Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) Page 11

  Charles nods.

  Charles would’ve been emotional, though, focused on his nun. He might not have been able to detect a lie. I may not have a very high emotional IQ—this per Valerie—but I can cut through a lie like nobody else. I see clues nobody else sees.

  Emotion makes people stupid. That’s why I’m smart.

  I need my hands on that German. “I’d like his contact information,” I say. “Just in case.”

  Charles goes to his laptop and pulls up the spreadsheet.

  Nuns—please. Right?

  That was his deal with Aldo Nikolla, though—he got to run his nun mania through Valhalla in lieu of payment. It makes him cheap, effective, and invested. Valerie would be proud.

  He scribbles on a slip of paper and hands it over. “We don’t think he has it in him,” Charles says.

  “People surprise you. But don’t worry. This is our fucking town.” I was about to say “my fucking town,” but I changed it at the last second. “Our fucking town.”

  He’s grateful.

  Valerie. I’m getting addicted to her. So often I wish I could bring her into the mix, but I have to remind myself she’s an executive coach, not a consigliore. Bringing Valerie in would be like wearing my shoe as a hat. Or would it?

  In addition to finding the nun, I have to end the Dragusha brothers, do what Aldo Nikolla didn’t have the balls to let me do all those nineteen years ago.

  Everybody knows Aleksio and Viktor Dragusha are in play now. People are holding their breath, thinking the brothers will unite and take everything, just like in the prophecy.

  Killing all of them would be ideal, but I only need one. It clearly has to be Kiro. I’ve tried sending people after Aleksio and Viktor, but it doesn’t work out. My top guys won’t touch that job—no fucking way. Aleksio and Viktor are too dangerous, too well-defended.

  Killing Kiro will be easy once we find him.

  Best of all, killing Kiro will solidify my leadership like nothing else. It’s what my people need to see, like King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone.

  Charles, in his anger, has people searching for the guard, but again, stupid. Where do frightened people go? They go where they feel safe. Where do people feel safe? Home. Where is home for a nun? A church.

  I need Charles to get the idea. Make your people feel smart, Valerie always says. You want them feeling good when they look in the mirror.

  I sit down with him and ask about his nun. He has a good deal of intel on her. He thinks she’s smarter than she acts. She’s from a convent out near the Russian-Ukrainian border called Svyataya Reka, which translates to Holy River, according to the internet. I ask him questions until he hits on the idea that she might seek out a church if she escapes from the guard. We do a little research together and locate a Russian Orthodox church on Leavitt Street. Very central, the largest in Chicago. And the names are similar.

  “What do you think, Charles?”

  “Tanechka will go there if she can,” he informs me, quite pleased with himself. “They have nuns there, too. This is the one she’ll pick.”

  I beam at him, mirroring his pleasure. “Awesome,” I say. “Right. Then she’ll lead us to him. Just in case, do you think we should post people at all of the Russian Orthodox churches in Chicago?”

  “Better to be safe,” he says.

  “Good. Consider it done.”

  Well, it is done—I already have men at them, but he doesn’t need to know.

  The nun will escape—hopefully. Charles will get his victim to fuck with, like a Boy Scout with a spider; I’ll make a bloody example of the guard; and it’ll be a fucking coup.

  I think.

  Valerie sometimes sees angles that I don’t. I really wish I could get Valerie’s honest take.

  But even if I kidnapped her, made her serve me that way, it probably wouldn’t turn out. Or would it?

  Ironically, Valerie would be the perfect person to ask about that, too.

  Chapter Twelve

  Viktor

  Tanechka is again locked in our bedroom. Her bedroom now. I let her have that. She can have anything she wants. Almost anything.

  She can have anything the old Tanechka would want.

  I head to the kitchen.

  Something broke in me when she began to sob. She’s still sobbing up there, my beautiful Tanechka.

  I learned what it was to suffer after I thought I’d killed her. This is hard in a different way, because it’s Tanechka suffering, right before my eyes.

