“That’s one way of putting it.” I say. Another—more accurate—way of putting it would be that two of my guys got wasted on meth and shot some Russian mob soldiers. Managing criminals isn’t as easy as it might appear. A lot of them are hotheads and addicts. “Maybe I could bring him their heads on platters.”
“Is that what he really wants, though?” She thinks I don’t mean that literally, either. “What are Dmitri’s business objectives?”
“Operational expansion,” I say. “Conservation of human resources.” This is how Valerie and I talk. My guys would fall off their chairs if they heard us.
“What I’m getting at is, if you want to prevent more sniping between your firms, look at it from his point of view. Imagine you weren’t rivals. What becomes possible then? Who are you without this rivalry? What’s on both of your business bucket lists? What makes you both look good in the eyes of the rank and file? Is there any sort of joint venture you could undertake? Or a pooling of resources to catch a large account that you both want? Think out of the box here, Lazarus. Maybe you collaborate to put on a charity event for a cause you both believe in and the Russian firm name is at the top. You’ll make him look good.” Making people look good is one of Valerie’s go-to strategies.
“He’s gonna have some significant trust issues,” I say.
“Then overcome them, Lazarus. When was the last time you and Dmitri met face to face?”
Never, I tell her. No, not even at an industry function.
She’s surprised. “The first step is a meeting. Humanize yourself to him. Invite him to dinner.”
“Just the two of us?”
“Two guys. Who probably have very much in common.”
It’s an interesting idea. Insane, but interesting.
I imagine sitting down with Dmitri in an out-of-the-way restaurant. Something neutral—not Agronika, the Black Lion club. Not one of the Russki places, either. There would need to be guarantees of safety. “I don’t know. I don’t want him to think I’m fearful of his retaliation. Going to him on my knees. Kissing his ass.”
“In judo, a fighter uses his opponent’s energy against him. When the opponent pushes, you pull. Your Russian rival is in pushing mode. Instead of pushing back, why not surprise him? Why not find a way to pull him close? You let him know you didn’t sanction that action that your employees took. You’re disciplining them, right?”
“They won’t misbehave again.”
“Good. Let him know the steps you’ve taken toward bringing your team back under control. Then move forward—find some point of agreement and build.”
“It’s…out of the ordinary.”
“Guess what, Lazarus. You’re in control now. You get to decide what’s ordinary now.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Viktor
When I open my eyes again, it’s dawn.
Tanechka’s arm is still around me. I can barely move the fingers of my right hand, and my phone’s ringing from somewhere. And then it stops. I’m just stunned that it’s dawn. I can’t believe I slept through the night. I never do—not ever.
Tanechka mumbles from behind me.
I remove her arm from where it drapes over me and settle her on her back, gazing down at her sleeping form. Nobody ever held me like that. Nobody ever told me I was worthy—not even the old Tanechka. I knew she thought it, but she would’ve been too cool to say it.
It did something to me to hear this nun say it.
I got her drunk and seduced her and acted like a savage, and she held me. I want to lie back down with her.
I straighten. No, I don’t. This is the nun, not Tanechka. The very thought makes me feel as though I’ve betrayed Tanechka.
I scrub my face and grab my Glock from the floor. Then I rip the covers from the bed and tuck them around her. She always liked warmth, a heat-seeking creature.
I set a fresh pair of socks by the fire. She loved her socks to be warmed by the fire most of all. I sit on the end of the bed and check my phone to see who called, trying not to think of the night.
The call was from Yuri. I call back. It is not good news. Some of Bloody Lazarus’s guys ambushed some of our American Russian friends. We have to help them avenge it.
It will be dangerous and bloody, but they’re important allies, and to have an ally, you must be an ally. And Aleksio is gone investigating a Kiro lead.
It’s up to me.
“I’ll be outside my door, brat.”
I button up my shirt, wincing at the pain in my hand, which is caked with dried blood. Nothing broken, I think. I move it, and it begins to bleed again.
