Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance (3 page)

“Have every possible resource scouring for Lazarus. He’ll be a problem.”

Viktor nods and puts his attention onto his phone, fingers flying.

I study the strong, familiar line of Viktor’s nose, so like my captor’s. Same with the cheekbones, the lips. Brothers. They both look Albanian, but how is one brother American and one brother Russian?

And then I see Dad in the golf cart, buzzing down the lawn.

“Dad! Watch out!”

Dad hears me, but he keeps driving his cart, which looks like a toy against the green. He knows what’s happening. Probably understands it better than I do.

“Turn back!”

Dad sees us now. Face grim.

“This is already better than I thought,” my captor says. “Such fucking drama.” He nuzzles my hair, turning it on for effect on Dad. I’m just a prop. I always have been, in this world.

“You’re not going to get out of this.”

“I like the way you smell,” my captor whispers. My mouth goes dry as he slides a hand over my pink skirt, holding me tight against him. His body is packed so tight with muscles, he feels like stone underneath me—or he would, if not for the immense heat he gives off.

But his attention isn’t on me. It’s on my father, who’s out of the cart now, running, nearing.

Running is bad for his heart. “Daddy,” I whisper.

“Shh. Daddy’s coming.” My mouth goes dry as he slides the barrel of the gun over my cheek in a horrible, gentle caress.

He wants me to look scared, so I do my best to look bored. Probably not pulling it off. I am scared.

My father slows and holds out his hands, a placating gesture. “Please—”

My captor surges up off the bench, taking me with him, practically pulling my arm out of the socket. We head to the center of the green, green lawn. I become aware of a few more men arrayed around the grounds, seeming to materialize from the shadows around trees and outbuildings. A lot of big guns. Assault rifles.

“Whatever this is, leave her out of this.” My father keeps his hands up. “I can give you so much. More than you can imagine.”

So my dad doesn’t know him, either.

My mouth goes dry as my captor slides the barrel of the gun over my cheek, tracing a design over my cheekbone.

I see my father out of the corner of my eye, but I can’t keep my eyes off the gun, cool and deadly across my skin.

“Let her go,” my father says. “You looking for money, is that it? We could talk about that. Bank accounts. Boats.” Dad points at his cherished 1940s mahogany Chris-Craft, moored at the dock. “Beautiful, priceless things. Whatever you want.”

I heave a breath of relief when my captor finally takes the gun off my cheek. “Boats are just glorified cars,” he growls, “except they don’t go anywhere.” The next thing I know, he has it pointed at Dad’s million-dollar boat. He pulls me to his chest as the gunshots tear out.

Viktor is smiling, maybe laughing—I can’t tell—as he shoots the boat, too. I cringe as the assault weapons start. It’s a war zone suddenly.

And then it’s over. And everybody’s attention is on my father’s precious boat, half-sunk.

He’s made his point. This is a man you don’t buy.

“Now for your dear daughter,” he says.

My father rushes toward me. Guys materialize from nowhere to grab him. Viktor pats him down, takes his Luger, his phone, his second Luger. He even finds what Dad calls his party favor, the gun tucked in a special pocket at the back of his jacket. They’re tight and well trained.

“Touch her and I will kill you,” Dad says. “I’ll have your balls.”

My captor releases me. I quickly work my hands out of the strap and throw it down, but my arm is seized by one of his minions. My captor doesn’t look; he knows where his men are. He just strolls up to my dad—
djall e bukar
—a beautiful devil. “Is that so?”

“We’ll string you up and—”

Crrrack
.

I scream as his hard, cruel hit sends Dad stumbling backward. He falls, blood dripping from his lip to his white shirt.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I say. “Leave him alone!”

“Stand up, Aldo,” my captor says.

“One hair on her head,” Dad growls. “If you hurt one hair—”

“Please,” I say. “He has a bad heart.”

“Poor Aldo Nikolla,” he says with a mocking edge. Mocking my father. No man would dare. Ever. It’s here that I know my world has changed.

I try to pull away. Arms tighten around me.

“Daddy,” I whisper, watching him through bleary eyes.

“It’s okay, Kitten,” Dad says.

