I say nothing. There’s just surviving for now. I make her get in the back with Pityr. I take the wheel with Aleksio at my side.
“What happened?” Aleksio asks quietly, tipping his head at Tanechka in the back. She talks with Pityr in low tones.
I shake my head.
He gives me a dark look, and we set off.
“The fuck,” he says after a bit.
He’s not talking about Tanechka this time; he’s talking about our Russian friends turning. Our best allies are gone—to the most powerful crime organization in the ten-state area…and they’re all united with the cops.
“I had the fucking money-laundering heist set up with them for tomorrow. We would’ve cleaned him out. It would’ve made us solid with the Russians.”
“The Russians knew about the camera.”
“Probably told Lazarus about it,” Aleksio says. “They probably took it out already.” He tips his head back. “Did they know about Tanechka?
“I don’t think so. Best to assume the worst, though.” Gangsters gossip. “This is on me, brat. I should have spent more time with Dmitri.”
“I missed that meeting with him,” Aleksio says. “But they hated Lazarus. Uniting with Lazarus…what the fuck is that? This is us underestimating Lazarus. It stops now.”
“Him going after us shows he doesn’t know where Kiro is,” I say. “We’ll go to this prison and take Kiro. Together the Dragusha brothers will rain fire on Bloody Lazarus. And we’ll have our empire back. At least the brothel pipeline has nearly collapsed,” I say. “We’re just waiting for the word from Kiev.”
We switch vehicles a few miles later, nabbing a nice SUV. We head south to Konstantin’s quiet senior village.
Whispering trees line shady sidewalks. Low-rise brick buildings stretch for entire blocks. One unit has the door swinging open.
Konstantin’s unit.
My heart drops.
Aleksio tears into the driveway and jams it into park. He’s out of the car, running for the door before any of us can move.
I take out my Glock and twist around to Pityr and Tanechka in the back seat. Pityr has his weapon out.
Tanechka’s blue eyes are wide. “Stay here until we make sure it’s clear,” I say to her.
I get out of the vehicle in a haze.
Konstantin is dead. I don’t need to see his body to know. I don’t need to hear Aleksio’s cry of rage and anguish from inside the door.
Pityr and I move in opposite directions along the fronts of the low-rise homes, covering the drives and the carefully tended grass with long, quick strides, weapons down at our thighs. We converge around the back. The ducks quack.
We head in.
The old man is on the foyer floor, a pool of blood under his cheek, gun in his hand, the back of his head blown off. Aleksio is on his knees next to him, his head on the old man’s chest.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Stay,” I say. “We’ll clear.”
We steal through the place, clearing room by room. We find no intruders. We find no struggle.
“Mne ochen zhal,” Pityr says to me in the dark hall when we know the place is clear. “I’m so sorry.”
“I knew him only a year. But to Aleksio, he was a father.” I say. “Get Tanechka out of the driveway. And call Mira. Aleksio needs Mira with him.”
I go back into the foyer to find Aleksio. He’s still next to Konstantin, grasping his hand.
I kneel next to my brother and touch the old man’s arm. Still warm. Three hours dead, maybe.
After a while, I pull Aleksio away from the body. It’s not good to let people cling to a body. I take Aleksio in my arms and hold him with everything I have inside me, squeezing him without shame. “Brat.” There is nothing more to say.
“He gave me everything,” Aleksio whispers hoarsely into my shoulder. “He gave up his life to save me.”
“A soldier and a father.” I squeeze him relentlessly, feeling torn apart right down to my heart. This brother I love, so devastated. This brave old man dead.
“He killed himself,” Aleksio says. “I can’t tell for sure, but the angle…his piece…” He pauses, overcome. “They came to the door, and he knew they’d hurt him to get what he knows of Kiro, of us. He killed himself rather than give anything up.”
“He died protecting us.”