Tanechka sleeps.
She never did anything in the regular way, never like a regular woman. My Tanechka, like a warrior nun. I buckle my holster and put on my suit jacket. I kneel over her and smooth a stray lock of hair from her forehead.
She rouses sleepily and smiles up at me. My heart leaps to think she’s back, but then the smile fades, and she pulls the blanket to her breast.
I stand up and fasten my cufflinks, looking down, affecting a cold demeanor. “I’m going out. To kill some men. You will pray for me?” I say it mockingly.
“Viktor,” she says sadly.
“You’ll pray for me, Tanechka?”
“I’ll always pray for you.”
Downstairs I bandage my hand and swallow pain relievers with a swig of vodka. Two minutes later I’m outside with my case. Yuri roars up in his black Mustang. I swing in.
He greets me with, “What the fuck?” The car screams around a corner.
“What?”
“You hand. What did you do?”
I flex it. “Nothing broken.” The pain relievers should kick in soon. I would’ve taken something stronger if I didn’t need my aim.
“Tell me.”
“I punched a wall.”
“You can shoot still, right?”
I work my trigger finger. Steady enough. I change the subject, ask about the ambush. Yuri and some of the American Russians have identified the man as one of Lazarus’s. “They want a full-scale war on Lazarus—now,” Yuri says.
“A full-scale war is a poor use of our resources.”
“You sound like old Konstantin.”
“Konstantin is smart.”
“They don’t want to wait,” Yuri says. “They’re scared.”
“So impatient. A full war puts Bloody Lazarus’s organization into the shell of battle mode. It makes them hard to hurt in the deep way we need to hurt them. We’ll take out the hitters. That should satisfy them until we attack Lazarus’s money-laundering op. When they see the cash they get from that, they’ll be very happy we waited.”
Yuri doesn’t like it. “That would go over better if Aleksio hadn’t missed that meeting.”
“They’re our brothers. They’ll understand.”
“They’re more American than Russian,” he says. “They make tacos out of shuba, Viktor. Shuba.”
I wrinkle my nose, trying to imagine salted herring and vegetables in a taco shell.
“Your hand. Tell me.”
I look down at my bandaged hand. “I thought it was her,” I say. “I thought for a moment that I had Tanechka back.” My heart pounds, remembering how it felt when I thought she was back. Until she told me that God would forgive me.
“Still thinks she’s a nun, huh.”
“Nun trainee. But yes. And I seduced her. I got her off with my hand. Then she had my gun, and I thought she was going to shoot me—”
“You gave her a piece? You angered Tanechka and then gave her a gun to shoot you with?”
“I didn’t give it to her.”
“Who did it then?” Yuri demands. “Did the nocnitsa float through the wall and give it to her?”
He has a certain point. How could I not think Tanechka could find a way to get at that gun, even across the room? I think about what Aleksio said. The death wish. “Just drive.”
Pityr’s in the kitchen when I return. “You do them?” Did we kill Lazarus’s men
who killed the two Russians, he means.
“They were already done,” I say. “Last night, apparently. Their bodies were found in Bobolink Meadow. Hands and feet gone.”
He narrows his eyes, confused. A Bloody Lazarus trademark. “Why would Bloody Lazarus kill his own men like that?”
“I don’t know. We went to see ourselves, and it’s true. Then, going back to the car, we fucking ran into a guy from Valhalla,” I tell him. “It looked like he recognized me from my Peter the German visit. We had to kill him. We’re making such fucking progress and now all this.”
I loosen my tie. An unscheduled kill. I always hate to do it. “I had to. We’re almost up on four pipelines. We’re going to take down every player. Once we’re done, nobody rebuilds that fucking place.”
“You had to, then. He would’ve blown all that careful work.”
“Tanechka up?”
“Yes, and she asked for vodka.”
