“Look really close, brat,” I say. He is not my brat—my brother—by blood, but he is a brother in every way. We came up together in the orphanage in Moscow before the men of the Bratva took us and trained us.
Again he looks. How can he not recognize her? It makes me crazy. I loop an arm around his shoulder. “Don’t you see it? Look, Yuri. Look harder.”
He studies my eyes instead. “What?”
“Look at her!”
He looks at her.
“Do you see?” I demand.
“What?”
“It’s her.”
He turns to me.
“Look at her, not me!”
“It’s not possible, Viktor.”
“It’s her.”
“Do you have a shot of her? Her face?”
“No.” I let him go, and I kneel in front of the monitor. “She never turns.”
“You haven’t even seen her face?”
“I don’t have to. It’s her. It’s her body. Her style of movement. Look.”
He doesn’t look at her. He looks at me—sadly. “It cannot be her, staryy drug.” Staryy drug—old friend, he calls me. “You know that.”
“I know what you think, but it’s her. You think I wouldn’t recognize her? Twenty hours a day she prays like that. But I don’t think she’s praying; she’s meditating. Remember how Tanechka used to do that? She would focus her mind to a tenacious point before a kill. Tanechka’s perfect icy calm. Look at the way her hands are. Do you see? I think she is doing a form of isometrics in the guise of praying…”
He grabs my shirt collar and pulls me away from the monitor. “Listen to yourself!”
I try to push him off.
He is too strong, too angry. He shoves me to the couch, gets in my face. “Do you hear yourself?”
“It’s her. You don’t know her like I do. It’s her.”
“Tanechka is dead. You killed her. You threw her into Dariali Gorge.”
“We never saw the body.”
“Dariali Gorge, Viktor! She cannot be alive.”
“It’s her.” I push him off me.
“What do you imagine she’s doing? Is she there to bring the brothel down?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Probably.”
“Think. If Tanechka wanted to bring this thing down, she’d bring it down. She has access to a computer in there. Tanechka could make five kinds of weapons out of a computer. She wouldn’t kneel and pray. Tanechka kneels before no one!”
I stand and glare. I’m sure he didn’t mean to put that picture in my mind, but there it is: Tanechka, big blue eyes, hair like sunshine, light freckles across her face, kneeling, looking up at me, hungry for my cock.
I swallow, pull myself together. “Perhaps she waits for somebody she has a contract on. Maybe even Bloody Lazarus. She loved to take advantage of her looks. Remember how she’d do that? Remember her white dress and high boots? Those clothes she’d wear for the fancy jobs?”
“Brat,” Yuri says sadly.
“It’s her. You haven’t been watching.”
He points. “Message her, then.”
“A message,” I spit. “She’s undercover. I might as well put a bullet in her brain.”
“Or a message could prove that it’s not her.”
“I won’t endanger her. Don’t ask again.”
“You used to have those codes between you. What was that one—‘coffee with ten sugars’—that meant, ‘do you have an SOS?’ Try it.”
“Are you crazy?”
“That’s not so strange a thing to say. That way, you could test whether she’s Tanechka.”
“She’s Tanechka.”
I don’t like the look that passes over Yuri’s face now. Worry.
“You don’t have to believe me,” I say. “Find it out for yourself. You knew her. Come. Sit. Watch her. You’ll see.”
“Blyad!” He sits by me in a huff. “This is psycho.”
“Look how she breathes. Remember how Tanechka would do that? She wouldn’t breathe for a long time, and then this lift of her shoulders.”
“You see a ghost.”
We watch in silence.
“You see this woman with your eyes, but I see her with my heart,” I say. “A superior form of knowing. There are forms of knowing we can’t explain, I think. But I know, I know…” I lose my train of thought here.
“Viktor…”
“If only she would turn, you would see.”
He sighs. His attention goes to the other women in their cages. He points to Nikki. “That one’s yours?”
“Yeah. She just sleeps.”
