Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) (3 page)

“You could not have done otherwise!”

I pull the jacket to my chest. “I should have believed.”

“You loved her very much.”

“I won’t let her down this time,” I say. “Whatever she needs from me, she has. My honor, my body, my blood.”

Yuri says nothing. He simply puts a hand on my shoulder.

“Like a miracle,” I say.

“So many monitors. Is a lot to watch.”

I sigh, feeling so fucking tired. I’m glad I told him. I’ve felt so fucked up and overwhelmed at times, trying to keep up with the feeds. Alone with this news.

“You’re looking for clues about where she is, because you want to be able to get to her if something happens.”

He’s right, of course. “
Da
.”

“You’re taping it, but if you’re watching the taped feed, you miss it live. It must be hard.”

I nod. “
Da
.”

“Do you want me to take over?”

I regard him warily. “You don’t even think it’s her.”

He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Let me watch for you.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“
Immeno
. Rest your eyes. I’ll watch.”

I show him how I have it set up. If he sees anything, he’s to note the time on the monitor or go back and do a clip grab. He knows how to do such a thing. He knows how to recognize a clue. I watch him through bleary eyes as he gets up from the couch. “Where are you going?”

He grabs one of Tanechka’s fur blankets and tucks it around me, and then he sits down. I close my eyes. “Don’t take your eyes from the screens,” I warn.

“I won’t,” he says.

I close my eyes and put my cheek to the smooth pelt. I can almost imagine her here, speaking softly. She’s so close. Praying on the other side of a camera somewhere in this city, or at least in this world. The world still contains her. My heart thunders to think of it.

Aleksio

I
text Viktor.
I don’t hear back. One hour. Two hours. Three hours. Nothing.

I’m not handling this uncommunicative shit of his very well.

I tell myself there’s nothing wrong, that I shouldn’t freak out about him not texting back. He’s just invested in his mission, that’s all.

I tell myself I’m used to being with him nonstop.

It’s just that I miss him. He’s my fucking brother, and I’ve only known him a year.

Finding Viktor last year, coming face to face with him in that gloomy garage in Moscow, and feeling that instant bond of love, it was one of the best fucking experiences of my life.

I held him to me—I didn’t give a fuck that the toughest Bratva fuckers were all around, bristling with weapons and distrust of this crazy American bounding into their space.

So yeah, Viktor and I have been together nonstop since.

And I don’t like us being cut off. All those years I thought my brothers had been slaughtered just like my parents were—finding him alive was life-changing.

He needs space, I get that.

But I need to know he’s okay. He seems…too obsessed. Yeah, it’s good he’s into the mission—taking down Valhalla will weaken and distract Bloody Lazarus. But something’s off.

He’s my brother. So I fucking care about shit like that.

He speaks English amazingly well, but he goes Russian now and then.
Brat
, he calls me. I love that.

When we talk about Kiro, he uses the word
bratik
, which seems to mean “little brother.” Or “baby brother.” Because that’s what Kiro is. He was taken when he was only eleven months old. By fucking Lazarus and his boss.

Kiro is still out there somewhere. He probably doesn’t know we exist. Every second that goes by that we can’t find him, he’s in more danger.

Bloody Lazarus wants to kill him. Must kill him.

I text Viktor again. Nothing back.

Of course it’s good he got his own place. Good for Mira and me to have some privacy. And he’s making important bonds with the American Russian gang. That connection is part of how we’ll take down Bloody Lazarus, the man who helped slaughter our parents and send us brothers to the ends of the earth all those years ago.

Bloody Lazarus, who controls the empire that is rightfully ours.

Bloody Lazarus, who is hunting our baby brother Kiro as obsessively as we are.

Mira calls me from the back porch. I go out and find her in the hammock we put up. We’re living this secret suburban life, and it’s fucking amazing and weirdly wholesome.

“Anything?” she asks.

“Still waiting. Sooooo….”

She screams as I climb into the hammock. I don’t tip us, though. I fit right in. I’m getting some specifically not-wholesome ideas, but she’s trying to read. I’m fine with that. I just lie there.

My phone pings. A text. I read it. A lead on the guy who might have Kiro. My whole mood lifts. “Fuck yes.”

Mira studies my face. “Is it what I think it is?”

“Could be.”