  I twist the cap off a bottle of vodka, throw it across the room, and drink. The bottle won’t be needing the cap anymore.

  I collapse on the couch, head bowed, bottle dangling from my fingertips.

  I’d rip my beating heart from my chest if it would buy her even a minute of peace from this pain.

  I trail over the afternoon in my mind. The way she looked when she ate the honey cake, how happy I was to give her that pleasure. For a moment, she felt like her.

  When the bottle is half-gone, I go up the stairs to check on her. It’s quiet. I put my ear to the door.

  “Go away,” she calls out. “Leave me.”

  “I’ll never leave you, lisichka.”

  Silence.

  I slide down to the floor outside the room, sitting with my back to the door. She hates me. She should, of course. Especially if she gets her memory back.

  For now, all I can do is to show her that she isn’t alone. “I love you beyond anything,” I say.

  Sniffles from inside the room.

  I take another swig, letting the liquid coat my throat against the darkness of memory. She cries softly now and then, every small sound like a blade to my belly.

  “You’ll never be alone,” I say. “I’ll always be here, a dog at your feet.”

  Quietly she weeps.

  I press the heels of my palms into my eyes, listening to what I’ve wrought. This woman I love in agony.

  Grief and shame and guilt and self-loathing mix together into a familiar cocktail, churning in my chest.

  Now and then I feel rageful toward the nuns, even though I know they saved her and gave her a home. If only she’d been taken in by farmers or a government clerk. Anybody but nuns, because then she wouldn’t feel such anguish.

  And the woman with the ring was an assassin, after all. Her death saved lives. Tanechka’s god should care about that.

  Sometimes I see the nun that she’s become as a jailer, keeping the real Tanechka buried and hidden. Other times I know this nun is a form of her.

  I drink.

  On she cries.

  I can bear it no longer. I stand. I pound. “Let me in.”

  “Leave me.”

  I throw the bottle to the end of the hall. It shatters against a door. I feel half-blind.

  “Tanechka!”

  No answer.

  I heave my shoulder against the door and break it open. She’s sitting on the bed, scarf askew, bright hair wild, eyes red.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tanechka

  He’s half-drunk and wild as a beast, hands gripping my shoulders. But still he’s beautiful. I shouldn’t think him beautiful. “The incident of the ring is one small part of your life,” he says.

  “The incident? I killed a woman!”

  “She was an assassin, lisichka.”

  I shake my head, naked in my sin. I killed a woman. “It’s not for me to pass judgment. That’s only for God, Viktor.”

  He hauls me up and pushes me against the wall. “You will stop with this talk of God! God knows nothing.”

  “God knows everything.”

  He heaves out a breath, nostrils flaring. I should be frightened, but so much about him is deeply familiar, this man, so tortured and distraught. I fight to see him for what he is—a thug, a killer. I shouldn’t feel bad for him. I shouldn’t feel breathless in his arms.

  A man shouldn’t hold a woman to the wall, eyes wild, breath ragged, and be beautiful while he does it.

  �
��Your god doesn’t know you—not like I do.” His heat grows. He thrums with intensity, scruffy cheeks glinting in the light of the bedside lamp. He hasn’t shaved.

  He forgets to shave when he’s upset. The thought bubbles up in from nowhere and makes me want to take his head to my breast and comfort him. I tell myself it means nothing. Men are pathetic creatures who forget to shave when upset. It’s nothing. I don’t know him.

  “Your god will never know you as I do, Tanechka, and he’ll never, ever love you as I do.”

  “You’re wrong.” I push him away and stand on my own, panting. “God loves me unconditionally. Do you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Unless I’m a nun.”

  “I love you for who you are.” Still his gaze bores into me.

  The thought comes to me that he’ll do something crazy now. He’s like a song—I know every note before it is sung. I brace myself.

  Snarling, he grabs either side of his white shirt and rips it open, revealing his hard, muscular chest, spattered with dark hair. I see the inky swirls and letters over his heart, the tattoo to match mine: “Tanechka + Viktor.” “You have the same.”

