Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) Read online

  “Rubik’s Cube,” he says. “We used to love them. We would race.”

  I pause. Another trick. I want to finish it. Red squares are where blues should be. The green, the red. It pains me not to finish it.

  “Go on.”

  I set it aside. “Another life.”

  “Don’t you want to know, Tanechka?” He lies down next to me now, on his belly, head propped in his hands. “You used to be curious as a cat. It would sometimes get you into trouble.”

  His nearness gives me an unruly feeling—so much feeling. My impulse is to sit up, so that the feeling might shake out of me. But such a sudden movement would reveal far too much. I stay. I pretend to be unaffected.

  “You always loved stories and mysteries.” He takes hold of a bit of fabric from my sleeve and rubs it between his thumb and forefinger—unconsciously, it seems. But nothing this man does is unconscious. Best to remember.

  “I remember once we had a ring that somebody lost—a ruby ring. So beautiful, with an unusual pattern. Celtic, you thought.”

  He doesn’t touch my skin, only my sleeve. Still, he has such a gravitational pull. He continues to speak. The velvet of his voice seems to sweep against my skin. This man who would die ten times to take my pain, admiring and enchanting me. He’s too rich for my blood, too everything, just like the honey cake.

  “You called on scholars to identify the unusual design, then you researched designers and stores. You had endless ideas for finding the owner.” He goes on about my quest, praising the inquisitive and resourceful side of me.

  I remove my sleeve from his grasp and pretend to study the clouds. It doesn’t matter; he overwhelms me even when we aren’t touching. “What happened?”

  “We found the person.”

  “From just a ring?”

  “Yes. Nobody thought we could do it, but you were tenacious. You and I found her house, just from the ring.”

  Something tugs at the corners of my mind. “Was she happy to have it back?”

  A pause. “Who wouldn’t be?”

  The sun comes out from behind a passing cloud, and I close my eyes, basking in its warmth, basking a little bit also in his admiration.

  That’s when I feel him touch my cheek.

  I turn and scowl at him, and he withdraws his hand, smiling.

  “You’re not doing it right. Keep them shut.”

  “What?”

  “Come on. It’s a game we used to play.” He pushes my chin, makes me turn my face back to the sky. “Close your eyes.”

  I feel happy, and I don’t know why.

  “Close them. Do this one thing for me.”

  “Fine.” I close my eyes. Again he touches my cheek—so lightly I almost can’t feel it. Unbidden, my lips curl in a smile. I don’t remember this game, but I remember the happy, pure feeling of it. The excitement of it.

  “Pomnish?” he whispers. “Remember?”

  “It’s no use, Viktor.”

  “Keep your eyes closed,” he says.

  I feel his fingertips graze my cheek once again.

  “Pomnish?”

  I smile again because I know he’ll kiss me there—I need for him to kiss me there just as day follows night.

  Then I still. This is the game—touch the place you’re going to kiss.

  I should stop the game, but every molecule in me is waiting for his kiss, craving his kiss on my cheek, as if I need to finish this thing we have started.

  It’s as if he’s communicating with my body, bypassing my mind completely. Is this what it’s like to be hypnotized?

  I feel him near.

  My breath speeds as something soft presses to my cheek, lightly, quickly, then gone. I open my eyes.

  He pulls away with the strangest look—a mixture of grief and joy. “You remember.”

  His gaze falls to my lips. He lifts his finger, but I’m too fast—I grab it, bend it, threatening to break it. I know four ways to break this finger, and they array in my mind in order of pain. I squeeze, feeling the delineation of bones, horrified at the knowledge inside me.

  Now he just looks happy. “You remember.”

  A dark feeling comes over me. “What happened after she got the ring back? What’s the rest of the story?”

  He breaks eye contact.

  “No.” I squeeze his finger. “Tell me the rest.”

  “Will you break my finger, Tanechka? Do you feel it? Just a twist.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Or you could break it at the middle joint.”

