Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) Page 9

  Tanechka stands, stunned. “Will you let me speak to them?”

  “I hung up, but Mother Olga has a message for you. They’re all healthy and well, and something about a rooster looking forward to seeing you.”

  Tanechka tears up. “Petushik,” she whispers. “What else?”

  “They’re happy to hear you’re okay, Tanechka. They were worried.”

  Mischa nods. “They sounded good. Well.”

  “What about the fighting on the border? The attacks—there was an old guard, and he was not so strong. You’re sure they’re okay?”

  “It’s what they said.”

  “They wouldn’t want to worry me. Did you tell them I want to talk to them? That I’m trying?”

  Mira casts a glance at me, the ogre. “I told them that you wanted badly to talk to them and that you would, soon.”

  “Thank you.”

  I shove an orehi into my mouth. One small kindness. I couldn’t have shown this one small kindness to the woman I love?

  I close my eyes, and I’m back at the edge of Dariali Gorge with her clinging onto me, the vast space below.

  Predatel! I call her. Reminding myself why I must kill her. She betrayed the Bratva. A traitor.

  She calls out to me as I shove her. Even as she falls, she reaches for me, terror and disbelief in her eyes. Her face is burned into my mind, into my dreams.

  The talk rumbles on, but perhaps I’ve had too much to drink, because I feel only like weeping. The hatred for myself is so close to the surface, the hatred for what I did.

  I should be happy that the beautiful brightness of her is back in the world, but it’s not enough for me, no. I watch the light waver on the thick red tablecloth.

  “So delicious,” Tanechka says.

  I look up to see her staring at her empty plate. Her gaze lights on the plate with the rest of the orehi. “Delicious.”

  “Would you like more?

  She looks down. She looks like she wants more. My heart pounds. Finally she waves her hand. “Gluttony,” she says softly.

  Chapter Nine

  Viktor

  I let Tanechka have our bedroom—alone. I sleep in a guest bedroom, or at least I try to.

  She comes down in the morning neat as a pin, still in her nun’s dress and head scarf. I leave her to herself, giving her space. She requests again to search for a Russian Orthodox church in town.

  “No, Tanechka. There’s a limit to the ways I’ll indulge you.”

  She regards me with her burning blue gaze. Only a matter of time until she tries to get out—I see this now.

  I decide we’ll go on a picnic. We used to picnic in a park near a lake, and she liked it. Lake Michigan is larger and windier, but I think she’ll enjoy it.

  Before I head out for supplies, I talk to Sander, one of our new guys, who’s stationed outside the door. We have plenty of money to hire new muscle like Sander. If they prove their loyalty, they’ll have a hand in the business our father built—once we take it back from Bloody Lazarus.

  “Don’t let that nun costume fool you,” I tell Sander. “She’s every inch a killer under there.”

  He nods. He understands, or at least he thinks he does. Nobody truly understands Tanechka.

  I start off down the sidewalk. This is the old part of town, lined with brownstones. The trees blaze with yellow leaves. A block away, I turn back.

  “Four men around this perimeter still?” I say to Sander. He nods. “Find another and make it five. She’s going to try to leave, and I don’t want her hurt.”

  I instruct Mischa and Yuri to tell the Americans how good she is at escapes. Mischa insists they have it under control. “Tell them,” I say. “They need to hear it from you.”

  I don’t like leaving, but I need to choose these supplies. To look at things through Tanechka’s eyes.

  When I return, I find none of the men out there. I burst into the house, and there they are, all in the living room. Tanechka’s sitting on the floor, cuffed to a radiator pipe.

  “She’s okay,” Mischa says, standing.

  I kneel next to her. “You’re okay?”

  “Aside from needing to leave?” She yanks on her cuff.

  I step outside with Mischa, who fills me in. It seems she tried to get out as soon as I was around the block. The group of them grabbed her. “Very gently,” he assures me. Ona nasha dorogaya podruga, he calls her—“the one we love the most.”