“She looks like a bednyazhka from a little village. What is that in English?”
I shrug.
He looks it up on his iPhone. “Ragamuffin,” he says. “Nikki looks like a ragamuffin from a little village.”
“Perhaps.”
After a long silence, he says, “It’s not Tanechka. You don’t see her with your heart. You see her with your guilt.”
I shrug. “You’ll see.”
“Viktor—” He rest his hand on the side of my neck and makes me turn to him. “This is a ghost here to say that you need to forgive yourself for what you did. You had no choice.”
“If I’d truly loved and trusted Tanechka, I would have fought for her. Believed her.”
“Then you would have died too.”
“Don’t make excuses for me.”
“Blyad!” he says suddenly.
“What?” I tear my gaze from Tanechka.
He’s pointing at the curtains. Sunflower curtains. “Blyad, Viktor!” He stands and walks all around, looking at the furniture. He picks up a fuzzy blanket and throws it across the room, knocking over a vase.
I turn to watch Tanechka praying through it all, powerful and immovable as a mountain. Sometimes I wonder whether she feels me.
“You’re making a nest for her.”
“I want it nice for when I bring her back here.”
He goes to the front closet. I sigh, knowing what he’ll find. Still, I cringe when he comes back holding the white leather jacket. It’s identical to the one she used to wear when she wasn’t trying to be anybody else. The Tanechka trademark. He hurls it at me.
I catch it, regard him defiantly. “It’s her.” I squeeze her jacket in my hands. I want to press it to my chest, but not in front of him. I wish very much that he would be happy for me.
I’m just so tired.
“Brat,” he says softly. He comes and sits next to me.
I close my eyes, still holding the jacket.
I flash on her expression—the surprise, the shock, the terror—as I threw her into the dark gorge. Even brave Tanechka was frightened of death. She reached out to me, even as she went over, eyes wild, grasping for my arms, nothing but cold wind whistling below her.
I hear him unscrew the cap from the bottle.
“It’s morning,” I say.
“Not for you, I think.” He drinks and hands it to me. He is a good friend, Yuri is.
I take it and drink. Together we watch Tanechka.
“I didn’t believe enough in our love,” I say. “I didn’t believe enough in her.”
“We thought she betrayed our gang. Our family. So much proof.”
“Proof.”
“Tanechka was playing a risky game. You say you didn’t believe in her enough, but she should have had enough faith in you to tell you the dangerous thing she was doing. She betrayed you by not trusting you with her plan. She should’ve trusted you.”
I shake my head. “I would have tried to stop her.”
“She should have had faith in her own gang, her own family.”
“Do not ever say she brought it on herself,” I growl.
Yuri sniffs.
We had this very argument so often in those dark months after I killed her. Me in my room, drunk. It was only because of Yuri that I didn’t hurl myself into the gorge. We traveled back home to Moscow a few months later. Things onl
y got worse.
“You could not have done otherwise!”
I pull the jacket to my chest. “I should have believed.”
“You loved her very much.”
“I won’t let her down this time,” I say. “Whatever she needs from me, she has. My honor, my body, my blood.”
Yuri says nothing. He simply puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Like a miracle,” I say.
“So many monitors. Is a lot to watch.”
I sigh, feeling so fucking tired. I’m glad I told him. I’ve felt so fucked up and overwhelmed at times, trying to keep up with the feeds. Alone with this news.
“You’re looking for clues about where she is, because you want to be able to get to her if something happens.”
He’s right, of course. “Da.”
“You’re taping it, but if you’re watching the taped feed, you miss it live. It must be hard.”
I nod. “Da.”
“Do you want me to take over?”
I regard him warily. “You don’t even think it’s her.”
He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Let me watch for you.”
“You’d do that for me?”
“Immeno. Rest your eyes. I’ll watch.”
I show him how I have it set up. If he sees anything, he’s to note the time on the monitor or go back and do a clip grab. He knows how to do such a thing. He knows how to recognize a clue. I watch him through bleary eyes as he gets up from the couch. “Where are you going?”
