Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance (8 page)

But that can’t matter. I’ve done a lot of bad things I couldn’t have imagined doing beforehand. Like that first kill and all the fucked-up things after. You put one foot in front of another, and you don’t stop until it’s done.

But this feels different.

“Oh my God,” she says. And then she wraps her arms around herself and begins to sob, there alone on the couch.

It fucks me up, so I sit by her and pull her into my arms and let her shake and sob. It’s the worst thing I can do. I wish she was drunk. I wish I was drunk. I force myself to think of Kiro out there, unprotected. Innocent. I promised my mother I’d protect him.

It’s Mira’s finger versus Kiro’s death.

“You’ll be fine,” I say softly, holding her tightly. Comforting her for what a monster I have to be to her.

Mira’s his weakness only if he thinks we’re serious. If he thought we were serious, we’d have an address right now—that’s what I’m thinking. Threats weren’t enough. We need to panic him, make him understand. I try to think of any other way to do that.

“Will you take a picture of it?”

“What?”

“Take a picture of it. So I can remember it? I don’t have a picture of it.”

“Of your pinky?”

She holds up her hand and looks at the back, then the front. “I like how it…” I feel her chest convulse with unshed tears.

Bends
, I think, finishing the sentence for her. It bends a little bit inward at the knuckle.

Fuck.

“Fine.” I say it like I’m annoyed. I drag her up and over to the window. Beyond her is the moonlit Lake Michigan in all its fake postcard glory. “Which side?”

She looks at her hand front and back. “Back.”

“That’s the side I’d pick, too,” I say.

“What happened to you, Aleksio?”

Your father slit my mom and dad’s throats and sent my brothers to the ends of the earth.
But I don’t say it. We’re hurting her enough.

“Tell me—”

“I turned into a real fucking bastard, I guess,” I say. “A bastard who’ll take this nice picture for you. Press your hand here.”

She presses it to the window. Her hair has come loose, dark curls around her face, a face I would hate like the devil if Konstantin had his way. I snap a picture with my phone.

When I show her the photo, she starts crying again.

“Come on.” I wrap my arms around her. She’s trembling, turning into a total basket case. Finally I just pick her up and carry her to the couch. I sit down with her still on my lap.

Suddenly she stops crying, seems to stiffen. “Did someone torture you?”

“What?” I ask, startled.

She touches my arm, the spot just to the side of the mottled pink burn scar. She turns up to me, eyes shining with tears. Even after a cry she’s beautiful. Really beautiful. “This is a cigarette burn.”

God, I remember this about her—the one way to stop her from crying was always to show her that someone hurt worse. To give her something to care about outside of herself. But I can’t. It can’t be me. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” she says. “It’s a cigarette burn. A really bad one. Somebody would’ve had to hold it very deliberately to your skin for a very long time.”

“You want a gold star?”

“Somebody hurt you.”

“Somebody
saved
me.”

“Whoever did this to you, Aleksio, that person didn’t save you. This is not what a savior does.”

I push down my sleeve. I’d rather eat glass than be exhibit A for Mira’s sympathy. Even if it’s what she needs to calm down. “You say that because you don’t know.” I adjust her on my lap, let her sit more naturally. I put my gun and my phone aside, just out of her reach. “It was an accident,” I say.

“Doesn’t look like an accident.”

“He didn’t know. He was helping me hide. He was playing a part, and I had to stay invisible. Not move.” For a moment I’m back there letting my arm burn. Trying to be a soldier for mighty Konstantin, the only person I had left in the world. I’m glad she can’t see my face.

“How old were you?”

I don’t tell people stories from then—not ever. This isn’t even one of the dark stories, the lose-your-faith-in-humanity stories. But if it gets her mind calmed, things will go easier with the finger. I take a strand of hair between two fingers, remembering huddling there next to Konstantin, eyes and lips squeezed tight. “Nine.”

“Jesus.”

“Shit happens.”

“Shit happens? That’s your astute commentary? Shit happens?”

“You remember Konstantin? The old bodyguard?”

“They said he helped the Valcheks.”

Valcheks were just the scapegoats, but I don’t argue with her on that. She’s upset enough. “Konstantin saved my life. He got me out of there before they found me. They hunted the two of us everywhere. I mean, we could not stop running. We had no money—we ran with clothes on our backs. I was actually in PJs.”