  I thank him and send them back out, then I unlock Tanechka. “If you have to pee, go now. We’re leaving for a picnic.”

  She rubs her wrist, glaring at me.

  An hour later we’re parking on the lakefront. It’s a sunny, brilliant fall day, the sky a bright, almost electric blue—candy sky, she used to call it. I’ve brought her a sweater, but she doesn’t wish to put it on. Nuns back home are famously ascetic.

  No matter. I get out, grab the picnic basket and blanket, and go around to her door.

  She looks up at me warily.

  It is all I can do to stop myself from taking her cheeks and kissing her. I love her so much I can’t think.

  She doesn’t wish to get out.

  “You want me to carry you?”

  This gets her out. I give her the sweater and lead her across the pale, cool sand toward the dark water, rough with whitecaps. The beach is deserted today. People aren’t so interested in the beach in autumn. Always everything needs to be perfect for the Americans.

  She gives me one of her challenging Tanechka looks. Just this look fills my heart with love. She addresses me in Russian. “Aren’t you worried I’ll try to run off?”

  “Maybe I’d like it. Maybe I’d enjoy catching you.”

  Quickly she looks away. Sander and his men tailed us, just in case she decides to run and I can’t catch her for whatever reason. You never want to underestimate Tanechka.

  I turn and walk backwards. “This isn’t your first time in America. Did you know that? Twice we were here.”

  “In Chicago?”

  “No. Once in Omaha, once in San Francisco. You liked the old houses in San Francisco. You said they looked like frosted cookies.”

  “Hmmph.” She looks away as she so often does when I remind her of our old life. I tell myself it’s a good sign that she runs from these memories. You only run from something if it’s a threat.

  “You said you wanted to eat those houses right up.” Both times we traveled to America it was to chase and kill those who betrayed the Bratva, but I don’t say that. Omaha got quite bloody. We had to kill one person extra before it was over.

  “We were put together because we both knew English. I was born here. You didn’t know that—neither did I, until a year ago.”

  She simply watches me.

  “I was born here in Chicago to an Albanian family. I was two years old, just learning to talk, when the man my father trusted most attacked our family. Our father ran a business dynasty that stretched across the entire middle of the nation. But this man—Mira’s father—he drugged our parents and killed them.”

  “Mira? The one Aleksio loves?”

  “Yes. Her father and a man called Bloody Lazarus did it. They drugged our parents and chased them up to the nursery where my brothers and I were. My parents wanted to protect us. Instead they were slaughtered in front of us.”

  “You saw it?”

  “I remember only…impressions. Aleksio saw it all, in the reflection of a window. He was nine.”

  “No.”

  “This old hit man, Konstantin, a veteran of the Kosovo wars, he held Aleksio in the shadows, hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t scream. Konstantin saved Aleksio’s life. Our enemies spared me and Kiro, our baby brother, but they would have killed Aleksio. They tried to. All his life, killers were after Aleksio. Me, they sent me across the world to that orphanage in Moscow with no identification. They sold our bratik Kiro into an adoption ring. We still can’t find him.”

  She regards me with a look of concern, even tenderness. A nun’
s compassion. Nothing more.

  “We’ll find him—we have to. Bloody Lazarus doesn’t want the three brothers to be together. He wants to kill Kiro, but we’ll find him first. We have to. He’s very vulnerable at the moment.”

  I turn and walk by her side. She sighs, as if it my nearness pains her.

  “You were always a little bit jealous of my English abilities, Tanechka. You thought I was so smart, the way I could think and even dream in English. It’s because the language was inside me from that time. I didn’t remember, but the pathways in my brain had been created for English. Because I was a little boy here.”

  “Mmm,” she says.

  Again I turn and walk backwards. I like to watch her face. “Do you want to know how you came to learn English?”

  Behind her are the trees in their fall colors and Lake Shore Drive, gleaming hotels and skyscrapers soaring above.

  “You don’t want to know?”

  “It’s immaterial.”