“I closed his eyes and his mouth,” Aleksio says. “He taught me that. An Albanian custom, done to stop death from coming again. He didn’t believe in the superstitions, but he wanted me to know our culture, to know the little things and the big things, like besa.”
Besa. Honor, it means. For the crazy Albanians, besa is everything.
I let go of Aleksio and bend down to kiss the old man’s forehead. “You believed, old man. You never stopped fighting. The strongest of us all.”
Aleksio stands over me with his fist shoved into his face, as though the pain is too much.
I rise and set a hand on my brother’s shoulder.
“Sometimes I would be scared as hell just to fall asleep,” Aleksio says. “Right after it happened, especially.”
He doesn’t have to say what “it” is. “It” is the night Aldo Nikolla and Bloody Lazarus slaughtered our parents.
“I was so full of fucking terror. This shit that would take over my body, you know? We’d live in these shitty apartments with walls like paper, him doing whatever dangerous scams he had to do to get us by, keep us under the radar. We’d have to move every week, but no matter where we went, the first thing he’d do was set up a chair at the foot of my bed or sleeping bag.” He turns to Konstantin. “Remember?” He kneels and sets a hand lightly on the old man’s arm. “Remember all the nights you slept in a chair at the foot of my bed? Did you even sleep back then? I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.” He scrubs a hand over his face.
I set a hand on his shoulder. “He was a father.”
“Sometimes when it was really bad, he’d touch my ankle. He’d just set a hand on my ankle, and it would break my fear. I’d fall asleep that way. Just him with his heavy old paw on my ankle.”
It’s then that the bad feeling comes over me. As if on cue, Pityr runs in, white as a sheet. He doesn’t have to say anything. I bound back through the place and out to the drive.
She’s gone with the car. With the weapons.
“No!”
He comes up beside me. “She didn’t have keys—she jacked it. I thought she couldn’t remember…”
“Blyad!”
“Where will she go?” he asks.
“Church.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know. I put trackers on all her shoes after she tried to escape the first time.”
“Shoes. Exactly where everybody looks.”
I nod. Exactly where she’d look…if her memory has returned.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Tanechka
The Sacred River Church is hushed and beautiful. Colored light trails through stained-glass windows high above. A few faithful pray in the pews. They have no idea who has come into their midst.
I suppose I don’t, either.
I go to the front and fall to my knees, making the sign of the cross. I clasp my hands together so tightly I think I might break my own bones. I feel unworthy even of looking up at Jesus on the cross. He showed me his light, and I wasn’t good enough. I can’t remember killing the people I killed, but I remember begging for Viktor to fuck me.
I shut my eyes tightly, trying to gather my other sins. How can I ask forgiveness if I don’t remember? How can I be washed clean?
Mother Olga said it was possible, but she didn’t know what I was.
I think of Viktor. A killer like me. Familiar as a glove on my hand. I feel bad for leaving him, but I had to get away. At the brothel they only threatened my body. Viktor threatens my very soul.
I take a spot in a pew in the front, and I whisper my prayers, bereft. Jesus showed me his beautiful light, and I turned away from it. The w
omen languished in the brothel while I became drunk and made love with a killer. The vodka, the feel of Viktor’s skin under my touch, Viktor’s manhood filling me—these things I wanted.
I look up at Jesus, blurry though my tears. “Show me your light again.”
Nothing. Jesus tried once to help me. Why should he try again?
I clutch my hands together as if I could press away the feelings I bear for Viktor. As if I could bring back my memories so I could see those I killed, so I could see their faces and feel the stain of it. It’s wrong that I can’t remember. I need to find a priest. I need to tell him about the women in the brothel. I need to beg forgiveness.
I think of Viktor holding me. Lisichka. Even now I miss him. Here I am, finally having made it to the church, and all I want to do is flee back to Viktor.
A male voice at the end of the pew. “May I?”
My tears make his face look blurry, but I recognize the frock of the priest. “Please, Father,” I say.
