Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance (25 page)

Aleksio

I
set down
the phone, heart thundering in my fucking ears. “They’re coming,” I say to Tito. I storm into Viktor’s room. “Nikolla’s on his way.”

He stands. “She told? She told where we are?”

“She
warned
us,” I growl. She sounded so scared.
Her father wouldn’t scare her like that, would he?
Shivers crawl up my spine. “It could be her father, but I think it’s Lazarus. He’s making his move, and he has Mira.”

“She told you this?”

“More or less.”

“What is more or less?”

“More or less means I know her. They’re coming, got it? They made her answer my call. She endangered herself warning us. They could be out there now.” And if they know she warned us? I can’t think about that.

“You trust her? One word and you trust her?”

“Yeah. I trust her.”

“Just like that.”

“We’re connected, Viktor. I need you to trust me on this. I just know.”

He seems to contemplate this. What is he thinking? Then just like that, he accepts it and shuts his laptop. “I understand,
brat
. We have that C-4. We rig the house to take them all down if they come. If not…” He shrugs.

“If we move on them like that, they’ll know Mira warned us.” “Happy baby animals” wasn’t the most natural comment.

“They’ll know either way. If we run or if we kill them, they’ll know.”

I scrub my hand over my face. “I need to get her out.”

A text. My tech guy comes through with a location—the Beverly Inn. Her dad keeps a suite there. I stand. “I’ll go in there and get her out before they realize what she did.”

“
Brat
,” Viktor says. “You can’t—”

“I love her.”

He looks surprised. Hell, I’m surprised.

“Just like that.”

“Always.”

“Aleksio,” he says darkly. Leave it to Viktor to see love and trust in a dark and tragic light. “Go, then. Take Tito. Brewer. Take all of my men.”

“Leave you?”

“Yuri and I will rig it. Then we’ll wait in the woods and pick them off. It’ll be bloody as hell.”

“Viktor—”

“We’ve done this many times. We could do this drunk.”

Mira would want to prevent more killing, to be neutral like Switzerland or something. Too late for that.

Yuri and Mischa get to work rigging the place, just like Lazarus did with the adoption agency. They’re like an Indy 500 pit crew, laying down cascading triggers. A lot of people will die. The three of them will snipe the survivors from the trees around. This won’t end the war—it’ll make it worse.

The remaining seven of us sneak out the side in case we’re being watched. We head into the forest, cram into one of the vehicles we have stashed over the ridge, and crash out the side road.

It takes forever. Viktor has agreed to text me when the action starts. We have to reach Mira before they arrive. Once they suspect her of warning us, she’s done. Does she realize what she did?

The traffic is shit. I go up on the shoulder at one point. Let the cops try to stop us. Tito argues with me, tells me to be smart.

I’m not thinking straight, I know. I just need to get to her.

Mira

L
azarus holds the
phone, knuckles white, wild eyes turned to me. “You little bitch!”

I back up. “What?”

“’Happy baby animals’ was a code, wasn’t it?” He throws the phone at the door. “The place blew as soon as they entered.”

I hit the wall.

He’s in my face, digging his fingers into my shoulders.

“You’re h-hurting me.”
He’s going to kill me.

“You tipped him off.”

“You think we have codes?” I rip out of Lazarus’s grip and move along the wall toward the window. I’m scared out of my mind. I feel like he can see right through me.

Lazarus advances on me with murder in his eyes. He grabs me again.

It’s then that the door bursts open. I gasp when I see Aleksio shoved in…his lip is bloody, and two of Lazarus’s guys are right behind him, guns at his head.

“Grabbed him out in the hall,” one of them says, setting Aleksio’s weapons on the table.
Clack. clack. Clack.

Lazarus wraps an arm around my shoulders. Aleksio’s eyes shine with hatred.

“I get not taking the finger. But showing up like this?” He smiles. “Why, this is just too delicious. And I’m in such a mood.”

Aleksio’s watching us, steady on his feet…barely.

“Ioannis, how many men did I lose out there?” Lazarus asks.

“Twenty-one we know of,” Ioannis says.

“That’s going to be twenty-one hours I’ll need to hear her beg to die. Or should I split it up between the two of you?” He grabs my hair. “Maybe I’ll play it by ear. And I’ll make Mira tell all about this social worker of yours so that we find Little Kiro, too. Just so that you die knowing that’s handled. It’s good to have closure, don’t you think?”

