Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance (12 page)

“How?”

He casts his gaze sideways. “She erased it.”

I shut my eyes. Our leverage on the old man is gone. Or at least the video is.

Aleksio

Y
uri’s got us
moving at top speed in that old Caddy with its shitty shocks the Russians have been driving around. Every bump sends starbursts of pain through my ankle and jars my vision, because yeah, I hit my head on something in that fall, and focusing isn’t that easy.

Viktor wants to stop at an office supply store. He prefers the paper cutter to the cleaver.

“No,” I say.

“The paper cutter is cleaner,
brat
. More leveraged. I have seen it both ways. The butcher knife leaves room for error. It’s good in a pinch but—”

“We can’t—”

“You would let Kiro die?”

I’m feeling dizzy, having trouble focusing. “We’ll cut up the old man—”

“Until he passes out from pain?” Viktor says.

That’s the intel on the old man. Pain doesn’t crack him. People have gone at him before.

“She shouldn’t have erased it,” he says, like she brought it on herself.

“Fuck you,” I growl, head spinning to find another way to show the old man we’re serious.

The car takes a corner, and my ankle fires like shards of glass.

Suddenly Viktor’s in my face, pinning me to the inside of the car door. He has my arms trapped up to my chest, panting with the exertion of it.

He calls up front to Yuri—a stream of Russian.

“What are you doing? What did you say to him?”

Yuri is talking back. The car is slowing. Yuri’s pulling over. It’s Yuri and Mischa up there. Both of them Viktor’s guys.

Fuck.

I lash out at Viktor, going for him with everything I have, going for every blow I can think of, even a head butt. He’s ready for them all. The car stops. Mischa’s out. I struggle harder, get an elbow into Viktor’s jaw.

The door I’m backed up against opens. I freefall against a tanklike chest and feel an arm loop around my neck, muscles like iron. Precise pressure. Mischa.

I kick out.

“This we do for you,
brat
,” Viktor says, suppressing my legs as Mischa puts the choke on me. A perfect triangle hitting the veins that feed the blood to my brain. The edges of my vision dim.

Fuck!

I wake up curled on my side, enclosed in darkness. The vibration below me tells me I’m in the Caddy trunk and that we’re back on the road. My head is woozy. My ankle screams. I pound like a madman. My good leg and two fists. Nothing.

I check my pockets for my phone, thinking to call Tito and have him put a stop to this. I can’t let them hurt Mira. I have to protect her.

No phone.

I go crazy on the trunk top in the darkness.

Mira

T
he two guys
who stayed back to watch me think it’s hilarious to hang around by the pool and help me get my gun spin down while I say the Sergei Kazan phrase. They told me it means, “You go ahead and try it, baby, and I’ll fill you so full of lead it’ll be coming out of your ass.” A really tough movie star apparently says it.

The better I get at it, the more they laugh.

I don’t see what’s so funny, but then again, American movie lines don’t seem like much out of context, either.

I monitor them for signs that they’ve heard something from the Worland raid. Have they gotten there yet? What if something goes wrong? Will they know? They don’t seem worried, but I am. If things get dangerous, Aleksio will be front and center. It’s how he is. If there’s trouble, he’s at the center.

The Russians have their suit jackets off, shirtsleeves rolled up. They’re lounging around like disreputable waiters from a thug café, smoking and drinking Beluga vodka like there’s no tomorrow. Petitioning me again and again to do the gangster character impression.

It’s taken a while to get the double gun spin down. I dropped them a lot at first. Obviously they’re not loaded. I keep practicing, though, the amusing trained monkey. I even try to say the line with the intonation they prefer. It’s not that I want to amuse them. I have to believe that one of these times, one of the guns they’ll give me will be loaded. Or somehow they’ll drop their guard.

So I practice the line. I adjust it for maximum shock. I get good. This is about escaping, about getting back to who I really am and away from Aleksio’s orbit. He’s like a dangerous black hole—he’ll pull you in if you’re not careful. I can feel his pull working on me with every hour we spend together.

The world I escaped to is a place where laws trump blood vendettas. Where people work together to protect the weak. Where even one death through gun violence means everybody failed. Where kids can still be saved. That’s the world I need to get back to.

It’s true what I said to Aleksio—I miss Chicago. But I can’t be who I am here.

