Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) (6 page)

“We could do a takeover of the police station,” I say.

Aleksio snorts. “We could, but…” He thinks about it a while.

“It would be easy. They would have nothing but a few clerks in a police station out here. Right? Easy to take.”

Aleksio considers this. “Yeah, but if we didn’t get what we wanted, Lazarus would definitely look hard at this place. And he has the reach to find things faster.”

“And it’s robbing a police station,” Tito says. “There’s that.”

I snort. “You Americans.”

Tito laughs. “Dude.”

“No, this feels like a time to go sure and slow and smart,” Aleksio says. “For Kiro.”

Aleksio has a plan—one of the investigators we use writes history books, loves his dusty records. “We’re going to send him up like he’s writing a book on the area and have him file for several things at once, not single out the cabin incident. We’ll have him file for every big incident report of this area for the year so they won’t be alerted to that specifically. It’ll take a few days, maybe a week, before they let him go to the county courthouse and examine the records, but it’s safest. Safest for Kiro.”

“Unless Lazarus has this lead.”

“I don’t see how.” Aleksio makes the call and gets the P.I. right on it.

We’re silent for much of the drive home, all of us thinking about that cage. Kiro in that cage. Midway back to Chicago, Aleksio starts talking about the money-laundering heist. Another way we have to hurt Lazarus.

It feels good. I want very much to hurt Lazarus right now. If I can’t watch Tanechka or rescue Kiro, I want to fight Lazarus.

Aleksio thinks they run their dirty cash through a restaurant supply warehouse on the South Side.

I turn to him. “Say the word,
brat
. We could attack there as soon as we land. Make it bloody. Divert their attention.”

“Tempting,” Aleksio says. “But let’s do the recon first.”

I sit back, fighting the urge to take out my phone and check on Tanechka. I remind myself that Aleksio needs to see that I am not obsessed. I remind myself I’m recording the feeds at home, that I will see everything when I get back. I’ll watch Tanechka and review the feeds of the other girls. Catching up on the feeds can be confusing and time-consuming when you’re trying to watch them live at the same time, but I’ve done it.

After we land, Aleksio decides that he needs my help with recon of the warehouse. I know what he’s doing—keeping me from watching Tanechka.

Fine. I go with him.

We drive by the restaurant supply warehouse owned by Lazarus. This is a run-down part of town. Many buildings vacant. Many windows broken. I take note of the entrances and sightlines all around.

Most interesting is the warehouse right next door to it. It has a broken chimney on top. A broken chimney is a good place for a man to hide while he studies Lazarus’s money-laundering operations.

A sign over the door of this warehouse with a broken chimney says “Brenner Industries.” Aleksio looks on Google and tells us Brenner is imported textiles. We head around to a door marked “Deliveries Only” and ring the bell. A security guard opens the door. He is a retired man.

Aleksio and I don’t bother drawing on this retired man; we just push our way in.

The man raises his hands. He knows what it is, what we are. The place smells of chemicals they use to keep the cloth free of moths and other vermin.

Aleksio says, “This is either your worst day ever or your best day ever. Which do you want?”

“Best day,” the man says warily.

Aleksio makes the deal with him. This retired man agrees to let one of our men go up and hide in the chimney and stake out Lazarus’s warehouse. He and Aleksio discuss how they will get the other guard who works there to play along.

This retired man sees that it can be a good day for them both. They’ll both be paid. The warehouse they protect will not be harmed.

Tanechka

A
t mealtimes, we
are herded into a large room to eat. My sister captives here are frightened and vulnerable, most of them Russian or Ukrainian, but there are also Americans and several Vietnamese in our group. I make friends, make the women laugh. Sometimes I simply listen.

I will confess that images of escaping, of taking these women with me, bubble up from deep inside me. These escapes are always exceedingly violent and deadly, though. I reject this.

At times I am forced to dine with Charles, the man who directs this place—just me and him at a special table. The sides of Charles’s head are shorn like dark velvet, and he has eyes so brown they look almost black. My skin crawls when I must sit with him. I sometimes think he has no soul.