I suck in a breath. Only the old Tanechka would ask for vodka. “You gave her some?”
He looks worried. “I hope it’s okay.”
I clap a hand on his cheek. “Of course, Pityr. She can have all the vodka she wants. Anything she wants.”
“Except a Bible.”
“Right. Did she say anything else?”
“No. Just to bring her the bottle of vodka.”
“Not even a glass?”
Pityr shakes his head.
Tanechka. I take the stairs three by three.
I hear the weeping in the hall. I burst into the bedroom. “Tanechka?”
She’s curled up in front of the fire, cheeks streaked with tears, bottle in one hand, volume of poems in the other. “Is this how I would overcome the killing?”
I go to her and kneel. I try to take the book from her, but she won’t let me have it.
“It’s in the darkness and squalor of his cell that he most feels free,” she says. “The prisoner feels such beautiful freedom and goodness because it’s what he can never have again. So beautiful to him because it’s so far away. It’s how I feel now, drifting so far from the convent.”
I stroke her hair, heart breaking. I get a crazy thought—what if I took her back there?
For a moment, I imagine how good it would feel to grant her that wish, to make her happy. Just for a moment, though. I would never do it. I’m not a good man.
She clutches the book and the bottle to her breast. So like Tanechka. A pale, beautiful creature, feeling so wildly. So deeply.
I sit and draw her to me, holding her. Times like these, I would just be there. She would rage or cry and I would sit with her and kiss off her tears.
“It’s never an easy thing, killing.”
“Answer me, Viktor. Is this how I’d overcome it?” she asks between sobs.
“No, Tanechka. You can never overcome it. That was never the goal.”
“What then?” she asks.
I settle her against me and take the bottle from her fingers. I drink. “This poem of Vartov, it let you feel the wound, the darkness, but you knew there was something good, too. Something nice somewhere else.”
She listens, a silent, deadly flower.
“When you’re a killer, you have to find a way to stay human. That’s the thing.”
“How did you stay human?” she asks.
You, I want to say. I don’t. “Best I could.”
She sniffs. It sounds almost like a soft laugh.
I drink some more. I want to be drunk like her.
“Some men in our gang would grow hard with killing. A crust and a shell. The kind of people where, when they walk into a restaurant, nobody wants to be near them. Not because they’re scary, but because they’re… oni zhutkiy.” I can’t think of the American word for it. Maybe yucky.
I feel her smile.
“There were many in our gang we didn’t like. We didn’t like to have to work with them. We preferred to work together, you and I.”
“You think we were a superior class of killers?”
I twirl my finger in her hair. “I don’t know. I think it is always better to feel it than to be a shell against it.”
She snorts. Does she understand how like Tanechka she is being?
“I think if we didn’t stay human like that, we couldn’t have felt the love for each other that we did. We were hard to the world, but human to each other.”
“I feel sad,” she says. “I’m sorry you can’t have your old Tanechka back.”
It breaks my heart that she says it. “You’re not so different from her,” I say. “As the old Tanechka, you believed in things so fiercely. When a plan went wrong or when one of our gang was wounded, you’d hang on to hope after everybody else lost their faith. You’d hang onto grudges, too…” I pause.
The old Tanechka was not so forgiving, but this one is.
What if I did tell her? What if I confessed?
I hand her the bottle, and she takes another drink. Is this the nun drinking, or is it Tanechka?
“I want an update on Valhalla. Have you rescued my sisters there yet?”
“We’re close,” I say.
“It’s taking too long. I can’t stop thinking about them.”
“I’ve told you why it can’t be instantaneous.”
“It’s making me mad.”
“I know.”
A long silence. It’s a good silence. We always could be silent together.
“You know what else is the same, lisichka?”
“What?”
“You always saw the sky. You were always looking up. You’d point things out to me. ‘Look at that cloud, Viktor. Look at the sunset. Look at the sky, how blue, how pale it becomes at the edges.’ You’re still looking up. As a nun.”