“God—”

“Better than being in Spiderman underwear, right?” I pull her tight to me and put my chin on her head. I shouldn’t be doing this tenderness shit. Maybe just for a moment, I think. Just a moment of rest. Of something nice.

I tell her the story. It’s like an out-of-body experience, watching myself tell her. Suddenly I don’t want to stop. The way she listens is a kind of nourishment.

In those dark days I would sometimes think about her and me stretched out on the lawn under the badminton net, splitting apart blades of grass—it was a kind of happy place, I suppose. The boy I was back then needed the sympathy she’s giving me now. But here in this hotel room, her sympathy is hell on the man I have to be.

I have to be that man. That monster. I owe it to my baby brother. To my dead parents.

“You did it. You survived.”

“Survival isn’t amazing, Mira. People are animals in the end, and you do what you have to do to stay alive. It’s built in. Like breathing. You want to believe the best, but it’s a fucking lie.”

She pushes my sleeve back up and rests her fingers on the burn spot, as if to heal it with her fucking sympathy.

I close my eyes as she moves her thumb, back and forth over nearby healthy skin—absentmindedly, maybe, but it’s a caress all the same, and it gets me a little hot because nobody ever touches me like that.

She’s warm and soft in my arms, and suddenly there’s a kind of wrong energy spinning between us—utterly sexual. Her breathing is even a little ragged. Maybe it’s fear or maybe arousal. Maybe both.

My mind crowds with images of her under me. Skin flushed. Hair spread around her head like a dark halo. Pale breasts. That Mira gleam in her eyes. Mira was always up for a dare, to go someplace we shouldn’t.

Mira always liked things extreme—it’s why we always got along. In a flash of intuition, I know that’s how she’d like to fuck. I’d hold her down and do it hard and dirty and connect with that place deep down inside her where she knows her sunny, plastic smiles are a lie.

Stop it.

I shut my eyes and drag in the scent of her hair like a drug. It’s all I get. I’ve threatened to cut off her fucking finger, for Christ’s sake. I can’t fuck her too, as much as I’m desperate to.

“He must’ve felt awful when he found out.”

“What?”

“When Konstantin learned what he did.”

“Oh. He didn’t know.”

“Afterwards, I mean.”

“And why the fuck would I tell him?”

“You didn’t
tell
him about the burn?” She pulls away. “What? Like, not at all?”

“He would’ve just felt like shit.”

“So you didn’t tell him? It would’ve been an unGodly amount of pain.”

“It wasn’t like my leg got blown off. It was war, Mira, you don’t stop for something you can handle with a Band-Aid. I grew up different than you. You need to understand that. I’m different. I went somewhere you don’t come back from.”

She settles back against me, nestling into my chest and starts sliding that thumb back and forth again along the good part of my arm. It’s connecting right to my cock.

Her voice is husky. “There’s no such place. Where a person can’t come back from.”

My heart pounds, and the way I’m holding onto her isn’t right. Like the twisted fucker I am, I pull her closer, up against my body for maximum control. It’s a hold for a hostage. With just a shift or two, it’s a hold for a lover.

I look at the spot on her hair where I want to press my face, overcome by the intensity between us, listening to her ragged breathing, feeling her gentle touch. If I were in the habit of lying to myself, I’d say she’s touching me because she wants to, like it’s not a self-soothing thing—or self-serving.

During those early days when we were on the run with nothing to eat, Konstantin would take me past restaurants and tell me to breathe in the smells. He lied to me and said that smells were just as nourishing as food if you really sucked them in. He actually had me believing it for a while.

We’d stand behind some of the nicest restaurants in the towns where we hid, me like an idiot full of longing, eyes shut, breathing in what I so desperately needed.

It’s what I do now. I suck in the scent of her and try to make that enough. I suck in the scent of her when all I really want is to bury myself in her. Lose myself in her.

Instead I’ll take her finger. I owe it to Kiro.

“You love the one who protected you,” she says. “You wanted to protect him back.”

“I would’ve died for Konstantin,” I say, breathing in her scent again.

She pulls away and looks at my eyes. “It’s what we do with the people we love.” She’s looking at me like she really wants me to get what she’s saying. “He can’t handle seeing my finger, Aleksio. You have to find another way.”

I stiffen, heart thundering.