God says to love your enemy, but it’s not so easy with Charles. The women are frightened of him, as they should be. I am more disgusted. But it is not for me to judge.

I’m a novice, not yet a nun, but in all things I act as a nun, following the examples of my mentor, Mother Olga, as well as the abbess of the Svyataya Reka convent. And of course, I follow the example of Jesus Christ, whom we imitate in all things. I mean to make my way back to the convent with a clear conscience and a song in my heart. It is my greatest wish for the abbess to ask me to join the convent. I would wear the outer robe and veil marking me as a true ascetic and take a new name. I would return to my prayerful life and my duties with the goats.

Life was not easy in that part of Ukraine, uncomfortably near the Russian border; we would often find ourselves at the mercy of insurgents and fighters of all kinds, who would come and take our food, sleep in our beds, sometimes get drunk and ruin our furniture or slaughter our animals. There were times we had to flee for our own safety, nights spent huddling in the small outbuildings with what treasures we could rescue. This we would bear. As nuns we pray for many things, but most of all we pray for peace.

I am grateful for that example to follow in this place.

I can bear anything for myself, but it does pain me to see how broken some of the women here are. I know what it’s like to find yourself broken and alone in a strange place.

I know what it is like to feel vulnerable, bewildered, frightened.

Two years ago I woke up alone in a strange place with no memory.

My body was twisted on a bed of tree branches, cutting into my flesh, into my back and shoulder. My shoulder blazed with the pain of a thousand blades. That is my earliest memory. My second memory was of looking up at the blazing blue sky, a sky so bright and blue it seemed unreal.

So beautiful.

It came soon to me how lucky I was. I had landed on a tree jutting out from a cliff—this was the Dariali Gorge, I later learned. A miracle, but when I looked and saw the distance still below me, I knew that danger still remained.

I called out for help.

My call echoed. Nobody called back. Alone.

I remembered nothing—not my name, nor where I came from, nor how I’d come to be on a tree halfway down this sheer rock face.

You never feel so frightened as when you don’t remember who you are.

For two days I picked and slid my way down the sheer rock face. Battered, thirsty, clinging to rocks and roots, sliding, falling, the pain in my shoulder sometimes unbearable. Finally I got to the river at the bottom of this great gorge. I followed the river, only stopping to seek shelter against the night. At times I had to swim, due to the sheer rock faces on either side.

I wore jeans, a leather jacket, and a T-shirt with the words “The Scorpions.” I hoped it might be a clue to my identity; I later learned that this is a famous rock band from Germany.

On the fourth day, hikers found me and took me to a hospital in Vladikavkaz. They dressed my wounds and put my shoulder back into place. The nurses there tried to find my family by searching for missing persons on the internet. Afterwards they called the authorities. Nobody had reported me.

I knew how to speak both English and Russian, and I had a tattoo over my heart that said “Tanechka + Viktor.” These are common names, though.

My body is covered in ugly scars that didn’t come from the fall—fighting wounds, one of the nurses told me. Some from the bullet, some from the blade. I could see that my wounds frightened them. I wanted to tell them that I wasn’t a bad person, but I didn’t know even this for sure.

It was at the hospital I met Mother Olga, who had fallen ill visiting relatives. I would sometimes talk to her about how troubled and bewildered I felt, with no memories of who I was. No place in the world.

When Mother Olga was discharged from the hospital, she offered me a place helping the mothers in the convent in the vast steppe in Donetsk Oblast. She had warned me of the danger there; some of the nuns had fled.

I went.

I fell in love with the once-grand convent, a gray stone edifice surrounded by rolling green hills. Half of it was bombed away in the past decade, and much of the stonework is in disrepair, but even in its ruined condition it’s beautiful to me.

The nuns taught me to care for the goats. They were frightened to take them grazing too far from their home, but I wasn’t. Fighting men didn’t scare me; it was my dark past I was frightened of.

Mother Olga and the abbess taught me to pray, taught me about the Bible. I found it all quite pleasant, but I was not moved by any type of religious feeling until one day when I was out on the steppes with the goats.

