Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance (6 page)

He’s acting like a fucking predator—of course I’d be aware of him. The prey is always wildly aware of the predator.

Another car pulls up. A capable-looking man wearing a T-shirt with what looks like a firefighter insignia on the pocket gets out. Firefighter. That’s close to a cop. Sort of.

I gasp as Aleksio cups my right cheek, staring into my eyes.

“You’re not playing fair,” I say.

“Really? That’s your complaint here? I’m not playing fair?”

“One of them.” His hand on my cheek feels electric.

He studies my eyes. He thinks I’m fucking with him. “And you don’t want to try anything. Not with this guy, either. He’d get involved, and it wouldn’t go well for anyone.”

I regard my old friend with a steady gaze. Like I don’t care. Like I’m not scared. “Seriously, Aleksio, you can’t just kidnap the most powerful man in Chicago.”

He smiles. Kidnapping the most powerful crime boss in Chicago is exactly what he’s done, of course. His smile creates a sparkly sensation that goes clear to my core. It’s fucked up. I push him, and he steps back, smiling like we’re just playing.

There’s a
clunk
over by the car. Gas gun settling back in its place. The clang of the little door to the gas tank.

“Aleksio.” Viktor.

The other guy, Tito, arrives with a white plastic bag.

Aleksio takes my hand and leads me to the car like a lover, opening the door for me, so chivalrous. Unless you feel how tightly he grips. “Ladies first.”

I get in.

We take off, and Aleksio grabs the bag. He passes around waters and candy. He gives me a bottle, a small baggie of English toffee, and panties.

I hold the stuff, stunned.

“Sorry, Kitten. Made in China was the best designer label they had.”

He thinks I’m surprised by the panties, but it’s the chocolate-covered toffee that gets me. English toffee is my favorite. Always has been. It’s a treat I never let myself have these days, because if I start eating it, I’ll never stop.

Did he remember?

He turns to stare out at the cornfields. “Go ahead.”

“Thanks,” I say, too baffled even to bristle at the designer tag insult. I put down the candy and the water. The panties are the cheap synthetic three-for-the-price-of-one kind attached by a plastic thingy that goes through a cardboard square. I yank them apart and put one of the pairs on, shimmying them up under my skirt. When I look over I catch him watching. With a bored expression, he tears into his Snickers bar.

I pick at the string on the toffee. It’s the kind of candy you’d find in the sad little “fancy” section of a rural gas station. “Why’d you pick this?” I ask.

“What?”

“You had him buy me English toffee.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

Right. As if he remembered. I break off a corner, chew it indifferently. I need to get my mind around the fact that I’m in actual danger. I need to be smart. To get the hell away.

I ask a few times where we’re going, what we’re doing, but Aleksio only talks when he feels like it. He’s back to surly silence.

People change, and sometimes they lose their fucking soul,
he said. Maybe that’s the best he can do, warn me who he is now.

They put up the top of the convertible, and we drive around Chicago a while, staying out of areas my father controls—or controlled. I’m not really sure about the status of the family. But if Lazarus has found out what happened, there’s going to be trouble.

It’s Saturday afternoon. No rush hour. Aleksio’s making phone calls. Marshaling troops.

We eventually pull up in a garbage-strewn alley on the poor end of a business district where a lot of charities operate. The buildings on either side are nondescript office buildings, not old enough to be cool but not new enough to be nice. One of the white vans from the house pulls in behind us. A few guys with assault weapons come around, some of them Russian, some Albanian-American.

I’m alone in the car for a second, and then Aleksio’s back with handcuffs. He cuffs me to the door.

“We’ll be a few minutes.” He pauses, then continues, “You still have a chance to get out of this alive. Don’t blow it by hitting the horn or something.”

The pack of them are at a shadowy side door. I hear an alarm beep, and then suddenly they’re all in and the alarm is off. Tito remains outside, guarding.

I lean all the way over, trying to check where I am, see whether anybody is around to signal. I catch sight of a small metal plate over the door. Worland.

That’s the place my father told them about. Worland Agency, he said.

Moving fast—they didn’t even case the place. This tells me they think Kiro’s in danger.
Obviously
. Why else take a risk like they did today?