Suddenly the phones are going off. The guns are taken from me. The joke of me being Sergei Kazan is over.

“What’s going on?”

The guys are shrugging on their jackets. They’re acting like men going to their battle stations. A hit back? Lazarus?

“Are they okay?”

Yuri bursts out onto the porch. He looks intense. He points at the picnic table that’s out there. “Sit.”

I sit.

Viktor comes out with a bottle of vodka and sets it down on the table, and then he sets down a glass. “This is for you. It’s nice. You should drink it.”

“Where’s Aleksio?”

“Aleksio is not coming.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s okay, yes.” Viktor pours the vodka into the glass.

“It’s not even dinnertime.”

Viktor sets the glass in front of me. “Was not a request.”

“What’s going on?”

Viktor pushes it toward me.

Yuri watches Viktor darkly.

“Did something happen to my father?”

“I’ll tell you if you drink it.”

I take it with shaking hands. “Is he okay?”

Viktor nods at the glass.

I down it and slam it onto the table.

“Your father is not dead.” He pours another.

“What, then? Where’s Aleksio?”

Again Viktor nods at the glass.

“I don’t want another.”

“Yet you will have another,
sistra
.”

“And then you’ll tell me the rest?”

“I will.”

I take the glass and drain it, then slam it on the table, feeling a weird sense of vertigo.

“Your father is awake. We will kill him, of course, but for now he lives.”

“You fucker.” I go at him but Yuri grabs me and turns me and pushes back down on the rough wooden bench, forces me to sit, using his weight to hold me still, and there’s nothing nice about it.

“Another,” Viktor says.

“What’s going on?”

“Your father needs to tell us more. He needs to get more invested in our cause.” He pours another.

“What are you going to do?”

“You know what I am going to do, I think,” Viktor says. “Now that we have no movie to show him. It was stupid what you did.”

A wave of wooziness washes over me. “No.”

“You are right-handed,” Yuri says, holding my hands and inspecting the pinky with the birthmark. I try to pull my hands to my belly, but he won’t let them go.

Tears come to my eyes. “Get Aleksio.”

“Aleksio will not come.”

I try to get up from the table, but Yuri won’t let me. He seems to know everything I’m about to do before I do it. “You can’t. My father can’t handle it. His heart can’t handle it. You need him alive, don’t you?”

“His heart.” Viktor sneers. “He does not deserve your care. He does not
deserve
shit
.”

“You have all this wrong. He and your father were friends and partners! They were like brothers!”

He brings the glass to my lips, but I shake my head violently and it spills all over us.

“You will want that in you, I think.” Viktor fills it again.

“Why are you doing this? Think! If he really did send you away, it was to save you.”

“You are so stupid.” He sounds disgusted. “Aleksio did not want to tell you—out of kindness he did not want to tell you. ‘We are taking enough from poor Mira,’ he said.”

A horrible chill spreads through my chest.

He pours another and pushes the glass toward me. “I told him it was obvious. ‘She will work it out,’ I said to him, but he did not think that you would work it out.” Viktor shrugs. “He was right.”

“You don’t know shit,” I say.

Viktor’s eyes go dead. “Drink.”

“Fuck you.”

“We will make you drink, then.” Viktor nods at Yuri. Yuri grabs my hands and holds them behind my back while Viktor brings the glass to my lips. Again I make him spill it.

Viktor fills it again.

“Get Aleksio!”

“This I do for Aleksio. Drink.”

I sit there with my lips zipped tight, like if I don’t open my mouth I might not be able to drink, and therefore the finger chopping won’t go ahead.

“Most do not get to drink vodka,” Yuri says, pronouncing it “wodka.” “It just happens.
Fwap
.”

“God, you’re fucking barbarians.”

“Somebody is coming out here with a paper cutter in a few minutes,” Viktor says. “You will be drunk or sober.”

“A paper cutter?” I try wildly to jerk away, writhing in his arms. I knock him in the head and balls, and he has to put down the glass and help Yuri hold me still.

“It will happen,
zolotse
,” he says softly into my hair. “Is sharp. Will be fast.” He lets one of my hands free, and that’s my chance—I take the bottle by the neck, thinking to hit him, but he’s too fast. He snatches it back. I moved too slowly.