“Almost a nun,” she says.
“As almost a nun.”
I think, suddenly, that she’s beautiful in her doomed desire to be a nun. She’s like a fish, swimming and swimming in a tiny dark bowl with us other fish, imagining a beautiful ocean beyond. And then one day she leaps out, escapes the confines of that little bowl, finds a new land.
But it’s not what people like us do. We don’t escape what we are. We can’t live outside the bowl. I won’t let her.
She gazes at the fire. Fire, sky, stars. Tanechka loved pure things. She loved Vartov’s poem about the prison and the darkness and something pure elsewhere.
“Give me the bottle,” I say.
She hands it over, and I drink deeply. I should take her back to that place. I really should.
She lowers her voice to a whisper, as though to confide in me. She says, “I wish I was almost a nun, but I think I’m starting to forget. I feel so cold.”
“Let me warm you,” I say, pulling her close.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tanechka
There’s blood on his shirt. I don’t say anything because I don’t want him to change. The blood reminds me of what he is.
It doesn’t work, though. It feels sweet when he pulls me to him. I can smell the blood, mixing with the muskiness of his sweat. Instead of pushing him away, I breathe it in.
I have drunk too much. All I could think of all day was what he said to me about how we were together. The way we’d dress up and pretend to be strangers. The way he’d hold my neck.
It’s not just the killing I want to erase from my mind. I want to erase the wild feelings I have for Viktor. The feelings are too big, too confusing, at once dark and light—so much love shot through with so much horror.
It’s too much to be with Viktor. Too dangerous, too beautiful.
I need to get to the convent, to reconnect with my kind. There has to be a key to the iron cuff somewhere, but he knows not to bring it into my range. You never bring the keys around the prisoner. I know this the way I know you never put your hand into the fire.
Because I, too, am a killer.
I push him away and force myself to look at his bloody shirt. This is a person’s blood.
He notes the direction of my gaze.
“Tanechka! I am so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me?” With a jerk he rips off his tie and fights off his shirt, as if it’s an octopus clinging to him. He pulls it all off himself and tosses it angrily aside. His chest is formed of hardened curves and dips. Two rosy nipples. A smattering of dark hair leading down to his belly. He sits back against the end of the bed.
More beautiful. More dangerous.
I snuggle up next to him. His skin is warm and smooth against my cheek. The touch of him nourishes me in a way that food never has. Something wicked inside me wants the nourishment of Viktor.
He strokes my hair. My eyes drift closed. It’s a comfort to me, the way he strokes my hair, sliding his fingers down the smooth surface of it. “It breaks me apart when you’re sad, lisichka.”
Without thinking, I grab the bottle and drink more. The drink has given me a good feeling I find I want more of. More vodka. More Viktor.
The muscles of his chest shift as he takes the bottle from my fingers, takes a swig for himself. The movement feels ancient. Like old times, probably.
The bare skin above his belt looks softer than the rest. I know exactly how it would feel to place my palm there—smooth and silky warm with just a little roughness from those wiry hairs.
The memory is in my hand.
The memory is in my face, too, because I know how it would feel to press my face there, my lips.
I say, “Back at the convent I had a tiny room with just a bed and a desk. It was a tiny life. I cared for the goats. I was happy.”
He holds the bottle loosely, tilted, the edge of the base resting on the rug, the diamond liquid inside tilted to be parallel to the floor, reflecting the firelight. Deep thoughts in his mind. “Tell me more. Tell me what you loved about it.”
I consider telling him about the icon—I want to, but I hesitate. Instead I tell him about the beauty of the place. How I felt so lost, always so angry and grieving, and the patience and love the mothers there showed me. And how brave they were in the face of the soldiers who would take so much from us. I tell him about the things they’d do to us.
The stories make Viktor angry on my behalf, as though he’s truly united with me. It makes me feel less alone.
Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) Page 17