  I push away his hand. “Tell me the rest.”

  “You found the owner. She was happy to get it back.”

  “There’s more.”

  “Do I look like a psychic? I can’t predict people’s futures.”

  “The woman who owned it—is she…okay?”

  He gets a helpless look.

  Everything in me clenches like a fist. “Tell me the rest.”

  “Tanechka,” he whispers.

  “Did I hurt her?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Please,” I beg. “Please.”

  His look tells me everything.

  I hurt her. Maybe killed her.

  A seasick wave rolls through my belly. I dive my hand into my pocket, fumbling for my prayer rope. I clutch it like a lifeline.

  “I need to know.” My voice is gravelly, as though dredged up from the rocky depths. “Tell me!”

  He shakes his head.

  “You wanted me to remember. Tell me.”

  “You won’t understand.”

  My throat feels so thick, I can barely get the words out. “I killed her.”

  “Tanechka.”

  “Get away from me!” I spring up and begin to run, feet sinking into the soft sand, frantic, pumping my arms, trying to go faster, faster, to outrun everything. I hear him panting behind me. He grabs me from behind and I plant myself, use his momentum to throw him over my shoulder, then I pivot the other way, sand spraying.

  Again he comes after me and this time he tackles me, bringing us both down. He rolls, taking the impact with his big body, holding me tightly.

  I gasp for my breath as he flips us, him over me now.

  “I killed her.”

  The weight of him presses me into the soft sand, cool and rough on my cheek. “Shhh,” he says, “you’re okay.”

  “I’m not okay.”

  “You just need to remember who you are. You need to be yourself again.”

  “I’d rather die.”

  He holds me tight, crushing me with the violence of his emotion. “I won’t let you. Not again.”

  “I killed a person.” The knowledge is a wound inside. There’s something warm in my chest, growing so fast I think it might break my ribs. I’m gasping for air, and suddenly the thing in me breaks and I’m sobbing—huge, heaving sobs.

  He holds me, strokes my hair. “Shh.”

  “How can God forgive a person like me?”

  “Tanechka.” He strokes my hair.

  I try to push him away, but he won’t let go. I sob in his hateful arms. “I’m unforgivable.”

  “Never, lisichka. You’re brave. You’re beautiful.”

  I sob quietly, bereft.

  “I wish I could take this pain from you.” He gasps his words into my hair, clutching me to his breast. “I would die for you a million times.”

  “No. It’s right that I suffer.”

  “No, Tanechka.”

  “I feel like I’m moving so far beyond God’s love. So far. Even when I wandered the wilderness with no memory, I didn’t feel as lost as I do now. I’m truly in the cold now.”

  “Let me warm you.”

  “It’s right that I should have this agony. It is right that I should know the sweetness of God’s love only to have it taken from me.”

  “Stop with the God stuff! Forget God! God forgot you. He abandoned you to hell before you could even walk. God doesn’t deserve you.”

  “Get away from me!” I push him
off. I don’t run this time; I walk back to the car. He’ll take me back to the flat. At least there I can be alone. I run my fingers over the familiar shape of my prayer rope, knot to knot, to the tassel at the end, representing the glory of the heavenly kingdom. He comes up beside me after a few minutes with our picnic basket.

  “She was an assassin, you know. The woman you tracked through the ring. You saved lives by killing her.”

  “It’s not for me to pass judgment, or to punish her.” I stand by the car. He’ll take me back to the flat. I’ll bide my time. As soon as I’m able, I’ll get away from this man. I’ll save the virgins. Then I’ll go home.

  “She was a killer,” he says.

  “You understand nothing.” I practically spit out the words.

  “I understand you have a beautiful heart.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Lazarus

  Tip of the day: When faking empathy, less is more.

  A frown and a simple sentence, that’s all you need. At funerals, for example. The grieving wife or something. I’m so sorry for your loss. So sorry. Even if you laughed as you put a blade into the guy, you look his wife right in the eye and repeat as needed. I’m so sorry, truly sorry.

