, but I know how to conceal it. So much information pouring back into my head. Banishing the peace I once felt.

“If you open your hands and drop your guns, I’ll let you live,” I say.

“Fuck that,” the other one says.

They don’t believe me. They look at me, and they see a killer. They would’ve been right once. Did they not see my refusal to kill? I hurt a few men. I did not kill.

Viktor is wrong about many things. But he’s right about one thing: This takeover couldn’t be accomplished without bloodshed. I wouldn’t be in this standoff if I’d killed carelessly and easily, as the old Tanechka would have.

All of the possible moves and outcomes run through my mind. Most end with Nikki and me dying. A few end with just me dying.

That’s the option I choose. I call out to Nikki. “Get out, Nikki!”

The two men watch me warily.

Nikki’s voice: “I’m good where I am.”

“Nikki!” But the argument takes precious attention.

I need her to go. At this point, not much changes if all of the guards get out. I’ll still have a standoff with all the guards. Me against all the guards.

Two is only a little bit better than that.

There was a time, back when Viktor and I were so wild and free, that we would’ve felt excited by such a thing.

The standoff goes on.

I stare straight ahead, keeping them both in my sight with what peripheral vision I have. Monitoring people on either side of you is part concentration and part relaxation.

More shots. I calculate the shots she has left across the three weapons I left her with. Not so many.

At one point the guards look at one another.

They could coordinate. I don’t have the sense that they’ve worked together long, but they could find a way. They’re in a far better position than I am. Do they understand that?

Viktor and I used to spend hours dissecting scenarios like this. We always assumed everybody did, until we learned otherwise—that we were
nerds
about it, as the Americans might say.

I remember everything now.

I remember everything I knew as Tanechka and everything I knew as a novice nun. I contain all of it.

I’m stronger for it. I might die because of it, but I wouldn’t trade it.

Another gunshot rings out from the break room. Nikki. Holding them in. She doesn’t understand that she won’t survive this if she stays. She can’t see ahead the way Viktor and I can. Viktor and I trained ourselves to think ahead about all of those Rubik’s Cube moves. Every move affects another, unseen and seen.

A double Mexican standoff like this was the worst. Neither of us had ever been in one, but we’d heard of them.

And now here I am.

We’d heard of one in Vladivostok that lasted hours. It ended from muscle failure. The older fighter couldn’t hold his weapon up any longer. Standing here with my arms out to either side, all the tension and adrenaline pumping through me, I can see how that would happen.

Viktor and I decided that you could never win such a standoff alone. You could only win such a standoff with an external helper, and that helper would die. “The replacement move,” we called it.

I think of the diagrams we used to scribble.

There was such beauty in what we had. I remember every kiss. I remember everything we dreamed. I remember that picnic in Gorky Park. I remember Red Square and my Taylor Swift outfit. I remember his face as he choked down the sweet Manhattan. I remember walking around Moscow with no money in our jacket pockets. I remember the pink champagne and being bloody together and being happy together.

And I remember his eyes the day he threw me over the cliff. Like my own heart, cast from my body.

And I remember the peace I felt when I didn’t remember it.

I sigh, clearing my mind. Alone in a double Mexican. I wish Viktor could see, so he would know, considering this was such a topic of interest for us.
Look at me, you
kozel, I’d joke.
I’m going to die in a double Mexican standoff. So much more glorious than your gorge. Your paltry Daliani Gorge
.

I smile.

“What?” one of the guards says.

I laugh. “My nines weigh half what your .357s weigh. One of you will tire first. One will move. One jerk and we go. We do this.”

A creak from the back door. It could be another guard, but I don’t think so.

I stare straight ahead, watching both of them and neither of them. My pulse races.

He’s come.

I always feel him. Everything in the world shifts. Gravity itself seems to shift.

Viktor.

Another creak. My heart pounds as he nears.

He appears at the door, eyes burning into mine. Instantly, he sees all. He smiles, Glocks in both his hands. “Imagine this,
lisichka
.”

“Put them down, on the floor!” the one on my right yells. He’s agitated, and an agitated man will sometimes shoot when he doesn’t mean to.

Viktor puts his hands up, still holding the guns. He addresses me in Russian. “One solution.”

I widen my eyes when I realize what he’s proposing. “
Nyet
,” I whisper.

“What did he say?” one of the guards asks. “No Russian.”

“The replacement move. We’ve thought this through,” Viktor continues in Russian.

“This is my operation,” I say. “My operation, my decision. Go find Nikki and take her away.”

“Are you crazy? We’ll finally see if it works.”