“Kitten,” my savage captor sneers. I can’t tell whether he’s mocking Dad’s affection or whether it’s the name, which, admittedly, I never loved. I always saw it as wishful thinking on Dad’s part.

The intruder comes back to me, drapes an arm around my shoulders. The threat hurts Dad more than any blow. “
Kitten
,” he says, pulling me close.

Dad looks horrified.

I twist in his arms and get an elbow out, manage to shove him away.

He stumbles back. “Oh, Kitten!”

Different arms close around mine, new guys holding me from both sides, holding me too tightly. I try futilely to jerk away.

My captor’s smile is all brutal beauty. He sparkles with hate, taking pleasure from Dad’s pain. This is very, very personal.

“You disgust me,” I say.

My captor comes to me, studying my face, my eyes, like he’s looking for something. Again I get this hit of familiarity. But how could I possibly know him? I turn away.

“Unh-uh,” he says. “You don’t get to do that with me.” He takes my chin and forces my gaze back to his, holding my jaw in a fierce grip, fingers thick and strong. I can feel his words like a knife in Dad’s heart. “You’re mine now to use as I see fit.”

I suck in a breath. Dad can’t take much more of this.

“And when I want you to look at me, you look at me,” he says.

I won’t go down whimpering.

So I look at him.

And I spit at him—right in his face—shocking myself. Never in my life have I done such a thing.

A bright dime of saliva glistens on the stubble-darkened skin under his cheekbone. It’s small—dainty, even—but it may as well be a nuclear bomb for how it silences everyone, stops everything.

What have I done?

The men holding me have gone stiff.

Even the wind in the trees above seems to still. Dad’s supporting himself on his elbow, hand at his chest.

The intruder doesn’t wipe the spit off—no, he’s too cool for that. He lets it glisten in the sunshine as he stares into my eyes.

His gaze is so powerfully intimate, I think I might not be able to move even if my arms weren’t being held by his guys.

My belly quivers as he takes a step toward me. One, then another, until he’s directly in front of me. His beautiful smile is cold as ice.

“No,” my father says from somewhere in the distance. “No.”

But I can’t look away. Nobody’s ever looked at me with such intensity. My heart pounds.

The intruder raises a finger, and I can see the thick pad of it. A white line bisects the inside of the knuckles;
defensive wound,
I think sort of automatically. I see a lot of them in my work.

Slowly he swipes it through the spittle on his cheek, then he holds it up in front of my face so that I can see. He seems happy. A furious angel at full blast, spit on his finger, gun down at his side.

Panic washes over me like a haze. He’s going to wipe that finger on my face or lips. Punch me at best. Most likely kill me.

What have I done? Made it easy.

He turns his hand and simply looks at his finger.

My pulse is an ocean in my ears.

He looks back up, invades my eyes with his stare.

And then he does something I never in a million years would’ve predicted: Looking deep into my eyes, pinning me with his gaze like that, he sucks on his own finger. He fucking sucks my spit off it.

My belly tightens over the dangerous sexuality of the gesture.

But he doesn’t stop there. No, he keeps going, pushing his finger in through his thick lips, shoving it in—slowly, inexorably. Eyes pinning me.

The haze intensifies. The moment goes on forever. I stand helpless in the face of all the things he’s shoving into my mind with that move.

It’s domination, and it’s danger. Invisible fingers sliding into me.

Then he starts to pull it out, just a glint of a smile in the depths of his dark eyes. He pulls it out slowly. This guy, he wants to make me feel every second. Every inch of it.

And I do feel it.

I can’t look away from this dangerous stranger with just a glint of a smile in the chocolate pools of his eyes.

I understand something in this moment: Nobody gets out of here unscathed.

“Take
me
,” my father says. “Kill
me
. It’s what you came here for.”

I’ve never heard him so frightened. Dad’s strength has always been dependable as gravity. It was dark strength, used in a way I’ll never condone, but it was always there. Everything’s spinning off its axis.

The barbarian doesn’t take his eyes from mine. “Take you? On what planet are you more fun than Kitten is?” Those evil lips form into a diabolical smile. That, too, is a weapon for this guy.

“But there is one thing.”

“What?” my father asks.