And what if they can’t find him? Worse—what if he turns up dead?

Aleksio

T
he adoption agency
smells like new carpet and Lysol. There are two rows of cubicles surrounded by meeting rooms and a shitload of file drawers and computers.

The guys are flinging open drawers and pulling the lids off file boxes, packing up everything that could lead to Kiro.

Kiro is vulnerable as hell right now. He could be a guy working in a suburban carwash or college kid sitting in Accounting 101. No idea what’s coming at him. And if anybody figures out what we’re up to, there are some heavy hitters coming for him.

It’s a miracle Aldo Nikolla and Lazarus didn’t kill him or Viktor that bloody night, considering the prophecy. My guess is that Nikolla didn’t have the balls to kill two tiny kids. He thought he could lose them. Thought they’d stay lost.

And we thought we had time.

Tito and the rest of my tight little crew knew I’d found Viktor, and that was containable, but we recently found out the whole of the Russian mafia has been talking about it. The baby sent away, presumed dead. The brother from America comes to get him. The sleeping king. Heirs to a crime empire in America.

Fucking gangster grapevine.

The guys are taking every file and every shred of paper related to the year our family ended. A few of them are downloading the computer files. We’ll take the laptops, too. I help stack the boxes at the door. I get updates from the guys watching across the street. So far, so good.

Worland is a charity that has a pregnancy counseling and adoption arm—I vetted it on the way over. It’s the kind of place people bring babies they don’t want, no questions asked—that’s one of the things on their home page. And apparently it’s also the kind of place a guy sends a baby he wants lost.

It really is possible Aldo Nikolla doesn’t know anything beyond the agency name. The agency could’ve set those terms to protect itself.

The files are building up. I have some guys check the basement, and I get others started on bringing the shit out to the van. It’s amazing to think the key to finding our baby brother could be hidden in all this paper.

Kiro.

My mom let me hold him when she brought him home from the hospital, so tiny and squirmy. Just so tiny. And he looked up at me with those big brown eyes, and instantly I loved him.

Viktor wanted to hold Kiro, too, but Mom said he was too little, but more like too reckless. Viktor was a one-boy wrecking crew. So he laid a careful hand on Kiro’s little belly.

Kiro needs you to be a good big brother to him
, my mom said to me.
Kiro needs his brother to protect him.

My heart nearly pounded out of my chest—that’s how proud I felt when that she said it. I promised that I would.

I hold that promise like a blaze in my heart. The slaughter happened soon after. Did Mom know there was trouble coming?

It hurts to remember her, but somewhere maybe she can see I’m fighting for Kiro. She needs to see I won’t let him down.

Little Kiro.

He could be in the army for all we know, though I doubt it. Marching in formation is not in the Dragusha DNA.

Viktor had no idea of his roots, and he grew up from nothing to become a key assassin in the Bratva—the Russian mafiya—in Moscow. Meanwhile I ran my own gang just under the Nikolla radar, developing my clan. It was like Viktor and I were living parallel criminal lives on either side of the world without knowing it.

Viktor comes up, and I clap him on the shoulder. Kiro. Alive. Maybe.

“A lot of paper to go through,” he says.

I grumble. It’s a lot, but we’ll go through it all the same, because they may not have computerized the older files. A low-rent place like this. Half-illegal.

“Good thing we have guys.”

Viktor checks a text. “Old man’s still out cold.” His Bratva guys are holding Aldo Nikolla in the basement of a chop shop.

He shakes his head. He doesn’t like it. We were hoping for an address, and this is so roundabout. And Mira’s father is not a man you can hold on to long. It’s like kidnapping the president of the United States—even if you manage to pull it off, you know you’re not keeping him long. He’s too big, and there’s too much heat.

“All this paper,” he says. “I say we send Aldo a finger.”

My gut twists. Sending Mira’s body parts was a plan we’d made while drunk and full of rage—and fearful for Kiro. She’s not a fucking soldier. She’s not in this. And the way she looked at me when she remembered…

“Let’s see what we get. No need to spill all our jelly beans in the hallway.”