He slides in. I feel instantly cold. Frightened. As though he is a threat. Is this how far I’ve strayed? That a priest should seem an enemy?
He says, “You are troubled.”
“More than you can imagine,” I say.
“Would confession help?”
“It would, Father. So much—”
He gestures over my shoulder. The other side. I look to see what he is gesturing toward. The confessional, perhaps?
A rustling sound behind me. Too late I turn. There’s a prick on my neck. And then darkness.
I awake alone on a cold floor in a dark room; if not for a sliver of light coming from the edges of a board over a high window, it would be completely dark.
He wasn’t a real priest, of course. The old Tanechka would’ve known. Novice Tanechka seems only able to sin and doubt herself.
My head pounds as I sit up. Thoughts muddy. I fight my way out of my stupor enough to go to the door, nearly tripping on my skirts. I run my hands over the coarse cloth and recognize the frock as a nun’s robe. Different from my old one. I wear the head scarf, too. But I’m not at the brothel; the brothel had a certain sound, a certain smell.
Somewhere else.
I try the door and find it locked. I step back unsteadily, mouth dry as a desert.
On instinct, I traverse the perimeter of the tiny room, inspecting the wall, the floor. I feel off balance. Drugged. I’ll need to get to the window. But how?
My senses tell me this place is in a basement, and that there are men in the hall to the right, and that’s also where the exit is. I begin to see it as a colorful cube in my mind’s eye, like the one Viktor put in my hands at the picnic by the lake. Rubik’s Cube, I think. Move one row and new possibilities open and close. Move this other and you’re surrounded. Viktor talked about that, wanting me so badly to remember. He said we used to solve them together. He said we’d solve standoffs the same way we solved Rubik’s Cubes. I try to force myself to remember how to be the old Tanechka. Not to fight, but to escape. Such a woman as Viktor described would be able to slip out like a ghost.
My body knows how to react, but I can’t seem to think ahead, to form a plan. I only react. Why can’t I think forward?
Footsteps. I spin. The door opens. The light blinds me.
He is there, face in the dark, light streaming in behind him. “Here she is, everybody’s favorite nun. Awake at last.”
It’s the man who pretended to be a priest. I can’t see his face, but I remember the voice. I know he’s dangerous. I was too emotional to see it before. I see it now.
He flicks on a light. Controls are outside the door. I blink. “This better?”
“Let me out.”
“Yeah. Maybe not.”
He walks in and shuts the door behind him. He has strange, severe looks—dark hair swept back and a nose like a beak, harsh eyes, harsh cheekbones. He might be handsome to other women in that way some severe men can be handsome, but he’s not handsome to me because I can feel his evil.
“Come here.” He goes to the corner table and spreads out a map. I can see from where I stand that it’s Chicago. “Come on.”
I cross my arms. “Will you take me back to that place? The brothel?”
“You say that almost like you want to go back,” he says. “Do you want to go back?”
A question with a question. Of course. This is a man who cannot be trusted. But I do want to go back. I don’t know what I can do for those women, but I know I’m all that they have. I can do this one good thing with my life.
Viktor says he’s trying to help them, but he’s powerful, and they’re still in there. His help is not helping.
The false priest puts a dot on the map.
I should have tried to break them out of there in the first place. I was bewildered by what I was then. So lost. “I just want to know,” I say simply. “Am I going back?”
“I can tell you that there’s one friend who is very eager to see you,” he says. “Can you guess who?”
I ball my fists. He’s speaking of Charles, the one I was forced to dine with. The man with a cockroach for a heart.
“Come, Tanechka. Can I call you Tanechka?”
I shrug.
“My name’s Lazarus.” He smiles.
I frown.
“You want to go back? You want to be a cheerleader for your little team there? Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to tell me where you’ve been staying. I want to know how the guard who took you got you out of there and want to know about anybody who helped him. Extra points for addresses, license plate numbers, and vehicle makes and models.”
I glare at him.
