Savage Mafia Prince: a Dangerous Royals romance

by Annika Martin

  I take up a position at the bulletin board outside the door to the admin area. I pretend to study the leaflets and notices, getting a feel for the hall and what sounds mean somebody’s coming around the corner. When the coast seems clear, I go at the lock. I get it open on the first try and let myself in. I close the door quietly behind me.

  The computer monitor on Pam’s desk pulses an eerie blue glow that lights her owl collectibles.

  I take a picture just because.

  The ambient light is enough for me to see my way to the door to Fancher’s office, opposite her desk. I pull out my pick kit and get at the knob. I find it’s always best to just do these things without thinking—especially now, with my sleep-deprived mind prone to paranoid thoughts. Still, I’m trembling by the time I get in there.

  Moonlight streams in from a high window. Heart pounding, I move to the cabinets, checking them to see which are locked. This shit’s going to be under lock and key. I work open the locked drawer and riffle through. Finally I get what I want—the file on 34.

  Too easy, I think. Then, Shut up. Go forward.

  I open it on Fancher’s desk. He’s listed as John Doe. Assault on a police officer. Is that why he got deep-sixed? Cop vendetta? There’s a lot of info I don’t take the time to read. I take pictures of each page and fumble the file back, buzzing with adrenaline. I close up Fancher’s office and go back to the outer office.

  Pam’s desk. Her cats stare out at me from their photos, little faces glowing blue. Owls standing by.

  I put my ear to the outer door, listening for footsteps in the hall. Nothing.

  Unless somebody is standing there. Could somebody be standing out there?

  I take a deep breath, say a little prayer, and slip out…just as Donny rounds the corner.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for Pam,” I say. “Nobody’s in there. When do they leave?”

  “You’re not supposed to be in there.” He comes to me. The hall is empty, dammit. “That door should be locked.”

  “It was open.”

  He crowds me. “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Yes, it was. I wanted my wellness survey, and…”

  He closes an iron grip on my wrist, looking hard into my eyes. I don’t want to call out unless I have to. I think he knows. Fuck.

  “You need to let me go.”

  In a maniacally quick move, he pushes me into the office and shuts the door with his foot.

  We’re alone.

  “You know how much trouble you can get in for being in here?”

  “Let me go.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll scream.”

  He yanks me to him. “Will you?”

  With that one utterance, my worst fear is confirmed—my fear that Donny, with whatever built-in dirtball radar he possesses, has detected that I don’t want to draw attention to myself, that I’m maybe even up to something.

  It’s not implausible that a newbie would peek in the office thinking somebody was there, not implausible the door would be left unlocked, but Donny smells the lie.

  I wrench my hand from his and stomp on his foot, grabbing for the knob.

  “Oh no, you don’t.” He pulls me back.

  My belly coils with panic. I try to twist free. I knee him, hitting his thigh, and twist away from him.

  He grabs my shirt as I pull out, ripping it before I get the door open.

  I go out and run like hell, slowing only at the corner, nearly colliding with a trio of orderlies coming around.

  I smile, pulse pounding. “Whoops!” I mumble something about being late.

  I’m within sight of the secure admittance desk. I head toward it, like an oasis of safety. I plaster on a smile for the night guard as he lets me into the secure wing.

  I sweep in and get to the general room. Donny comes in right behind me, but he won’t try anything here. His uncle might not care what he does—that’s probably the reason he’s even still here. But in this room there are cameras. People.

  He comes up next to me, talking at me with his fish lips. “What are you hiding, Ms. Saybrook?”

  “What the fuck would I be hiding? I’m looking to get through probation without making waves, buddy, but I’ll lodge a complaint if I have to.”

  He cracks his knuckles. “I’m watching you.” He has letters tattooed on his fingers that say F-U-C-K T-H-I-S. That’s nice. A real top-quality guy.

  I get the fuck away. Donny is going to be a problem and a half, but if I stick to patient rooms and public spaces, I should be okay. The pharma rooms could be a problem.