“
Brat
,” he says. I never get sick of Viktor calling me that—it’s the Russian word for “brother.” “You guessed her candy.”

“Nah. I already knew. That’s the kind I used to steal for her when we skipped out of church choir. As a bribe to skip church choir.”

“The fashion princess used to skip church choir?” He snorts.

“She was quite the rebel.”

“From rebel to consumer running dog,” he spits.

I narrow my eyes, not so sure I like that last part.

“It is even worse that you remembered her candy,” Viktor says. “I think it will not be so easy to cut off her finger.”

“Have I ever not done what it takes?” I ask him. “I’ll cut off my own fucking fingers if it saves Kiro’s life.”

He grunts and grabs a box. He’s right, though. It was a lot easier to talk about sending her body parts to her dad in theory.

A text comes in. Suspicious car circling the block twice. Not good.

Viktor doesn’t have to see it to know there’s trouble—he can tell from my face. One year together and it’s like we were never separated. He’s hustling everyone out with the last of the boxes.

Back outside in the alley, I uncuff Mira, pull her out of the Maserati, and shove her into the back of the van with the files and boxes of laptops. Then I grab Tito. “You watch her. No one touches her.”

We continue loading up. When it’s done, Viktor swings in the front of the van, and I take the wheel. I don’t like putting somebody else in charge of Mira like this, but if things get hot, Viktor and I need to run the show. Our fucked-up talents as criminals know no bounds.

Viktor’s lieutenant, Mischa, pulls out in front of us in the flashy sports car. If there’s someone out there, Mischa’ll draw that person away while we get the van full of files out of sight.

By now, Bloody Lazarus and the rest of Nikolla’s crew will know there’s been an attack, but they won’t know who we are or why we came. People will be focusing on the house, combing it for Aldo Nikolla’s remains, trying to figure things out, buying us time.

Only Mira and her dad know what’s going on, and they won’t be talking.

But no plan is foolproof.

“Got something to say?” I ask as I pull out.

“No,
brat
.”

Yeah, right.

We drive in silence.

In books, the feeling of being followed is always a tingle down the spine or your hair standing up on the back of the neck. But for me, it’s more of a buzzing in the awareness. So faint you don’t notice unless you tune into it.

Getting out of there, that’s how I feel—awareness buzzing, even though I turn one way and then another and I can see, technically, that nobody is following us, but there’s that buzzing, and I have the sense of eyes on the streets. Could they be after us already? Guessing our purpose? Nikolla didn’t get to where he was by surrounding himself with stupid people.

Viktor scowls, but he doesn’t question my maneuvers. He just scowls. He’s always ready for something to be worse than expected. He was pulled from the orphanage at an early age and raised the way really sick assholes raise kids. I don’t know whether he even feels his kills anymore.

When I’m confident we’re not being followed, I pull the van into a wasteland area at the edge of the tracks and park in the shadow of some junky abandoned strip mall. A daycare and a bakery used to be here, long closed, but the payday loan shop down the block is still going full blast. We’ve used this area before. The sightlines and escape routes are killer. Another of our vehicles pulls up.

I hop out and send a few guys to the nearby corners, and then I go around and open up the back.

Tito jumps out. Mira stays huddled in a far corner, glaring, squinting, long dark hair pushed all around to one side, so that it hangs off one shoulder like an onyx waterfall, glinting in the streetlight.

“Everything go okay?” I ask Tito.

“Yep.”

I climb into the back and pull out a few files, feeling her eyes on me.

She feels too familiar, like gears clicking into place.

She still looks at me like I’m that kid she knew—I see it in her eyes. Fucking Rangermaster. She even remembered Rangermaster. And yeah, it was stupid to give her the English toffee because God, the way she looked at me.

When she looks at me like that, I want to shake her, because that’s a road to a whole lot of fucking pain for her.

I don’t need her looking at me like that. Saving Kiro might mean hurting Mira. Bad.

Tito and few other guys and me are in the back with her. I’ve put myself across from her, far away as possible and separated by boxes of files and stacks of papers, like a signal to myself that she’s not mine.

She glares. The glare is good. It’s right. Hell, she had the right idea with the spitting, reckless as it was.