  I clutch the fabric at my breast.

  “No.” He pushes my arms away, grabs my collar, and rips my robe down the middle. The tattoo peeks out from under the cotton shift that covers my thin slip. With a look of horror he yanks the shift down to reveal the entirety of the tattoo. “They tried to bleach it. Who did this? Not the nuns. The men at Valhalla? Who touched you?”

  I try to push him away. I fail.

  “Who? I’ll kill him.”

  “Then I won’t tell you.”

  “I’ll kill them all.” He traces it with a trembling finger. “Did it hurt?”

  “No.”

  “This is how they knew your name.”

  “Leave me.”

  “They couldn’t get rid of it completely.”

  “They would’ve, and I was glad. I wanted it gone.” The sisters liked to pretend it wasn’t there, as did I. Another life, another person.

  I stiffen as Viktor draws his head to my chest and presses his lips to the tattoo, leaves them pressed there over my pounding heart.

  I try to push him away. It’s like pushing a mountain.

  “God doesn’t know you like I do, or he’d love everything about you.” He presses his lips to my shoulder, to the to the upper curve of my breast as he says this, as if he’d speak directly to my heart. “He’d love everything you are. If God knew you like I did, he’d be crazy in love with you.”

  “I killed a person, Viktor. God can never love that.”

  With a growl he draws away, dark eyes even wilder, and tears my shift in two, so that I’m only in a scanty slip.

  In a flash, I see myself driving my fist into his jaw. I resist the impulse; I cover myself with my free hand instead.

  I wish I were a snake, that I could shed this body, this mind. Because I don’t just imagine hitting him; I imagine hitting him and then pulling him to me, touching him, feeling him.

  “Viktor, please.”

  He pushes the remaining bits of robe and shift over my right shoulder, so that it’s like a coat half-on, revealing my slip.

  “No.” I push at him futilely, garments hanging from my other shoulder. I fear he’ll rip my slip off, too, and take my nipple in my mouth. The image spears me with warmth. I hate it. I shouldn’t think such things. How could I think such things?

  I brace myself, waiting for him to rip my slip off.

  He doesn’t.

  Instead, he sets his finger on a scar at the far side of my collarbone. Was this his goal? To reveal this scar? And not my nipple?

  “Did you ever notice how many of your scars are crosshatched, Tanechka?”

  I pant, too aware of the familiarity of his fingers to make sense of his words.

  “Have you noticed?”

  “I don’t think about them. The scars are ugly reminders of another life.”

  “They’re beautiful.” He grabs my arm and jerks it up so that I’m face to face with another ugly scar, this one on the underside of my forearm. “This one, too. Crosshatched. Look at it, Tanechka! You will look at it!”

  I turn my eyes to it. Anything to end this.

  “A defensive wound. The crosshatching shows that the scar was made when you were very young.” His gaze is fierce with soul. “It’s what happens when the skin stretches over it as the body grows. This one you got when you were ten, defending a child in your housing block from a sadistic teenaged predator.”

  His fingers move along the raised ridges of the scar as if it speaks a language only he can divine. I feel magic in the space between us.

  “You threw yourself into danger so that the weaker child could get away. You were like this, Tanechka. Even in the brothel. You wanted to take the pain for those women. This is who you are—this! This scar is who you are, true and fierce.”

  I feel like weeping. I’d always imagined it was something dark and despicable, that scar.

  He tries to push my tunic all the way off me.

  “Viktor,” I say, clutching the brown serge to my shoulder. “Nothing erases having taken a life.”

  “You will know about these things you carry.” He pulls at the fabric. This is a battle I won’t win—he’s stronger and has the advantage of knowing I won’t truly hurt him.

  There’s no sense allowing him to rip my robe more, so I push him away and cast off the rest of my outer garments. “Happy?”

  I tremble before him in nothing but a thin, nearly see-through slip and panties. My tunic is a heap at my feet. It’ll take forever to sew it back up. I focus on that. I’ll acquire a needle and thread and sew it back up.