  I stop when I decide we’re at the perfect spot. I spread out the blanket. I sit and open the basket. “Sit.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You prefer to stand?”

  She sits stiffly, like the nun she wants me to take her for, but a small, bright lock of hair has broken free from under her scarf, flying and waving at me like a small flag. I wonder how long her hair is under there. She used to keep it long—she said it gave her a greater diversity of styles. All the better to be a chameleon. A good killer is, above all, a good chameleon.

  “You learned English easily because of your obsession with rock and roll,” I say. “That’s how you came to know it. Memorizing songs.”

  She frowns.

  I take out the bottles of sparkling lemon water, unscrew the top of one, and set it down on a platter. She loves anything citrus. Flavors with bite. Everything with an edge, even sex. She liked to be held tight, to be held down. Make me know you’re there, she’d whisper. Make me know, Viktor.

  That was code for her wanting me to be more forceful.

  I remove a small box from the basket and open it, pleased to see that the honey cake I bought just a few hours ago survived the trip. I place a piece on a small painted plate and set it in front of her next to her fizzy lemon water. She used to enjoy such water with vodka.

  She thanks me politely. “Spasibo.”

  “Nezashto.” I take out the book, the poems of Anatoly Vartov.

  “A book,” she says.

  I grit my teeth. A book. This isn’t just a book; it’s her favorite collection of poems in the world. She had a fiercely personal relationship with each and every one of them, especially the poem titled “Cages.” There was a dark time in her life when she would read it and cry for the beauty of it. Like a gift to her, this poem. “I thought we would read.” I stretch out on my back. “I could read to you if you like.”

  “It won’t work, Viktor.”

  “Can’t we just enjoy the afternoon?”

  “You won’t make me remember.”

  “Then what’s the harm?”

  She sighs, seeming to relax, and I think maybe Mira was right about letting her relax, surrounding her with goodness. You can’t force a flower to bloom, but you can show it the sun.

  Tanechka eyes her honey cake. “I require only simple food.”

  “Honey cake isn’t so complicated.”

  She bites into her cake and chews without expression, as if it’s cardboard. It was one of her favorites—layers of honey-soaked cake with creamy frosting between each one. A girl’s cake. She pauses, still looking at nothing, but there’s a slight light in her eyes. Is she remembering?

  I stay quiet, but my heart feels like it might explode.

  Her famous focus was good for more than killing; it allowed her to enjoy beauty and pleasure more deeply than other people.

  I want to tell her this is something beautiful that I loved about her very much, but I hold back. I want this moment to be for her, not for me.

  She casts her gaze down at the cake. “Not bad,” she says softly.

  I look away before she can catch the shine in my eyes and think me soft. “Hmm,” I say, as if bored. I’d give her anything if only she’d come back. I’d give her a blade and tell her to cut my throat.

  Out the corner of my eye I see her take another bite. I school my features to look unimpressed.

  “Usually it’s the Russian babies going to the West.”

  “What?” I say.

  “You. Sent to a Moscow orphanage.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Your enemy wanted to destroy your family. A young family.”

  I try not to betray too much happiness that she’s engaged me. “Yes. My father lifted him up to make him his right-hand man, but it wasn’t enough. He wanted the power that our father possessed. He wanted the power to pass on to him, not to me and my brothers. Mira’s father is dead now, but his dangerous kumar, Bloody Lazarus, is even worse. Lazarus is the man who owns Valhalla, where you were.”

  “That’s why you want to destroy it, then. To hurt Lazarus.”

  “It’s not only self-interest,” I say.

  “No?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. We’ll take it down all the same.” I look away. “There was a prophecy—”

  “I don’t believe in prophecies.”

  “I don’t either, but a lot of people do, and that’s what gives them power. An old crone, honored for her predictions, pointed to the three of us brothers at a party soon after Kiro was born. She said that we brothers together were unbeatable. ‘You boys. Together you rule…you boys, you three boys.’ Aleksio thinks it was part of why Lazarus and Mira’s father went after us.”