“Our brother,” he says. “You give us the location of our brother, and we’ll be in a slightly better mood.”

My father looks confused. “And do I know your brother?”

I stiffen as Viktor nears my father. I’m thinking he’ll hurt him again, but he just hands my father a paper photo.

My father takes it. Even from feet away, I can see the small white rectangle tremble in my father’s hands. He looks from Viktor to my captor. I know him well enough to see the gears turning in recognition…and horror.

“Seems I’m not dead after all.” My captor nods his head at Viktor. “This one was to be sent a world away. You’d think he’d be the hard one to find.”

“What’s going on?” I say. “Daddy—”

My father’s lost in this, though. Whatever it is, it’s big.

Viktor speaks up. “We cannot seem to find our baby brother. Our
bratik
.” He pronounces it in an ultra-Russian way, rolling the
r
.
Brlod-dy
. He snatches the photo from him, and I catch a glimpse. Three little boys. Two of them infants.

Brothers. Something about the picture tugs at the edges of my memory.

The Russian one says, “We get our brother back alive, or we kill your kitten, you understand?”

I suck in a breath. I’ve been around this life long enough to know there’s nothing empty about that threat.

“A name and an address,” my captor says.

“I don’t have that—I swear!” Dad says. And I don’t believe him.

When in my life has my father not bent over backward for me?

Cold horror slides through me.

Aleksio

A
ldo Nikolla looked
so much bigger when he was slaughtering our parents. But then, I was small. Just nine.

And then there’s Mira. I have this weird feeling that she almost recognizes me. It fucks me up a little.

I tell myself to stay cool, stay hard. I take Mira back—she’s his weak spot, his only pressure point. I hold her a little more tightly than I should, and she gasps.

It affects him. I see it in his eyes. Good.

I slide my finger back from her chin and down her jawline. Rough, scarred finger over the unbroken creamy expanse of her cheek—a metaphor for the two of us now.

Mira was there in the background of a lot of the surveillance photos over the years, the cherished daughter in the castle her family ripped from ours. We’d been friends before the attack—as much of friends as nine-year-olds can be. I’d study her expressions when new pictures came in. Always smiling.

She smiles, so happy,
Konstantin would say.
The slaughter of the Dragushas has been very, very good to Mira. She takes everything while you hide like a dog. She shops with your millions. Of course she smiles.

Konstantin imagined I hated her for those smiles, but I didn’t. I’d wonder how she was doing, what she was thinking. Sometimes I’d enlarge the shit out of the images. I felt bad for her when her mother died. I was actually worried about her. She had no idea that her own father was capable of slaughtering his dearest friends in cold blood. I thought to warn her. It was a childish impulse.

Needless to say, I didn’t admit any of this to Konstantin. He was a hardened Kosovo war vet, out for bloody vengeance. He’d say I was fixating on her, obsessing over her. He’d think I couldn’t do what needed to be done. But I’ve always done what I have to.

Over time, those smiles intensified, and Mira appeared to transform into a plastic princess, a black-haired Barbie doll. Meanwhile, I transformed into something cold and dark and barely human. So I guess I can’t fault her.

I hold her a little more tightly than I should and slide my finger back from her chin and down her jawline. I always wondered what her skin feels like. Answer: softer than imagined.

I feel her pulse pounding—she’s frightened, but she puts on a good front. For him? I continue down to her collarbone, I stop just before the perfect line of it disappears into her filmy white top. I’m scaring her in order to fuck up the old man. A means to an end.

It’s not supposed to be fucking me up.

“I’ll kill you,” the old man says.

I smile. I’m getting to him. He’s a gambler. He’ll gamble Mira—to a point. I just need to push more. Make it more real for him—and for her. I can’t let him set the terms.

“Let her go,” he growls.

I point the piece at him. “Mira is mine until we have Kiro back. That’s done. What you do now determines how bad it goes for her. That’s all that’s on the table…” But why am I pointing a gun at him? I put it back on her cheek. That perks him up.

“Take off your panties, Kitten,” I say.

Her chest jerks with an intake of breath.

That’s right,
I think.
I’m the motherfucker who will cross every fucking line to get my baby brother back.
I turn my head and growl into her ear. “Take ’em off.”