  “Do what you will,” I continue. “I was prepared for as much at the brothel.”

  He looks devastated at my words. “You think I’d hurt you like that?” He presses gentle fingers over the fabric of the slip, pressing it to the place where my ribcage turns to soft belly. I stiffen as I realize what he’s going for—two long white scars, a double scar like train tracks curling around my side. They become visible when he presses the fabric around them.

  “You got this rescuing a puppy from barbed wire. Your father beat you for your trouble, as you knew he would, but you did it anyway. There was no vulnerable being you wouldn’t fight for. Your father was drunk and weak, but you were strong. You were the head of your little family, even caring for your father, much as you disdained him. You had such principles.”

  My pulse races. It’s because of the revelation, but it’s also because of his nearness. The way he knows everything about me is seductive. All of these things I dreaded to know seem not so bad.

  “And here…” He presses two fingers to a spot on my ribs that sometimes aches. “At the age of fourteen you confronted the police who were demanding protection money from a friend, a poor girl who spent all of her money to bury her baby son, who’d just died. The police beat you with clubs and shattered this rib. They said you attacked them. You probably did. You hated the police, and you hated Putin and his people. This landed you in a home for bad girls.” He grazes his fingertips over the spot. “It hurts in the rain and snow. A heating pad helps. I have one. I’ll bring it to you and show you how you used it.”

  I school my features, trying to appear unaffected. It does hurt, sometimes. So much of me hurts.

  “I know your body as my own, lisichka,” he whispers. “It once was my own, just like my body was yours. Even now, everything I am is for you.”

  A wave of something flows through me, dark and glittery and despairing.

  He moves his hand to the side of my mid-section, to the angriest, worst scar of all. The bullet—even the nuns knew I’d been shot there. There’s an exit wound behind.

  Viktor drops to his knees, lips an inch from this ugly, ugly wound. He presses the thin fabric of the slip to it so that it shows through, and he traces around it with his finger. His finger thick and blunt. With his other hand he
touches my hip.

  I grip against the sensation of the way he holds me. I grit my teeth against the goodness of it.

  “The doctor said you should keep it moist. With coconut oil. I’ll bring you some.”

  I nod, heart in my throat.

  He traces around it again. I suck in a breath, focusing my mind on the repairs I must do on the garments he ripped. I imagine the types of stitches I’ll use—anything to take my mind off his tender touch.

  But he’s hard to ignore, this clothed and powerful man on his knees before me. I’m aware of his roughness against my bareness.

  He makes my belly quiver. My breathing speeds. The thrill of it transports me, and I think I don’t want him to stop. I’m to take a vow of chastity, and here I stand, not wanting this killer to stop touching me. Tears gather in my eyes.

  He touches the center of the scar, and I stiffen. Because now he has to kiss it there. That’s the game. Touch and kiss. “Please, no,” I gasp.

  Eyes turned up at me, he brings his lips to it. Softly, gently. His kiss is silky and electric.

  “This is where you saved my life. You took this bullet for me, Tanechka.”

  He clutches my hips, kisses me again, so soft I can barely detect it.

  “I hated you for doing it. It was during our war with the Petrov gang. They were going to kill me, and you hurled yourself at Roman Petrov like a wild animal. And then the gun went off, and when I saw you crumple over, my whole life dissolved before my eyes. We were so frightened for you, Yuri and I. We took you to the hospital in their territory—it couldn’t be helped. We guarded you until we could move you. We didn’t think any of us would survive.”

  He pushes his face to my belly. I feel his mind, feel his heart. He’s lost all sense of himself now. My hands go to his hair.

  He clutches the backs of my thighs through my slip. “We were so frightened for you. Pityr kidnapped a doctor to give a second opinion, so crazy. You were sick for so long afterwards, but we got you back. You came back to us.”

  My belly seems to move of its own accord, too much alive. He closes his eyes and kisses me again through the fabric, nearer to my belly button. My pelvis feels floaty. I don’t want him to stop.