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

  She’s silent for a while. Then, “Did you pick Manhattan for its name?”

  “Of course,” I say. “But it was wrong. Too sweet. A cherry in it. Not right.”

  Again she sips. Faraway eyes. Marveling over the taste, perhaps.

  “You’re a million times more beautiful than Taylor Swift.”

  She frowns. “Were we there to kill somebody?”

  “Just scare,” I say. “We followed them to their room and did a push-in.”

  “We hurt them?”

  I pause, but I won’t lie to her. “There were four others in the room we didn’t expect.”

  “What happened?”

  “We handled them.”

  “Six against two?”

  “Numbers like that were never a problem for us.” I keep my eyes on the fire as she sips again. “Remember that colorful cube I gave you at the picnic yesterday?”

  She says nothing, but I can see she remembers. She itched to finish it. She probably still does.

  I swirl the liquid in the glass. “We used to love the Rubik’s Cube. We each had one. We’d do them side by side, up on the Borodinsky Bridge. We’d race. We came to see scenarios as Rubik’s Cubes—planes of action moving this way and that. Our thinking was very aligned in this way. We could hold even a large group when we went to it as a Rubik’s Cube. Five men and a woman in a hotel room. That was nothing to us.”

  “Did we hurt them?”

  “Just one. But not so badly.”

  She hurt one, actually. A man. She dislocated his shoulder while I held the others at gunpoint. That was always a bit of icing on the Tanechka cake, to have her do the hurting, delivering both pain and emasculation. “They were very bad people,” I say. “Worse than us. They needed a message from our superiors.”

  The story troubles her. She drinks some more.

  “Just a message,” I say.

  “Great.”

  “Afterwards we walked through the square, window-shopping, pretending to be these newlyweds still.”

  “You can’t keep me chained up.”

  “Maybe I like you chained up.”

  She looks at me wistfully.

  I take the volume of Vartov from the table. “I understand you have requested the Bible to read.”

  She takes another lemon wedge.

  “Too bad.” I open to “Cages.” “This poem, you loved it so much.”

  She shakes her head. “This will not work.”

  “You clung to this poem. You’d think of it when terrible things happened to you. So many people, when they have terrible things happen to them, they become small. Not you. You became fiercer. More loving. You turned to art. This poem, it spoke to your heart. It’s about a man in prison, but he’s able to see such beauty. His heart’s utterly free. You would read this poem over and over, and you’d weep.” I run my finger over the Cyrillic letters, so much more elegant and dramatic than English. It’s not the edition she had, but it’s similar. A bit older than the one she had. Just as beat up.

  She swirls her champagne, watching the play of light, mesmerized. It is nearly gone.

  “Americans have such a different relationship with art,” I say, concentrating on the book, giving her the space to enjoy the champagne without my watching over her. “You haven’t been here long, but you’ll see. They’re like bees, going from one thing to another, tasting widely, always seeking the next thing. Not like us Russians, standing in front of one picture at the museum for hours, wild with feeling for it, standing there until they have to drag us from the place. Or reading a poem over and over. We are never content with the surface. We could live a whole lifetime caught in the spell of a beautiful poem.” Out the corner of my eye I see her drink again. “That’s how you are. You like the other poems. But ‘Cages’ is your heart’s poem.”

  I feel her watching me. Feel her interest. She really was obsessed with this poem. Tanechka was nothing if not obsessive.

  Discreetly I refill her glass, and then I begin to read the poem in the original Russian, speaking her favorite lines slowly and with feeling. It’s a long poem—many pages.

  “So sad and beautiful,” she says when I pause partway in. The drink is beginning to affect her—I can feel the bright quickness of her.

  “Maybe you don’t remember with your mind, but you remember with your heart.” I scoot back to sit on the floor against the end of the bed. I reach out. “Come.”

  She stays put.

  “I should make you?”

  Her glare hardens. Right then, I recognize the terrifying stare of Tanechka, as if she is in there, trying to break out.