  I go through my duties. Patient 34 doesn’t break character. I can’t tell whether he’s surprised to see me in the place at night. Mitchell has the flu, so I spend extra time with him. When I get a moment alone, I move out of camera range and pull out my second cell. I send the images to myself on two accounts and delete them from the obvious areas.

  I get home at seven in the morning and start digging.

  I’m not turning up much. No surprise there—I need access to official records that won’t be on the web, but I do get the name of the psychiatrist who testified at 34’s initial commitment—one Dr. Roland Baker III. He’s around sixty years old, attached to a large regional health center in Duluth.

  His office opens at eight. I make a quick call, posing as a court clerk, asking for confirmation on the dates of the original hearing, mumbling something about lost data. Really, I just want to make sure he really was there. Because what if the whole hearing never happened? His admin tells me he was present.

  I’m disappointed.

  I imagine hopping in my car after my shift and driving to Duluth to question the man, but no psychiatrist is going to divulge anything to a stranger. They don’t even have to talk to the cops in most cases.

  I have a better route, anyway—contacts from years of reporting.

  I wait until nine to call in a favor from a colleague who owes me—he’s done some public beat investigations and knows the Health and Human Services scene. I’m not sure what kind of record I need.

  I get him on the phone. When he realizes it’s me, he’s cagey. I have this reputation now for spinning out.

  “Dude,” I say. “Come on. Who put you together with the Iranian Consulate? I’m doing a thing inside of a place, and I really do need this.”

  “For who?”

  “Stormline.”

  He’s polite and doesn’t say anything like, “Oh, how the mighty have fallen!” Stormline really is the lowest. “What you need is the 24A from the case.”

  “So you can get it?” Silence. “Is this a HIPAA problem?” That regulation makes getting health-related info hard.

  “No, it’s not that…” He pauses, and right then I know he could get it if he tried.

  “Please,” I say. “You owe me. We’ll be even.” Sometimes you have to be shameless.

  “I’m calling in a favor of my own here for you,” he tells me, just to show he’s really sacrificing. He doesn’t want me coming back to the well a second time.

  “I appreciate it. This closes our accounts until I fucking claw my way back up and you need me again.”

  He laughs. He likes that I’m sounding like the old Ann Saybrook, the pre-spinout Ann Saybrook. A.E. Saybrook—that’s my byline. I send him the photo of the commitment certificate.

  While I wait for him to call back, I make a sandwich and scan old Duluth Tribune news stories from the year before 34’s commitment. The paper appears to cover all of northern Minnesota. I make a list of all assault and murder cases from fourteen to eighteen months back. After that I expand my search geographically, out through all of Minnesota and then northern Wisconsin.

  I show up the next night early as a way of Donny-proofing my arrival. I do my rounds, stopping for an extended one-sided conversation with Patient 34. “I’m looking into your case, pal,” I say. “What do you think?”

  For just a moment, I think I catch a hint of agony in his unfath
omable eyes. Physical pain? Mental pain? Anguish?

  “Do you not want me to find out? It’d be fine for you to tell me that, too.” Not that it could keep me from it at this point. But he’s free to tell me. I really just want him to say anything to me.

  “You’re good. You can almost make me think it never happened. Like maybe I dreamed it. Almost. But I know it happened. You should tell me your name and save me time.”

  I fit the cuff and pump it up.

  “I always find out in the end.” Usually I get the subject to tell me, though.

  People like to talk to somebody who gives a shit—that’s basic human nature. Sometimes easy questions get you the best stuff. Like if I’m talking to a cook, I get her to explain something about dicing vegetables. Or with a mercenary, maybe I ask about how he decides what to put in each pocket.

  “Mercenaries have a lot of pockets, did you know that?” I rest my hand on his forearm, just above the band that traps his wrist. I can’t imagine how alone he must feel.