“It’ll kill him,” she says.

“Are you seriously comparing me and Konstantin to you and your dad? Seriously? Your fucking father?”

She rises off my lap, alarmed. Her knees hit the coffee table. “Whoa!”

I grab her arms to keep her from going over backwards, but I don’t let go.

I hold her in limbo between falling backward and falling into me, a little off balance. My cock is raging. My cock likes this.

That’s when it comes to me that there’s a way I don’t take her finger. It’s twisted. It’s not the other way she would’ve had in mind.

But it’s another way all the same.

I tighten my hold on her wrists.

“What?” she gasps. She senses something.

Slowly I guide her down. Not into my lap this time, but down to her knees in front of me. Because I’m a twisted killer, and fuck if I don’t want her mouth more than my next heartbeat.

She watches my eyes as I do it, comprehension dawning.

“You want to keep your finger?”

Her eyes fall to my cock, raging in my slacks. Her chest expands. She lifts her gaze back to mine.

I take it as a yes.

Not once has she thought about the pain of losing a finger; it’s all about Aldo not being able to handle it. The man who killed his best friend and didn’t have the stones to finish off the babies—not that I’m complaining.

She puts her hands on my knees, slides upwards.

My heart thunders, and my cock strains behind layers of fabric.

“You’re thinking maybe there’s another way.” She’s grateful. That’ll change soon.

I put my arms out on the back of the couch like she’s some whore between my legs. My mouth goes dry as her fingers approach. “Maybe.”

This whole power play shouldn’t get me off, but it does. I love her on her knees in front of me. I love the wrong energy between us.

Mira’s skin looks flushed; for a second, I think she wants me. It’s as much of a delusion as smells being the same thing as a big juicy steak and a basket of garlic bread, but I’ll take it.

She slides nearer to my crotch. I suck in a silent breath as she makes soft contact with my raging erection. She scratches lightly with her nails and gives me a playful look. I give her nothing.

She cups her hand around it, a half-moon of pressure.

She undoes the button. She’s shit at working the zipper, breathing hard, now. She looks up and lets me hold her with my eyes, or maybe she’s holding me with hers.

“I knew you’d find another way,” she says.

I steel myself as she pulls my shirt up from my belt. She leans forward to kiss my abs, tits pressed on my legs. She’s whoring herself for a piece of shit, but the message gets lost in my mind, and all I see is that she’s the strong one. Between her worthless father and her, she’s the strong one.

She undoes my zipper. I adjust my hips to let her pull me out, making her do all the work. The cool air hits my cock. She curls her hand around my root. Squeezes. It feels so fucking good my eyes blur. I give her a steely look. It’s all she gets.

She comes in closer, pushing between my legs. As if they have a will of their own, my hands go to her hair, so dark and silky. She keeps the squeeze on my cock. I want to thrust into her hand, into her face. I want to flip her over on the couch and plunge into her. I want her so bad I think I might implode.

She’s breathing onto my cock now.
Fuck
. I close my eyes, tip my head back.

She seems like she wants me.

Just empty smells
, I tell myself, but some fucked-up part of me doesn’t care. Whoring for her worthless dad, but I don’t care about that, either.

“Mira.” I stroke the back of her hair. “Grab me at the root. Harder.” My voice sounds strangled. I settle both hands onto her hair.

She tightens her hold and licks my cock, ice cream cone style, pushing waves of heat and need through me. I never wanted anyone more.

“I’m not a good person like you remember,” I warn.

“But you won’t cut off my finger.” It’s a question.

“If you do what I say.”

“Okay.”

It’s hot. It shouldn’t be so hot.

I grab her hair and look hard into her brown eyes. “Look at me when you do it,” I say.

Keeping her doelike eyes on me, she takes me in her mouth. Just a little bit at first, wetting the tip. I bite the inside of my cheek, to balance things with a little pain.

I’d be lying to say I never imagined this. There was a certain yacht shot Konstantin got hold of, a bunch of Nikolla’s made guys at somebody’s engagement party, a picture like all the rest except for sixteen-year-old Mira in the background in a bikini. Let’s just say that picture was in my stash. But this is so much better. Full-color, full-blast 3-D, her mouth a hot, silky cave. The pleasure is so intense I want to close my eyes, but I don’t, because watching her is so goddamn powerful.