The blank look on Aleksio’s face is killing me because of what it conceals. This is all my fault for leaving.

“We’ll have to get Konstantin involved, too,” Lazarus continues. “We don’t want to leave him out.”

Ioannis smiles.

Aleksio jerks away from the guys holding him, but they take him back easily. It’s not enough that he’s fucked up with a bloody lip and face and his ankle and who knows how many injuries—no, two guys have guns on him. Like he’s this huge threat. Like he’s a nuclear bomb, liable to go off.

“You had to come for Mira,” Lazarus says. “I can’t imagine she was that good. Guess we’ll see about that.”

Aleksio goes at him then. He actually manages to rip out of one guy’s hold. All the attention is on him.

All off me.

Suddenly it’s like I’m animated from some other planet—I see myself reaching for nearby weapons, taking one from Lazarus’s back belt and one from another guy’s holster. I take off the safeties before they can even react, and I put one to Lazarus’s head and one to Ioannis’s head. “Let him go.”

Aleksio

I
t’s sheer and
utter madness. Mira, taking their guns. She hates guns.

One second I’m utterly fucked in a hotel suite with some of the biggest hitters on the planet, all with pieces trained on me, and then Mira moves like a fucking goddess of lightning and wrath.

Two cannons in her hand, one pointed at Lazarus, the other at his brother Ioannis. The two people in the room who matter.

But I’m freaking. What if they call her bluff? Everyone knows she hates guns. I know it most of all. Mira would never shoot a guy in cold blood. It’s not in her.

Lazarus smirks. “Mira, Mira. You don’t do firearms. I bet you don’t even know if the safety is on or off.”

He’s trying to shake her. My heart thunders.

“On or off,” he says sweetly. “You don’t have the balls.” Lazarus’s about to make a move.

Then she speaks. Or more like, she growls, “You go ahead and try me, motherfucker.”

That voice—it’s like she’s possessed by a demon or something. Everybody freezes.

“You try me.” Oh, God, it’s
not
the voice of a demon—it’s the voice of Sergei Kazan, Russian action star. And then she starts spinning the fucking pieces like a hoodlum.

It’s a total mindfuck—Mira, talking like that and spinning guns, Wild West style. Like the sun rising at night. Like the moon crashing into the stars.

“I’ll fill you so full of lead it’ll be coming out of your ass,” she says.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Mira’s holding a room. With guns.

This is what Yuri and the guys taught her, the gift they didn’t realize they were giving her. In a flash the guns stop spinning and come to rest in her hands like she was born with them there. Like she’s itching to shoot up the room.

Again she trains them on Lazarus and Ioannis. Right on their heads like she’s Jesse fucking James. Like she was born to it.

The atmosphere in the room shifts completely. A minute ago I was the biggest problem in the room. Now it’s Mira, and like magic all of the guns come off me and go onto her. The men do this instinctively. She’s a wild card. Something they don’t understand.

But I understand. This is the woman I love. She makes everything possible.

She’s given me a window, and I’m not wasting it. I take the distraction to grab a guy and use him as a shield while I grab another guy’s weapon. I knock my first guy out, grab Ioannis by what hair he has left, and shove the piece into his cheek. “Everyone but Mira, weapons down. And I mean all of them.”

People comply. Nobody wants Ioannis to be hurt. I have Mira collect the weapons into a pillowcase and sets them by the door. She does it, and then she straightens, looking unsure. Damn. “Rondo, tie Lazarus—now! Hands and feet.”

Rondo looks to Lazarus. Lazarus nods. He’s unpredictable, but he won’t do anything to me while I have Ioannis. I have the room under control now.

Rondo ties Lazarus and then the rest of the guys, hands and feet. They’ve got enough zip ties around.

That’s when things go wrong. Rondo senses Mira’s wavering. Senses that it was all an act, probably.

I see it like a slow-motion train wreck. I see him going for his ankle. A third piece. “Don’t do it,” I grate, trying to be powerful enough for both of us.

I can’t stop him. I see it all in slow motion, and I can’t fucking stop it.