  The night shift is lax, so I stay a bit longer than usual. I tell him about my childhood idol, Harriet the Spy. I tell him about the trailer where I grew up in Idaho, and how Greyhound buses would pass by three times a day. My sister would dream of being one of the people on the bus going somewhere glamorous, like L.A. I’d just want to know their stories. It seemed like the buses were forever passing us by. “I wonder if you feel like that. You have to. Oh, and newsflash—did you know Donny has ‘FUCK THIS’ tattooed on his fingers?”

  Something flickers in his eyes.

  “Right? Fuck. I’m going to get to the bottom of this.” Without thinking, I slide my fingers under his. Loosely grasping his hand. It feels natural. Like the two of us alone against the world. Then I drop it, because what am I doing?

  I get the fuck out of there.

  My guy calls me a few hours later. There’s no record of the hearing even happening.

  “But you saw the certificate. The hearing happened. The psychiatrist’s office confirms it.”

  “But I sent the image to my guy, and the file isn’t there. Here’s what he found interesting—the data is kept in a database, and he noticed a blank row on the batch for that date. The formatting was weird. It was kind of a flag to him.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “He said the blank row could possibly have happened because somebody entered something by mistake and they deleted it and didn’t take out the row. But he thinks it’s more likely that there was a deliberate deletion at some point. Looks like you’re on to something.”

  There was a time when I would have been thrilled about this. But not now. I’m worried about 34.

  “Does your guy have any next-step thoughts?”

  My guy reads me off his notes. There are things I could file for. Another name who could chase the paperwork deeper, but I’d have to give him some serious juice, meaning serious money. Which I have none of.

  And then there’s the option of fingerprinting the patient. Yeah, I can get his prints, but getting them run on IAFIS—the FBI’s national database—would take more juice.

  I thank him for his time. Favor burned.

  Chapter Nine

  Lazarus

  There are a lot of really idiotic martial arts systems out there. Karate, for instance. Do you really see people squaring off like that out in a street fight? No. It’s not at all functional. Yet one of my toughest motherfucking soldiers came up in karate.

  My point is, it’s not the system that makes the man, it’s the man that makes the system. It’s about what the man brings, not what the system brings.

  This is especially true with Valerie, my executive coach. Valerie has never met a motivational saying she doesn’t like. The more idiotic and trite the saying, the more she likes it and uses it.

  But she makes those fucking sayings work—that’s the thing about Valerie. That’s what sets her apart. In Valerie’s hands, the sayings aren’t trite.

  So I’m talking on the phone with her in one of our coaching calls, enjoying her, enjoying the way she laughs—she’s smart, and it’s easy to make her laugh. I’m even enjoying her lame-ass motivational sayings.

  And then we come around to the Kiro account. “Have you found your way into the Kiro account yet?”

  I tell her no. “We’ve been researching the hell out of it. It’s just always out of our reach.”

  “Your competitor isn’t anywhere nearer, though, right?”

  “I think our competitor might be getting inroads,” I say. “They’ve been making business trips that look like they’re related to Kiro.”

  Needless to say, she doesn’t know Kiro’s a guy I’m trying to find and kill. She thinks I’m running an accounting firm.

  Gotta keep it clean with Valerie, being that she’s an executive coach.

  “But they don’t have the account yet,” she says. “So it’s still in play. Are you thinking positive? Are you encouraging your people to view it as already a done deal? Already yours? Letting the universe know that Kiro account belongs to you?”

  This sounds hokey, but it’s actually been good advice. People thinking Kiro is dead has made us more powerful. Everyone wants to be on the winning team. Especially when it comes to criminal organizations.

  “But it’s not truly a done deal. I don’t know what they’ll say if we don’t get the account.”

  “Keep your eyes on the prize, Lazarus. When one door closes, another opens.”

  It was a two motivational-saying call. Three if you count “Think Positive.”

  Anyway, when one door closes, another opens. Right?