“Fuck.” I look down at my pinky, a little bent on the tip, with the freckle birthmark.
This is going to happen,
I think, fighting back the tears. The worst thing is thinking of my father seeing it. He’ll recognize it. He’ll know it’s mine. The blood will be too much for him.

“Shhh,” Yuri says. “You’ll get through.”

“Fuck you.” I sniffle. I should tell them about his blood thing. Or will they just use it against him? My mind feels hazy.

Viktor pours me another. This time I drink it. “I can’t do this.”

“It’s the adrenaline,” Viktor says. “Is still worse if you are sober.”

“Aleksio’s going to kill you.”

“He can kill me after we find Kiro.”

I take a drink and look at my pinky against the rough, dark wood of the picnic table, resisting the impulse to sob. Sobbing won’t solve anything; it could even make things worse. A door slams from somewhere inside house. I perk up, hoping it’s Aleksio. But no, it’s one of the Russians coming out with a bag…from an office supply store.

My blood races as the man who was joking with me not fifteen minutes ago pulls out a box. He rips it open and pulls a big heavy paper cutter from its Styrofoam bed. I twist and turn and scream for Aleksio.

Viktor says, “The fact that you are calling for Aleksio is exactly why I made sure he cannot be here. He will not come.”

“Fuck,” I say, hyperventilating. It’s from the shock of what’s happening to me. I feel like throwing up. “Oh my God.”

I’m feeling woozy. More woozy than I should for just drinking a few shots of vodka. “Did you put something in that vodka?”

“No,” Viktor says. “I wouldn’t ruin good vodka like that.”

“The glass?”

“Maybe.”

Things are feeling tilty. Like I’m not really in my body. “Warn my father beforehand. His heart can’t handle the shock, but if he’s warned…”

“Your worthless father,” Viktor spits. “I should open his chest with a machete and fuck his heart as he dies. If it was not for Kiro, this is what I would do.”

I swallow past the dryness in my mouth. “The Valcheks are the ones who killed your parents, Viktor. They’re the ones you should be angry with. And the Valcheks are dead. Why? Because Dad killed them. He avenged the death of your parents, and this is how you repay him?”

“This is what you tell yourself? That it was the Valcheks?” Viktor wipes the paper cutter. He’s careful, deliberate. Lush lashes like Aleksio’s, but none of his warmth.

“It’s what happened! Everyone knows it.”

“Aleksio knows different. He saw.”

“What?”

“Aleksio saw your father kill our parents. Your father slit their throats. Bloody Lazarus helped.”

My throat feels thick.

“Your father drugged our mother and father and cut their throats. He killed them as they begged for the lives of their babies.”

“No,” I say. “My father wouldn’t…” My heart pounds. “He couldn’t!” I’m about to tell him about my dad’s secret, that he becomes violently ill at the sight of blood, but I can’t form the words.

Viktor draws his face near to mine. “We were all there. Kiro was one. A tiny boy.” He straightens. “I was a baby, too, but not so young. I remember the feeling. The blood. Nothing more.”

“My father wouldn’t do that. Wouldn’t and couldn’t.”

“The man you know now, maybe not. He is old now.” He watches me with dark calm. “Your father split those babies up so that they would never find each other. Me he sent to the worst orphanage in Moscow. Kiro he sold. Aleksio got out. But not before he saw all. Old Konstantin pulled him into a cubby and kept him still. Hand over his mouth. They hid in the very room where the killing was.”

Viktor wipes the cutting surface with vodka. “There are many cubbies in that playroom, no? Many places to hide. He watched it in the reflection of the window. Your father gave our parents drugs to make them slow. He slit their throats and then he threw up, so disgusted was he with what he did.”

“He threw up?”

“He cleaned it up, of course. He is not stupid.”

I’m stunned, reeling.
He threw up.

It’s his reaction to blood. The secret he hides, the secret they would have no way of knowing. Could it be true?

I feel like throwing up myself.

Viktor is droning on with the story. When my father could not find Aleksio, he figured out Konstantin must have helped him get away…and my father put out contracts on them both.

I think about the burn. The hiding. That was my father hunting Aleksio. I think about the look on my father’s face when he recognized Aleksio. Could it be true? God, to kill a mother and father
in front of their babies!