I had not been sleeping, troubled by an incident in town when I’d wanted badly to break the nose and fingers of a Russian fighter who mocked Mother Olga. Out there in the grass, I accidentally dozed off.

When I woke up, there was a strange light blazing from a thicket. I went to investigate it and found myself scratching away dried leaves and dirt to uncover what felt to my fingers like a wooden slab the size of my hand. I brushed it off to discover it was an icon of Jesus shining up at me. I did not understand how this painted piece of wood shone so brightly. The light seemed to blaze from Jesus’s eyes and face, brighter than the sun and all the stars.

All I knew was that I was filled with such indescribable peace, just gazing upon his face.

This light illuminated the bushes and the faces of the goats who had gathered around me. Like lightning, but brighter. As soon as I was able, I carried it back to the monastery, running at top speed, eager to show the mothers, but the shine faded. By the time I burst through the doors, I held nothing but painted wood, an icon like all the others, only more damaged and weathered, some of the paint off.

Mother Olga was excited all the same. She told me the icon had been stolen decades ago and was thought to be lost forever.

The abbess arrived when she heard. She said, “The grace of God has come to comfort you.”

It was then I knew I wanted to join them. The nuns said Jesus would love me even if I wasn’t a nun, but I was determined, because of the darkness in my past, and the way this light spoke to me.

The fighters came soon after I found the icon. This was one of the greatest trials in my short memory. I shook at the way the three of them forced us to sit and watch as they took most of our food and relieved themselves on the rest. I heard the others outside, taking our best goats. When they mocked my beloved abbess as she prayed, I started toward them, meaning violence.

Mother Olga grabbed my arm. “Tanya!” This was the name they called me.

Hers was an old woman’s grip, but there was power in that grip, and love and goodness and faith. I forced myself to still, heart pounding so fast, I imagined the whole countryside could hear it. It was with an iron will that I stilled myself and bowed my head. “Please excuse me,” I whispered in Russian.

Even then, I strained not to fly at them, right there in my novice’s robe and head scarf, sure that I could make them sorry, elbow to throat, gun butt to nose, foot to jaw, all in one flowing sequence.

Oh, it would have been so easy. Bowing my head and saying words of peace… I could have crushed a mountain with the effort it took to bow my head and say those words.

When they left, the abbess lifted my chin with her bony fingers. “I am so proud of you, Tanya.” I wept with the frustration of it.

After being a novice for a year and a half, they said I was ready to turn in my head scarf for the nun’s veil and a new name. Except then I caught a man who had snuck into the pen at dawn, about to kill my favorite goat. I broke both his arms and his jaw. We had to drive him to a hospital a day away.

Thus I had to begin my period of being a novice over again.

It takes such a long time to learn the art of forgiveness. Mother Olga said that my love of fighting and lack of forgiveness was a lion at the gates of my heart’s desire to be a nun. She said that Jesus loves me all the better for it.

Then I was taken.

I was napping on a hillock. I woke up with boots pressed down on both my arms, like boulders on my arms, and a sweet cloth being held over my mouth.

When I awoke again I was locked in a dark freighter container with two dozen other women, out at sea for some weeks. The virgins among us were brought here to this place with cameras and many little rooms. They tested the other women for virginity, but they didn’t test me. It’s strange to me that they didn’t test me. There is no reason to assume a novice nun is a virgin.

I still have my head scarf and novice’s robe in this place. Still my prayer rope.

I hate cameras or surveillance of any kind—a feeling from my former life that I don’t understand. Nevertheless, I pray faced away, whispering the Jesus prayer.

One of the guards asked me whether I would like a cross for the wall. I told him I would prefer an icon, and he was able to get one similar to the one I found on the steppes—a little more modern, but Jesus wears the same colors and holds his hand in the same beautiful gesture. This icon serves as a window to heaven just the same as one covered with gold or lit with a thousand suns.

I don’t think he got it for me out of kindness; I believe my being a nun makes me desirable to bidders with evil intentions.

Still I am grateful.