  “I’ll pull you over and make you sit with me,” I growl. “You think I won’t? Comply with me, Tanechka, or I’ll make you comply.”

  She deliberates, then comes and sits next to me against the end of the bed. I read on. The poem is melancholy. I pause and lean over to her. I speak into her hair. “You liked me to read it to you over and over.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Over and over?” she asks. “Just like that?”

  I bite back a smile. She’d sometimes do this—ask questions she knew the answer to, especially when drunk. “You would very much like me to read to you, Tanechka. Over and over.” She also liked me to repeat things as though I was certain of them, like strong arms around her.

  I read more. I feel her rise and fall with the words. After a long silence, she says, “It makes me feel lost and lonely.”

  “I’m here,” I say.

  She sighs.

  “Come.” I reach around and nudge her head toward my shoulder. Miraculously, she complies, leaning her head on my shoulder. I begin again to read, trying to conceal my excitement over her having almost voluntarily laid her head on my shoulder. The poem always did crack her open. Or maybe it’s the drink.

  “You would destroy my dream to be pure,” she mumbles between stanzas. “More.” She holds the glass out for me to fill. My heart pounds. I fill it full of pink champagne and read on.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tanechka

  The old book is fragile. The binding threadbare. The pages inside are loose, liable to fall out.

  Viktor holds it carefully. Reverently.

  I stare at his hands, so strong and sinewy. His fingers are thick and his knuckles rough with life, but he cradles the book as though he loves it, and from the way he reads, I think that he does.

  Watching him cradle the book in this way makes me feel so very melancholy.

  I don’t know whether it is because of the poem or because of not remembering the poem. It doesn’t matter. I hear the poem now, and it twists me inside. The poet lives his life in a prison cell, but when he sees beauty outside, he’s not sad anymore.

  I finish the drink. Bubbles and candy. I put down my glass wishing for more. I look over at the icon of Jesus and try to remember the way the light shone out from his eyes and the way it lit the faces of the goats.

  Jesus feels far away.

  Viktor transfers the book to one hand and stretches his free hand around my shoulder, pulling me closer. I shouldn’t allow it, but I feel so tired and lonely, and I think I’ll just rest a bit before fighting him again.

  A truce. Peace.

  I shouldn’t allow it. He knows how to make my body feel good.

  He pulls the band from my hair and makes it fall out. He takes a ribbon of my hair between his fingers, smoothing his thumb up and down. I resist the impulse to turn my face to his hand and kiss it. He knows too many things about me that I don’t know.

  “Lisichka?”

  “I don’t remember,” I tell him sadly. “It makes me feel lost not to remember things you know.”

  “I remember for both of us.”

  “That’s trouble, I think.”

  “Never trouble, Tanechka.”

  I smile. Or more, my cheeks smile of their own accord. The drink has a hold on me now, but it feels good. I notice my glass still has pink in it. I thought I’d
finished it. I finish it now. It’s good and sweet, and I want more of this feeling. Perhaps I’m drunk.

  I like it.

  “I don’t want to be a bad person,” I say. “The kind to hurt people and kill people.”

  “You’re not a bad person,” he snarls. “You were never a bad person, okay? Never. And any kozel who would dare to suggest it—”

  He stops. Because it’s me who suggested it.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t let anyone say anything bad about you, that’s all, and you shouldn’t, either. There were infinite sides to you. You hurt people, and you saved people. You loved fiercely and wildly. You thought deeply. You and Mischa and Yuri and the group of us, we were a family. We would die for each other.”

  Something in his voice catches.

  “We would die for each other, and we’d want to die if we ever hurt each other,” he adds.

  I feel this surge of warmth for him. It’s usually too much for me to look at him—the pull of him. But now, my senses dulled by drink, I like it.