“Aleksio!”

I smile. “It’s not for sure—just a lead—but…”

She kisses me.

I call the P.I.

I haven’t seen Kiro since the night our parents were slaughtered in the nursery where my brothers and I once played. An old hit man hid me in a dark cubby while it happened. He held me there, hand over my mouth, arms like iron.

Baby Kiro cried while it happened, waving his fat arms as the blood spurted from our parent’s necks. Viktor was there, too, a screaming toddler. Bloody Lazarus and his boss took them both away. I was just nine.

Viktor and I learned just last month Kiro was adopted after that. When his piece-of-shit adoptive father couldn’t handle him, he dumped him in the wilderness. Eight years old. And not just any wilderness—the fucking Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a vast expanse of uninhabited territory stretching through northern Minnesota and Canada.

From the story we could put together, our baby brother lived wild until he was 18, when he was found half-dead and brought to a hospital with a wound in his leg. Completely wild. The bottoms of his feet so leathery they were like shoes.

It didn’t take long for rumors to start—a handsome young man, completely wild. The media flocked to the area, salivating for photos. Getting rabid, aggressive. “Savage Adonis,” they named him. Fuckers.

And then the whole thing was shut down and Kiro disappeared. The authorities up there told everyone it was a hoax.

We know different. We believe he was taken.

We got photos of the man who likely took him, and our investigator ran them through every database he could. It was a dead end. It had been our only lead.

We were disheartened.

But the man who took Kiro from the hospital posed as a professor—this made our investigator wonder whether the guy had been a professor in the past. He took the money I threw at him and hired a team of guys to personally visit every college and university in the Midwest, showing the picture around. It was a lot of man hours.

Over the phone, my investigator tells me it paid off. A name. A location. That’s what unlimited resources gets you.

I text a few guys to meet me at Viktor’s. I can’t wait to tell them the news.

We are going to find this fake professor. And with him, maybe Kiro.

It’s noon by the time my main man Tito and I get to Viktor’s northwest Chicago neighborhood, a hidden pocket that is pure Russian
mafiya
territory. We park a ways down, just a precaution. My ankle still hurts from an injury some weeks back, but I can walk. Run if I have to.

You’d think you were in Russia, to walk down the street, smell the food, hear the chatter. We find Mischa, one of Viktor’s guys, on his stoop a few houses down, and he’s greeting people all around in the mother tongue.

People are tight here, and there are eyes everywhere. If we were cops or muscle from Bloody Lazarus’s gang, the whole neighborhood would be alerted.

We get to Viktor’s condo, a brownstone row house, and knock. Yuri opens the door and puts his finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

He leads us to the living room where Viktor is sacked out on the couch, cradling a bottle. Instead of a coffee table in front of the couch, there’s a wall of monitors set up on a bookcase.

“What the fuck is this?”

Again Yuri puts his finger to his lips.

“Be quiet? It’s noon.” I frown. This isn’t like my brother. Viktor may be an impulsive hothead, but he doesn’t drink and pass out in the middle of the day. I go to him, but Yuri pulls me back.

“Let him sleep,” he whispers.

“What the fuck?” I whisper back, thoroughly alarmed. I saw Viktor not five days ago, and he seemed…distracted. But okay.

Yuri stations Tito in front of the monitors and gives him instructions on what to watch for on the strange array of nine screens, then he pulls me into the kitchen.

“What’s going on? Is Viktor drunk?”

“Sleep deprived.” Yuri looks out the kitchen window. “More or less.”

“More or
less
? Talk to me.” I join him at the window and touch the curtain—every room is beautifully decorated. You’d think somebody obsessed with home décor magazines lived in the place. Well, aside from the insane shelf of monitors flashing captive girl vids. “Is this about Valhalla? We have what we need now. We don’t need to get crazy here.”

Yuri says something in Russian that sounds like swearing, just from the tone of it. He loves Viktor as much as I do.

I gaze around. The kitchen is seriously stocked. Nice, too. The kind of shit I’d buy. “He doesn’t need to monitor them like he’s the fucking Secret Service,” I say. “He needs to win the auction and get in. You all have the tech ready to go?”

“Yeah, everything is ready to go with Valhalla.” Yuri opens a cupboard and then another. There’s a ton of food. Lots of sweet stuff. This is not the type of shit Viktor eats.