“You’ve been gone for days. Where’d he have you?”
“Bring me back to that place and I’ll tell you.”
His lips turn up at the sides. “That’s not how this works.”
I shrug. “I won’t tell you, then.”
He stands and advances, menace in his eyes. “The sister drives a hard bargain.” He comes right up to my face and adjusts my head scarf.
I flinch as five ways to kill him flash through my mind. I shut my eyes, praying for strength. I promised Jesus I wouldn’t kill.
“I don’t think you have much of a choice here, sister. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Please don’t.” My voice trembles. “Please don’t try to hurt me.”
I open my eyes and find him smiling at the fear he hears.
He thinks the fear is about what he’ll do to me. He’s wrong.
“Tell me what I need to know.”
“No,” I whisper.
A light snick tells me he holds a blade down by his side. I know the kind from the sound alone—slim unibody, with a handle that’s bumpy and easy to grip and painted to resemble wood.
I’ve used such a blade. Not my preference, but I know it well. This isn’t knowledge I wish to have. I stiffen as he touches the tip of the blade to my chin.
It’s not a killing place on my neck, but it’s near a killing place. I know to respect the blade.
Lazarus draws his face near mine. I squeeze my eyes shut as he crowds me against the wall, the knife a needle on my chin, now. It’s very near his throat, too.
I resist the impulse to take his wrist and turn the blade back on him. It’s not for me to punish him or pass judgment. “You escaped from Cecil—our guard. You came here alone. You honestly have some allegiance to him? We just need to know where he had you.”
“I won’t tell you.”
“I promised a certain somebody you wouldn’t be harmed,” he says. “Harm, though, it’s a loose term, don’t you think?”
My heart races. He’s a trained fighter with a blade, but I have a weapon, too—surprise. I picture a move—the only one I have—a fast one-two snap designed to put the blade off me and into him.
I can’t. I won’t.
My eyes widen as he pushes the point of the blade into the soft flesh under my chin, breaking the skin.
Blood trickles down m
y neck.
“Oh dear,” he whispers. “You’re bleeding.”
I suck in a breath, fighting the panic. Bleeding panics a person on an instinctual level. Something else I shouldn’t know. He needs me; he won’t hurt me. This cut is not lethal.
“Why are you protecting him?”
I close my eyes.
“Are you praying right now?”
“Yes.”
“To save you?”
“No, to save you. I’m praying to Jesus for his help not to kill you if I must fight you.”
He laughs, long and hard.
“It’s not a joke,” I say.
“Word of advice: Asking for Jesus’s guidance in the finer points of hand-to-hand combat is like wearing your shoe as a hat.”
“Why? Jesus outshines everything.”
Lazarus smirks. “No—seriously? You really think he can help you right now?”
I’m not in such a good position, but inside I feel hopeful. I try to remember Jesus’s shining eyes. The trickle of blood has reached the divot at my throat.
Lazarus’s gaze is cold. “I formed a question, didn’t I? Voice turned up at the end and all?”
He wants an answer? “I do think it. Jesus isn’t small. He loves even the unlovable.” I surprise myself with this answer. Maybe it’s not too late for me.
“Hmm.” Again he shifts the knife.
I keep my breathing shallow. My mind is reeling. Maybe he wasn’t showing me his beautiful eyes to get me to be a nun. Maybe he was just showing me love. Forgiveness. Showing me himself, so that I would know him. I can’t be a nun, but maybe it’s not too late.
“Whatever turns your crank, sister. Location. Now.”
A distant sound, like the soft slam of a door. Lazarus hears it, too—I can tell by his eyes.
Viktor has arrived.
I know this like I know morning from night and darkness from sunshine. We used to feel each other, he said. I always knew when you’d entered a building.
There’s a thunk in the hall.
“Tony?” Lazarus calls out.
Nothing.
Lazarus pulls me back into the room, away from the door, right before it bursts open.
Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) Page 19