  It’s helpful to think of it as a form of jazz, with variations on the basic riff.

  Empathy is absolutely critical for a leader to have, according to my online executive coach Valerie Saint Marco, whom I’m inclined to believe. “If they feel you don’t understand them, they’ll lose respect.”

  She thinks I’ve recently taken over an accounting firm.

  Valerie often talks about mirroring people’s feelings back to them. “You may not be familiar with the frustrations of a help-desk clerk or a first-year hire, for example, but you can listen to their frustrations and mirror them back, showing you understand.”

  That bit really helped me; faking empathy is easy, but it’s hard to know when to put the empathy in. Valerie’s way of taking cues is excellent. I’ve noticed that some people want you to do an immediate leap to empathy, but with others, it’s apparently more appropriate to go from anger to empathy along with them. You have to get that part right, or else they think your empathy is fake.

  If people think you’re faking empathy, that’s worse than no empathy at all. Trust me on that.

  I’ve found the mirroring thing also helps to make sure you don’t empathize with the wrong things, because that’s a sure sign that you’re faking it.

  So when I get to Valhalla, I ask Charles to tell me the story in his own words. It gives me a chance to figure out where to put the empathy regarding the nun situation. Charles is critical to the brothel operation, and I really need to keep him on board.

  We’re in his little office at the front of Valhalla, the small apartment complex positioned on the corner where a residential area gives way to a low-rent shopping and dining district. Dollar stores, that sort of thing. Charles is shaking with rage over the guard taking the nun.

  So I do rage, too. I plan to kill the guard either way, but I’m angling to make it all about Charles. I set my face in a frown and show him my balled fists. Valerie says physical cues are 80% of your message. Who knew?

  “That man needs to hurt,” I say.

  Charles nods, slowly.

  The man is fixated on his nuns. He takes women to his home, dresses them in nun’s outfits he’s had specially made, and two weeks later they’re hacked up and he needs another, because that last one wasn’t quite right.

  What the fuck are you supposed to do with that? I would defy even Valerie to feel empathy for this particular frustration.

  But I need him running Valhalla. He was doing it under the old boss, Aldo Nikolla. Aldo himself would often say how fucking valuable Charles was. If I lose Charles’s loyalty, I’ll have to kill him, and there will be no one to run Valhalla. That would be a hell of a hit on the bottom line.

  I know they don’t see me as leader material. They see me more as an untrustworthy psycho who’ll go bananas at the drop of a hat. That was part of Aldo Nikolla’s PR, though I’ll admit to doing my part to stoke it.

  A kumar needs to instill fear. It’s in the job description.

  Aldo Nikolla made me heir apparent as a kind of insurance policy, knowing none of the ambitious kryetar would kill him and risk having me in charge.

  Making a half-crazy, bloodthirsty killer your second-in-command…sure, it was a good plan for a man who didn’t want the rank and file offing him.

  But hello—when you make a bloodthirsty killer your heir, let’s just say it’s not the best longevity plan.

  Needless to say, I was vague in explaining all of this to Valerie during our initial consultation.

  Engaging an online coach—how desperate is that? But I was feeling desperate. I told her I wasn’t a people person, that I didn’t have the trust of my organization, but that I’d found myself in charge, asked whether she thought she could help.

  She grasped the whole thing right away. “You’re moving from a task-oriented role to a leadership role,” she said. “It’s common for people who excel in a support role to be thrust into leadership before they’ve developed the skills. And these first weeks are crucial. Your people are watching you.”

  I liked that she understood, and yeah, I know they are fucking watching me, a lot of them looking to defect, especially with the fucking Dragusha brothers out there.

  “What do you think? I need those skills fast. Can I get to where I need to be? Get as good as my old boss fast enough?”

  “Hell no,” she said.

  I was pretty fucking unhappy with this answer. Visions of tracking her down and breaking her neck danced through my head, but then she added, “I think you can be better than your old boss, Lazarus. I’m going to help you knock this fucker out of the park.”