  So many nice things about Viktor. His neat, close-cropped hair, so forceful and intense like him. His rough, musky smell. I loved the way he shed his stark black jacket. And his white shirt, open at the collar, tie loose; this feels familiar, like so many things about him. The way his strong, corded neck rises from this civilized shirt. I think of his chest under there, hard and scarred.

  Quickly I look down. “Why can’t you just let me be good?”

  “I’ll let you be good when you stop thinking you’re bad.” His gaze falls to my chest, then back up. “You wear my shirt.”

  I put on his shirt because all of the clothes he supplied for me are tight, but I see my mistake now. I should’ve seen it when I first donned it, surrounding myself with his smell, with him.

  “You want to corrupt me, I think. You come to me and read to me, and I feel too much, and I don’t know what any of it is.”

  He kisses my cheek. His touch is a familiar anchor. I feel like I’m drifting. The poem made me feel too emotional.

  He kisses my forehead.

  I straighten away from him. “I feel helpless around you. You would touch me, and I would like it, but I can’t have it.”

  “I don’t have to touch you,” he says.

  “Don’t, then,” I say.

  He takes his hand from my shoulders and curls his fingers around the corners of the book, cradling it once more. “I’ll love you from here.”

  We return to our stations, then. Two people sitting on the floor at the foot of a bed. One in chains.

  He’s silent.

  “Tell me more,” I say.

  “About what?”

  I don’t know. His voice is like old leather, pleasing and soft and strong. I just want to hear his voice, really, but I don’t want to say that. “All of it.”

  “You loved it when I’d hold your wrists above your head,” he says.

  I jerk to attention. “No, not like that. I wouldn’t like that, I think.”

  “You would. You’d love it when I’d pin your wrists to the wall or to the cool, soft bed and hold you immobile. Make you my thing in every brutal, beautiful way.”

  My face grows red. Is he right?

  “I’d put my tongue into your ear. I’d lick the inside of your ear. You loved it. You said it felt like sliding through the universe. Like you were sliding in space. And then you would beg for my cock.”

  I swallow. “I don’t believe you.” Except I do—the suggestion of it glitters like dark gems in my mind.

  “We had a game where I would tie you up naked—”

  “These games again.”

  “You liked to give up your choice to me. It made you feel everything more intensely.”

  My pulse races. I should stop him from this talk.

  “I would tie you up naked on the bed, and you’d close your eyes, and I’d kiss you on different parts of your body. You wouldn’t know where to expect the next kiss.”

  “That’s not the game you told me before.”

  “It’s a different one. You’d try to feel where I was just about to kiss you before my lips touched your skin. You had to feel me in the empty space between my lips and your skin.”

  I look away.

  “When you felt me near, you’d open your eyes and look right at me. You had to catch me before I kissed you.”

  I shouldn’t feel fascinated by it.

  “A game of negative space. We had many ideas about empty space, negative space, you and I. It was a thing for us, as they put it here. We’d sometimes spar with one of us blindfolded, using a stick for a knife. That was about negative space, too. Feeling the other beyond your skin. You were as much a master of negative space in battle as you were in fucking.”

  I cringe at the savage word, so blunt and hungry. Fucking. I sip from my glass, just for something to do.

  “When you were tied, you’d feel it more. You’d say that the air would tremble above the place where I was about to kiss. You were a master at that game, but sometimes I’d win, and I’d sneak in a kiss. I could always sneak under your defenses, lisichka.” He slides his hands around the back of my neck, up to my hair. He grasps my hair in his fist. “But you owned my heart.”

  His words blur as I focus on the way he grips my hair, keeping my face turned to his. Ropes to the head, like a rider directing a horse.

  “You’re making it up,” I say breathlessly.

  He draws his face to my ear. My heart pounds. He whispers, warm and low, “You liked this.”

  Warmth blooms inside me. That sort of wanting belongs to another life.

  Again he whispers, so close to my ear, it feels like a tongue. “Pomnish?” “Do you remember?” His words go through me like electricity, warm and good. He tightens his hold on my hair. I feel like I’m moving further from Jesus.