  Out the corner of my eye I catch her focusing on the box where the rest of the cake still waits. Two more pieces.

  I try not to smile. “There’s more.”

  “I do not think I want it.”

  I wave my hand. “Feed it to the gulls, then.”

  She folds her hands in her lap. Oh, she wants the cake. “Your enemies want to keep you from reuniting?”

  The old Tanechka would not ask such an obvious question.

  “Yes,” I say. “It’s why we have to find Kiro before anybody else can—especially Bloody Lazarus. He needs to prevent the brothers from being together.”

  “He believes in the prophecy?”

  “I don’t know. But within…our community, it would be an immense psychological advantage for us to bring Kiro back. The three brothers united would command the hearts and minds of people because of that prophecy. But if he kills one of us, it’ll make him stronger. People will more readily follow him. It’s not so easy to kill me or Aleksio. But Kiro is out there unaware. Lost.”

  I sit up and put another piece on her plate, then I gaze out at a distant freighter, allowing her privacy. She very much wants that cake.

  I tell her about Kiro, how he might be a wild boy. I tell her about the joy I felt when Aleksio showed up at a garage in Moscow. Tanechka would have been every bit as happy for me as Yuri was, seeing that I had a brother. She would’ve jumped into my arms, and the three of us would have gone out and torn up the town.

  Now she just listens.

  She reaches out and pulls a bit of spongy cake from the edge. My heart lifts. But then she throws it. Gulls fly over. One takes it and flies off. She throws out the rest, bit by bit, feeding the gulls. This, too, is so Tanechka. She will not be managed.

  Chapter Ten

  Tanechka

  The gulls finally leave. I lie back, staring at the sky that is such a beautiful blue. “Just the color is so beautiful, it makes me feel dizzy. As if the color is alive,” I say.

  He says nothing. I can’t tell whether he’s happy or sad. So often he seems to have both emotions flowing through him. Never have I met a man so volatile. Then again, I have not met so many men.

  That I remember, anyway.

  He stares at the lake, arms planted behind him, sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms w
ild with sinew and muscle.

  If he is to be believed, I once loved him. We had sex together.

  Thick, thick fingers spread out on the picnic blanket.

  If he is to be believed, it means he once touched me everywhere with those fingers. I can’t imagine what it would be like, to allow him to touch me with those thick fingers. To have him put himself inside me.

  Sometimes his gaze is invasive, seeing too much. Other times it has weight and warmth. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with such a gaze upon my naked body.

  He turns to me as if he senses the direction of my thoughts. “What are you thinking, Tanechka?”

  “Many things.”

  “I wish I could take all of the pain you felt. I would die ten times over to spare you from what you went through. The pain. The fear. I would do anything—”

  “I wouldn’t want you to take it away. What happened was a gift,” I say. “The best thing.”

  He grits his teeth and looks away. He doesn’t agree that it was a gift.

  He has four guards following us, keeping watch on me. I saw two when we got out of the car. Two more later. Three are on the road behind us. One lingers near the shuttered snack stand some distance away. I am just one woman.

  Perhaps he’s right to have four on me. I get many ideas about escaping, seemingly out of nowhere, like a hidden helper passing me a note. I often picture the floor plan of the flat he has me trapped in as a diagram in my mind. The idea of the roof has come to me several times. The row of homes is so tightly packed, the roof will be like a highway. This way of thinking feels like a well-worn path.

  He wants to read the poetry to me.

  I tell him I don’t want to hear it.

  This upsets him—he’s gets upset very easily, this one—but I don’t like the way he knows things about me that I don’t know. Like the honey cake. The orehi. The fizzy water—favorites of mine from the past. This is not a fair playing field.

  He wants to play music instead, but I will not have it—not after what he told me about my love of American rock and roll.

  He reaches into the basket and pulls out a block with squares of color on it. He hands it to me, and instinctively I begin to turn the parts this way and that, knowing it is wrong and that it must be made right.