  The very next day I get a phone call from one Dr. Roland Baker, a psychiatrist up in some hospital in northern Minnesota. I almost don’t take it. I don’t know the guy. He said he had some business with Aldo, my late boss. What do I care?

  I take the call.

  “This is about the boy,” the shrink says. “Aldo wanted me to alert him if anybody started poking around about the boy. He said it was vital. I know that Aldo’s passed, but…”

  “Yes, he’s passed,” I say. Due to the fact that I killed him.

  “I thought if this information was important to Aldo, it might be important to you, too,” the shrink says, clearly looking for a payday.

  “I don’t know that it’s my business if somebody’s poking around about a boy,” I say. “I can’t say I condone it, exactly…”

  “No, no, not like that. The wild boy. I’m talking about the wild boy, Lazarus. The wild Dragusha.”

  Needless to say, this gets me sitting up straight. “Kiro Dragusha?”

  “Yes. Kiro. It took a lot of doing to get that boy under wraps. Aldo didn’t want people poking around, asking questions, undoing all of our work.”

  “Aldo knew where Kiro was all this time?”

  “Of course. He gave explicit instructions to be alerted the moment anybody started asking about him.”

  I grin. I imagine telling Valerie how fucking wide the Kiro account door just opened.

  “It’s very much worth my while, Dr. Baker,” I say. “I don’t know the specifics of Aldo’s arrangements, but I’m very invested in the Kiro situation.”

  I always said Aldo should’ve killed the babies when he killed their parents, but he never could quite bring himself to. This is the result. The babies grow up and become problems.

  The doctor and I proceed to have a fascinating conversation where I learn all about the travels of Kiro, with Aldo paying for one stopgap measure after another, culminating in his paying for Kiro to be committed to an asylum for the criminally insane.

  It seems we have people on payroll in the asylum. He doesn’t know who. It doesn’t matter. Kiro’s there.

  I thank him and get a funds transfer going.

  Kiro, strapped to a bed in a nuthouse.

  Thank you, universe.

  Chapter Ten

  Ann

  I get back on the day shift and start running my rounds, but the usual trio of orde
rlies isn’t in the hall outside Patient 34’s room at the agreed-upon time, which is strange. I text one of the guys. He says they’re doing a simulation.

  This puts me in a bind, because the guys on highly toxic cocktails need periodic checks according to state rules. If I break state rules, Nurse Zara could write me up.

  But if I go in, I’d be breaking the institute rule about the three orderlies.

  I decide to go in. State rules trump institute rules, that will be my defense. And it’s not like 34’s going to attack me.

  I head in with my cart. “Hey,” I say softly, wanting anything—just a glance, even. To see that warmth in his eyes again. To know I didn’t dream our connection.

  Nothing.

  “The thousand-mile stare again. There’s a shocker.”

  I feel such intense fondness for him. I’ve always admired people who decide on a direction and go for it against all odds. The rebels, the heretics, the true believers, the doomed warriors. Those are the people I love the most. The female warlord in Afghanistan. Unbelievable.

  But with 34, it’s something deeper.

  I start setting up the kit. “You’re tenacious, I’ll give you that. You’re the kind of guy who, when he commits, he really commits, aren’t you?”

  I tick off the boxes on my tablet and pull on my gloves.

  His dusky whiskers almost qualify as a beard at this point. I rest my hand against his cheek, thinking I should find out who cuts his beard and hair and try to take over the job.

  “Update, 34: the plot thickens. Massively. Congratulations, you’re more of an enigma than Easter Island.”

  The sound of footsteps out in the hallway. I drop my hand and crane my neck around. Donny. Fuck.

  “Why are you in here without proper guard, Nurse Saybrook?” He closes the door.

  I sit up. “He needs his vitals checked on a regular schedule. State regs.”

  Donny comes up next to me, too close.

  “What are you doing?”

  He flicks a finger onto 34’s cheek. “Diagnosis—vegetable.”

  “What the fuck!” I push his arm away. “Stop it!” I say protectively.