  Suddenly I don’t care. I want him to hold my hair more tightly. I want him to whisper something more. My heart hammers as I wait for him to show me that he has me.

  He pulls away and looks into my eyes.

  My gaze drops to his neck. His neck would be warm against my lips. I shake the thought from my head. I’m dangerously far from Jesus now. I can barely remember the light that came from his eyes. It feels like nothing more than a cartoon in my mind now. “I can’t.”

  He lets go. I feel the loss of it deeply. He takes the glass from my hands. I allow it. I feel cold now—nothing in my hand. Viktor out of my space. Cold. Lost. I hate it. I hate being cold.

  But then he turns back, and the look in his eye warms me.

  “Viktor,” I say.

  He puts his hands over my eyes. “Where am I?” he whispers.

  I smile. “What do you mean, where are you? You’re right here.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” he says. “Stay still, okay?”

  I find I can’t stop smiling. I have the strange sense that I’m waiting for something…something good, magical. I don’t know why I should think it.

  A tickle on my cheek.

  Shivers slide over me as some deep, buried part of me thrills to attention. This is the game he described where he draws his lips near to my skin and I have to feel him before he has a chance to kiss me. He’s playing the game.

  “My cheek. You must not—”

  “Come on. Once more.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll win.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  A tickle of aliveness on my cheek. “Cheek. You think I’m stupid.”

  The tickle goes away.

  “One more try,” he says. “Please?”

  “Fine.” I wait.

  Nothing happens, aside from my heart pounding madly in my chest. The waiting is so tense that I laugh. It seems to last forever, the waiting. And then I feel warmth on my neck.

  “Neck,” I breathe. And then I feel his lips touch my skin there. I hiss out a breath. “It’s not fair. You can’t kiss me after I caught you.”

  “Sorry,” he whispers, pulling away. “Another,” he
says. “Feel me, little fox.”

  I breathe in. He’s not touching me except for where his hand covers my eyes, but I feel him with every sense. I feel him stir the air around my body. I smell his sweat, and I see him strong and savage in my mind’s eye. Most of all I feel him with my heart. The love and the fear I have for him spins wild. It seems too big, suddenly.

  And then the space between our lips thrums with life. The space is empty but full. Excitement grows in my chest. I wait. It’s excruciating, this waiting. It doesn’t feel like sinning when his hand is over my eyes.

  “Guby,” I whisper in the moment before he takes my lips in a warm kiss. A single kiss. He pulls away, but I feel him hovering near. He sucks in a breath, as if to breathe me in.

  I don’t want him to breathe me in. I don’t want the blank space. I want him around me. “Once more.”

  Suddenly his lips are on mine again. He kisses me hard and hungry, consuming me roughly. It feels ancient and familiar, and in that moment, I’m not lost. I’m clinging to him.

  I slide my hands to his hair, so smooth. I pull. “Yeshche,” I say into the kiss. I don’t know why I should ask for more like that. The want comes from somewhere distant. From the moon, from the pink bubbles in my glass. I set my hand over his, still covering my eyes. “And keep your hand there.”

  “No.” He removes his hand from my eyes. “I want you to see what I am. What we are. You used to like when I was hard, when I truly gave you more. You liked when I played the bad man while fucking you.”

  My pulse races. “I would never like that.”

  “You used to say that sex is not a place for smiling faces.” He slides an hand over my hair, smoothing it down. “You never wanted smiles as we fucked.”

  “I would not…” I trail off, unsure what I meant to say.

  “You would,” Viktor says. “Oh, you would. You’d say, ‘Take everything.’ You wanted me to be hard, to be other. You liked it when I had clothes on and you did not.”

  I shiver, remembering how I’d felt the night he touched my bare skin, telling me about my scars, the night he ripped my tunic. He was clothed, and I wore only a slip. I used to like that?