He grabs one of Tanechka’s fur blankets and tucks it around me, and then he sits down. I close my eyes. “Don’t take your eyes from the screens,” I warn.
“I won’t,” he says.
I close my eyes and put my cheek to the smooth pelt. I can almost imagine her here, speaking softly. She’s so close. Praying on the other side of a camera somewhere in this city, or at least in this world. The world still contains her. My heart thunders to think of it.
Chapter Two
Aleksio
I text Viktor. I don’t hear back. One hour. Two hours. Three hours. Nothing.
I’m not handling this uncommunicative shit of his very well.
I tell myself there’s nothing wrong, that I shouldn’t freak out about him not texting back. He’s just invested in his mission, that’s all.
I tell myself I’m used to being with him nonstop.
It’s just that I miss him. He’s my fucking brother, and I’ve only known him a year.
Finding Viktor last year, coming face to face with him in that gloomy garage in Moscow, and feeling that instant bond of love, it was one of the best fucking experiences of my life.
I held him to me—I didn’t give a fuck that the toughest Bratva fuckers were all around, bristling with weapons and distrust of this crazy American bounding into their space.
So yeah, Viktor and I have been together nonstop since.
And I don’t like us being cut off. All those years I thought my brothers had been slaughtered just like my parents were—finding him alive was life-changing.
He needs space, I get that.
But I need to know he’s okay. He seems…too obsessed. Yeah, it’s good he’s into the mission—taking down Valhalla will weaken and distract Bloody Lazarus. But something’s off.
He’s my brother. So I fucking care about shit like that.
He speaks English amazingly well, but he goes Russian now and then. Brat, he calls me. I love that.
When we talk about Kiro, he uses the word bratik, which seems to mean “little brother.” Or “baby brother.” Because that’s what Kiro is. He was taken when he was only eleven months old. By fucking Lazarus and his boss.
Kiro is still out there somewhere. He probably doesn’t know we exist. Every second that goes by that we can’t find him, he’s in more danger.
Bloody Lazarus wants to kill him. Must kill him.
I text Viktor again. Nothing back.
Of course it’s good he got his own place. Good for Mira and me to have some privacy. And he’s making important bonds with the American Russian gang. That connection is part of how we’ll take down Bloody Lazarus, the man who helped slaughter our parents and send us brothers to the ends of the earth all those years ago.
Bloody Lazarus, who controls the empire that is rightfully ours.
Bloody Lazarus, who is hunting our baby brother Kiro as obsessively as we are.
Mira calls me from the back porch. I go out and find her in the hammock we put up. We’re living this secret suburban life, and it’s fucking amazing and weirdly wholesome.
“Anything?” she asks.
“Still waiting. Sooooo….”
She screams as I climb into the hammock. I don’t tip us, though. I fit right in. I’m getting some specifically not-wholesome ideas, but she’s trying to read. I’m fine with that. I just lie there.
My phone pings. A text. I read it. A lead on the guy who might have Kiro. My whole mood lifts. “Fuck yes.”
Mira studies my face. “Is it what I think it is?”
“Could be.”
“Aleksio!”
I smile. “It’s not for sure—just a lead—but…”
She kisses me.
I call the P.I.
I haven’t seen Kiro since the night our parents were slaughtered in the nursery where my brothers and I once played. An old hit man hid me in a dark cubby while it happened. He held me there, hand over my mouth, arms like iron.
Baby Kiro cried while it happened, waving his fat arms as the blood spurted from our parent’s necks. Viktor was there, too, a screaming toddler. Bloody Lazarus and his boss took them both away. I was just nine.
Viktor and I learned just last month Kiro was adopted after that. When his piece-of-shit adoptive father couldn’t handle him, he dumped him in the wilderness. Eight years old. And not just any wilderness—the fucking Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a vast expanse of uninhabited territory stretching through northern Minnesota and Canada.