  I felt such intense gratitude right then and there, which is saying a lot, because I don’t tend to feel much. But for this I felt gratitude.

  “Do you see what I did there, Lazarus?” she asked. “Give them a vision to believe in. Be their champion, and they’ll be your champion. This is what I’ll teach you to do, with actionable steps you can start taking right away.”

  Fucking Valerie. She’s the shit.

  Already her moves have been helping me. She’s become my secret weapon. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little infatuated with her. She’s hot in her picture, too. But I need to concentrate on the task at hand.

  Valerie says that a leader who uses fear has a limited shelf life. Fear is effective at first, but the team will begin to chafe under the yoke of fear. I need to show them strength and understanding.

  I sat there patiently as she delivered this particular message over our Skype connection, complete with a mixed metaphor that puts me on a shelf driving an oxen team. I’ve learned not to point out Valerie’s mixed metaphors.

  She’s wrong about fear not being effective. Still, I can use this.

  Cue the anger. I put my hand on Charles’s shoulder, there in his messy office. “He will hurt,” I say. We’re in agreement there—the guard does need to hurt.

  Charles seems to like this. So I start riffing. “We’re going to find him,” I say calmly. “And he is going to fucking beg to die. He is going to scream for me to end his life for what he did to you.”

  Charles nods. Valerie would be proud that I’m getting Charles’s buy-in like this.

  “And then I’m going to bring your nun back. Together we’ll make Valhalla better and stronger.”

  “I need her unharmed,” he says. “If she’s harmed…”

  “That’s our goal,” I say.

  Heaven forbid she should be harmed before Charles can exercise his psychotic desires on her.

  It’s all so fucking exhausting.

  It would be so much easier to squeeze the life out of Charles, what with his ridiculous nun fetish, which manages to be both pedestrian and absurd at the same time.

  Valerie’s website says that part of her job is being an ex
ecutive confidante. She tells me she’s there as my sounding board for confidences large and small, but Charles with his nun-killing fetish probably isn’t the type of thing she has in mind.

  I simply described Charles as a manager whose personality I’m not crazy about. Sometimes I think Valerie would get it, how really ridiculous and unimaginative the nun thing is, but she would fixate on the moral aspect of it to the exclusion of everything else. That would be so Valerie.

  Anyway, the team is watching me for signs of how I’ll champion them, so I’m making this thing about supporting Charles and the Valhalla team. Right there I can fucking see it working. Charles looks at me like I’m a warrior on his side instead of a vicious thug who shouldn’t be running the massive criminal empire that is the Black Lion clan.

  Lazarus 2.0 is a warrior for his people, Valerie once said. I like that. The 2.0 is cheesy, yeah, but when Valerie says it, it’s not cheesy. When I complain about my antisocial image within the organization, she encourages me to invent a story for myself. Maybe you were antisocial because that’s what the role needed. Now you’re not. You’re a man who rises to the occasion.

  Valerie’s excitement is infectious at times.

  I sometimes wonder what will happen if the nun turns up dead. It was special for Charles that this woman actually was a nun, even though she wasn’t an American nun. Can I find another nun? Will Charles accept another nun in her place? Is a hot nun like a puppy to a serial killer like Charles, where you can’t just substitute them? Or is a hot nun more like a cookie, where one is as good as another? What’s the more “champion of Charles” move?

  More stuff that I can’t ask Valerie.

  First things first. Find the nun.

  I want the nun back, and not just for Charles’s sake. The nun’s combination of blonde hair poking teasingly from her ridiculous head scarf and the way she never seemed to stop praying stoked the fervor and the bidding like I never saw. The rising price on her made her an excellent price anchor to the other girls, meaning she made them look cheap by comparison and raised the bidding all over. She also greatly raised the site’s notoriety.

  “You questioned the customer yourself?” I ask Charles. “The German who was here when the guard took her?”