“What’s up with all the food?” I ask.

“Checking a theory,” Yuri grumbles. “Follow me, Aleksio.” He leads me out of the kitchen and up the wooden staircase to the bedroom.

The bedroom is also done up like a home décor mag. Like a fucking woman’s bedroom. Yuri flings open the closet. And lets out of streak of Russian that’s probably more swearing.

He pulls out a hanger with a white leather miniskirt, puts it back, and paws through the rest of the stuff. All women’s clothes.

“Whose shit is this?” I ask. Viktor doesn’t have a woman.

Yuri pulls more women’s clothes from the closet—boots, skinny black jeans, a blood-red vintage-looking cowboy shirt with black embroidery, a floppy white hat, a faded jean jacket with flowers. A Ramones T-shirt. This last he tears off the hanger and tosses across the room. “Blyad!”

Okay, that word I know. It’s their version of “Fuck!” “Talk to me, Yuri.”

He turns to me. “Tanechka clothes.”

“Tanechka.” I narrow my eyes. “His girlfriend who died. The woman he…”

“Killed, yes.”

“I don’t understand.”

Yuri picks up the skirt. “These clothes, these are the sorts of things Tanechka would wear. She loved black boots. She loved cowboy shirts. This red shirt—she had this very shirt. I don’t know how Viktor found these things. Perhaps online. He did not bring them to America with him, I know. He has been busy. And if I look in that chest of drawers, Aleksio, we will see ripped tights. Faded T-shirts. A white knit hat with a puffball on top. Tanechka’s famous hat.” He picks up a red T-shirt that says “Gone Fishin.’” “Tanechka loved stupid American sayings like this.”

He puts it down, and I see here that Viktor’s not the only one who grieves for Tanechka.

“What has he told you about Tanechka?” Yuri asks.

“She was the love of his life. He killed her in some kind of gang honor thing, and it turned out—”

“That she was innocent,” Yuri says.

“Yeah. And it destroyed him. He can barely even talk about her.”

“Mmm, yes. It hurts him very much.” He runs his palm over a scarf. “Tanechka was part of our gang as much as I was. She came from the same world we did. She was trained as well as any of us. She was so—scrappy, I think you would say. Fierce and wrong. Very fucking dangerous, like a white tiger. We all loved her, but what was between Viktor and her…is was so huge.”

He goes to the dresser and picks up a necklace.

“They would send her of on jobs with Viktor very often. So many jobs, those two. Tanechka and Viktor would pose as tourists. The wealthy young married couple, so much in love. Very believable, because they were in love. They could get into any hotel, any installation.” He picks up one of the boots, black with a shiny buckle. “Tanechka could make herself look like an American businesswoman or French movie star. But these clothes that Viktor has been collecting, these were her regular clothes. Very much a hoodlum, our Tanechka. Hair like starlight, Viktor would say. She loved white leather. He is collecting her clothes, Aleksio.”

I pick up the cowboy shirt, not liking this.

“He almost didn’t survive her death,” Yuri continues. “I never saw him like that—so devastated. What her death unleashed inside him was wild and dark. We were frightened for him. He lived at the bottom of a bottle. I think if it were not for his ability to become so drunk that he’d pass out, I think he would have jumped into the gorge himself. We were helping a Georgian gang at the time. We traveled back to Moscow after that, and I thought he would feel better, but he felt worse.”

My heart pounds. “He told me about it. I thought he was…improving.”

“I thought so too,” Yuri says.

Fuck. Here I’ve been chasing after Kiro and the empire we lost—and neglecting the one brother who is here.

“Some nights he would shake in my arms. His grief was so powerful he would vibrate.” Yuri looks up. “They were perfect for each other. You think your brother is extreme? It’s only because you never met Tanechka. The way she loved him and clung to him was mad and obsessive. She clung to him at the end. She clung to him even as he threw her to her death. He would talk about it. Dream about it. I’m sure he dreams about it still. It was so good when you found him. It is a good thing, a family. But now this—this is not a home, Aleksio. This is a nest he makes for a ghost.”

I suck in a breath.

Yuri fixes me with a dead serious gaze. “There is a woman in Valhalla. He thinks it’s Tanechka.”