From the story we could put together, our baby brother lived wild until he was 18, when he was found half-dead and brought to a hospital with a wound in his leg. Completely wild. The bottoms of his feet so leathery they were like shoes.
It didn’t take long for rumors to start—a handsome young man, completely wild. The media flocked to the area, salivating for photos. Getting rabid, aggressive. “Savage Adonis,” they named him. Fuckers.
And then the whole thing was shut down and Kiro disappeared. The authorities up there told everyone it was a hoax.
We know different. We believe he was taken.
We got photos of the man who likely took him, and our investigator ran them through every database he could. It was a dead end. It had been our only lead.
We were disheartened.
But the man who took Kiro from the hospital posed as a professor—this made our investigator wonder whether the guy had been a professor in the past. He took the money I threw at him and hired a team of guys to personally visit every college and university in the Midwest, showing the picture around. It was a lot of man hours.
Over the phone, my investigator tells me it paid off. A name. A location. That’s what unlimited resources gets you.
I text a few guys to meet me at Viktor’s. I can’t wait to tell them the news.
We are going to find this fake professor. And with him, maybe Kiro.
It’s noon by the time my main man Tito and I get to Viktor’s northwest Chicago neighborhood, a hidden pocket that is pure Russian mafiya territory. We park a ways down, just a precaution. My ankle still hurts from an injury some weeks back, but I can walk. Run if I have to.
You’d think you were in Russia, to walk down the street, smell the food, hear the chatter. We find Mischa, one of Viktor’s guys, on his stoop a few houses down, and he’s greeting people all around in the mother tongue.
People are tight here, and there are eyes everywhere. If we were cops or muscle from Bloody Lazarus’s gang, the whole neighborhood would be alerted.
We get to Viktor’s condo, a brownstone row house, and knock. Yuri opens the door and puts his finger to his lips. “Shhh.”
He leads us to the living room where Viktor is sacked out on the couch, cradling a bottle. Instead of a coffee table in front of the couch, there’s a wall of monitors set up on a bookcase.
“What the fuck is this?”
Again Yuri puts his finger to his lips.
“Be quiet? It’s noon.” I frown. This isn’t like my brother. Viktor may be an impulsive hothead, but he doesn’t drink and pass out in the middle of the day. I go to him, but Yuri pulls me back.
“Let him sleep,” he whispers.
“What the fuck?” I whisper back, thoroughly alarmed. I saw Viktor not five days ago, and he seemed…distracted. But okay.
Yuri stations Tito in front of the monitors and gives him instructions on what to watch for on the strange array of nine screens, then he pulls me into the kitchen.
“What’s going on? Is Viktor drunk?”
“Sleep deprived.” Yuri looks out the kitchen window. “More or less.”
“More or less? Talk to me.” I join him at the window and touch the curtain—every room is beautifully decorated. You’d think somebody obsessed with home décor magazines lived in the place. Well, aside from the insane shelf of monitors flashing captive girl vids. “Is this about Valhalla? We have what we need now. We don’t need to get crazy here.”
Yuri says something in Russian that sounds like swearing, just from the tone of it. He loves Viktor as much as I do.
I gaze around. The kitchen is seriously stocked. Nice, too. The kind of shit I’d buy. “He doesn’t need to monitor them like he’s the fucking Secret Service,” I say. “He needs to win the auction and get in. You all have the tech ready to go?”
“Yeah, everything is ready to go with Valhalla.” Yuri opens a cupboard and then another. There’s a ton of food. Lots of sweet stuff. This is not the type of shit Viktor eats.
“What’s up with all the food?” I ask.
“Checking a theory,” Yuri grumbles. “Follow me, Aleksio.” He leads me out of the kitchen and up the wooden staircase to the bedroom.
The bedroom is also done up like a home décor mag. Like a fucking woman’s bedroom. Yuri flings open the closet. And lets out of streak of Russian that’s probably more swearing.
Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) Page 2