He pulls out his weapon and goes for Mira—just goes at her, a charging bull. She spooks and shoots. The Beretta she nabbed has mad stopping power—it throws her backwards.

Rondo crumples, holding his belly.

Fuck!

She drops the thing and stares hands out, like she’s going to go help him now. Hug him, I don’t know.

“Out!” I say. “Go!”

She turns to me. She’s not even hearing.

“Out in the hall. For me, baby. Go, go, go!”

She looks back at Rondo.

Movement in the corner. Lazarus is trying to get loose.

She’s barely there. She’s in shock.

“Mira, don’t you fall apart. Look at me. Look.”

“You killed him!” Lazarus screams. He’s knows she’s freaking, and he’s pushing her. “How could you?”

“What did you do, bitch?” Ioannis screams.

“Both of you shut up!” I ram Ioannis’s head into the wall to make my point.

Mira jumps.

“Hall. Now!”

She goes for the door, and I limp behind, dragging Ioannis, covering her, covering us, covering the fucking world.

It’s here that I look Lazarus in the eyes. Mira’s out safe in the hall. I have everyone under control. It’s my big chance to execute him.

But all I can think of is Mira out there.
You’re better than that.

I’m not better than that, but I want to be. He looks pretty fucking surprised when I back out into the hall and shut them in.

I jerk up Ioannis’s arm behind his back, nice and painful. We move past the slumped guys in the hall.

Tito and a few of the Russians come out of the stairwell door. “Fuck,” Tito says when he sees the three of us. “Come on.”

I hand Ioannis over to him because my ankle is beyond toasted, and mostly because Mira needs me. I grab her, give her a good hard look. We don’t have the time, but she needs me. “You’re okay.”

She’s shaking. “I killed him.”

“You gut-shot him, nothing more.”

“Nothing more? As if that’s not enough?”

“We gotta get the fuck out, baby.” I pull her. She’s coming along.

Three more flights and we hit ground level. Tito leads the way out, right through the lobby. It should be fine—they disengaged the security cameras.

“Hey!” a desk clerk says uncertainly, backing off when gets a better look at us. Guests at the cab stand outside startle when they see the guns and blood. It’s cool. It takes people a while to mobilize in the face of something outrageous, a little fact of life I happen to know firsthand.

“Medical emergency,” Tito says. Which explains my bloody face, but not the gun on Ioannis, whose face is also bloody. Sirens sound in the distance. But the real problem will be the Nikolla soldiers. We head down the alley out to the street on the other side of the hotel.

A flower delivery truck rolls up.

Tito opens the back. It has metal coolers along either side with a rubber mat between. I hop up and help Mira up, and he slams the door, enclosing us in cool darkness. He’ll handle Ioannis with the other guys. Seconds later we’re off with a jerk.

I turn on my phone light. A refrigerated flower delivery truck. The light jumps as the truck pitches, illuminating the crates and metal coolers all around us.

She’s crying. “I killed him.”

I reach out for her. “Come here.”

She pushes me away.

“Mira, you probably didn’t kill him. You got him in the gut.”

“I know where I got him!” She’s hysterical. “It was a bloody fucking hole in him!” She puts her hand to her chest. “My heart feels like it’s going to beat out of my rib cage. Fuck, I can’t breathe. I can’t feel my face.”

I go to her and grab her, pull her to me.

“I shot him!”

“You had to, Mira. He rushed you. You get to do that when a killer rushes you. You get to defend yourself.”

“I probably killed him.”

“Mira—”

“If you say gut-shot one more time…”

So I hold her.

“I’m a fucking…” She can’t finish the sentence.

“You’re not a killer.”

“They lost twenty-one guys because of me tipping you off.”

“Guys were going to die one way or another.”

“That’s twenty-one human beings. Oh my God, what have I done?”

“Fuck, Mira.” I hold her tight, wishing I could suck up all the darkness.

“They killed Dad. He’s dead, Aleksio. He died—right in front of me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Are you?”

“He’s your dad.”

She pushes her face into my chest. “I don’t even know what to think.”

“Then don’t think,” I say. “I’m with you, okay? We can just be here.” I flip over my phone light so just a little brightness leaks out the edges, and I pull her into the corner of the truck. A small place in the darkness. It was something that helped me on the run sometimes, being in a small place in the darkness. “You’re okay.”