It can’t be true. “Lazarus wouldn’t kill Ligne. They’re on the same side.”
“Take it up with the witnesses Viktor rounded up,” Aleksio says. “In other news, we got the key to the code.”
“We can read the files now?”
“Yeah,” he says. “If we had the right files. The illegal adoptions were hidden in the basement in the fucking maintenance record files.”
“That whole raid and you took the wrong files?”
Tito comes out, Glock in hand.
“Wait! What are you doing? You’re not going back to the Worland…”
“Until Daddy wakes up, it’s what we have.”
Of course. He’ll do anything to find his brother, and when he does, he’ll love him barbarically and unconditionally.
Aleksio’s love is the dangerous kind of love that breaks all the rules. It’s him killing and kidnapping as he goes after his brother. It’s him pulling my hair and shoving his cock in my mouth.
I shouldn’t think it’s beautiful.
He turns and leaves with his guys, through the patio door, through the house.
The front door slams. Car doors slam. I stand there alone, stupidly wistful.
CHAPTER NINE
Viktor
The area around Worland is quiet on a Sunday afternoon. We find free spaces at meters. We park a few blocks away and split up, moving through the neighborhood like shadows.
The old buildings in Chicago are very blocky. Old Moscow buildings have more imagination. I have argued with Aleksio on this point, of course.
I move alongside him. Tito and Yuri go up opposite. Others will loop around. We are all on edge.
Hitting this place a second time, it’s madness. We hide in the dark out of the afternoon sun, looking, listening.
“He may not have heard about yesterday,” Aleksio says, hopefully.
Perhaps. But if Bloody Lazarus did hear about our raid yesterday, a raid on the same day as Aldo Nikolla’s disappearance, he may very well think of Kiro. We cannot be sure what Lazarus knows. He may have found out from Ligne where Kiro is.
Our attempts to save Kiro may have gotten him killed.
Still, this thing must be done. We go forward. We hide. Listen.
They say a baby of twenty-some months cannot remember things, but I remember violence. I remember fear and death. My memories are more like dark scribbles than photographs. They are memories all the same.
I did not know they were American memories, however.
When Aleksio came to our garage in Moscow, I did not recognize him, but he recognized me.
With his television clothes and scruffy American hair, Aleksio looked very strange, very out of place; I wondered whether I had known him as a boy in the orphanage. And then he began to speak. A brother, he said.
Yuri came up behind me, amazed. Brat, he said. Yuri had heard nothing of what Aleksio said, but he looked at our faces and he knew that we were brothers. Yuri clapped his hand onto my shoulder, over and over, so happy. Yuri and I had come up in the orphanage together, always dreaming of family.
This orphanage was a favorite recruiting ground of the Russian mafia. They would adopt the strong boys and raise us like fighting dogs. Vicious to the last.
“Looks clear,” Aleksio says, seeing nothing in the alley. Tito makes a hand signal, and he and Yuri flank left with some of Aleksio’s men. Our two groups have learned to move together well in the past year. Merging our techniques—his gang, my gang.
There’s a dumpster to the left, stacked-up crates from the restaurant on the other side of the alley. We flow around it, avoiding the cameras, keeping to the shadows.
I lock eyes with Yuri across the span of alley. We wait. We let the area speak to us.
Yuri and I rose up quickly within the Bratva. I was to be a Bratva soldier until they noticed my ability to mimic American actors from the television. I could understand what they were saying when nobody else could.
They sent me to classes. I picked up the strange grammar quickly, easily. Because of my good English I was made a hit man. I even spent ten days in New York once, hunting a man who attempted to flee the Bratva. Never did I imagine I was born here, that I spent some twenty months here—not until Aleksio came to our garage and told me about Aldo Nikolla, who killed our parents and stole our lives. We would make him pay, and we would make Lazarus pay, because Lazarus helped him. And we would find our baby brother Kiro and take back the empire.
With the blessing of my superiors, I took five of our best, including Yuri, and went with Aleksio to Chicago. It was not charity, of course, that our mafia bosses let me go. A position at the top of one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Chicago would be a good thing.
Al Capone! That’s what Mischa and the guys said when they were told they would accompany me. Each and every one of them said the name of Al Capone.
Chicago was Al Capone to me, too, until I met Aleksio.
Yuri slides up to one of the windows. He gets ears in, pressing a listening device to a small square of safety glass.
I exchange glances with Aleksio. He tips his head. So far, so good. Perhaps our enemies do not know.
Yuri steals over. “Is quiet,” he says. “Too quiet.”
Tito slips in. Tito is Aleksio’s Yuri. “What’s your feeling?” Aleksio asks Tito.
“Feels like a trap, smells like a trap. Is a trap.” Tito likes to make his hair bright blond on the tips of it. He is very formidable.
“A trap,” I say.
We have men around the neighborhood, and they text in. Nobody is watching.
Aleksio looks up and down the blocky building. “The files are right inside, and we have the fucking decode key,” he says.
No question we’ll risk it. Aldo Nikolla may or may not talk. The file is sure.
We discuss what we would do in the place of Bloody Lazarus if he thought we might be back.
“I’d think about torching the place,” Tito says. “But then I’d say, how can I go for maximum death? That says explosives to me. And if I didn’t have a lot of time? Explosives connected to the door.”
“Or to the alarm system,” I say. “Sound, vibration.”
We narrow it down to the door. Easiest, smartest, fastest.
“Then maybe we should go up the side. Up that old fire escape.” Aleksio points. The fire escape is half falling apart, but it’s still up. “What happens if we break that window?”
I pick up a brick and hurl it. It sails into the window with a crash. We press against the wall, waiting for an explosion.
Nothing. So we have our entrance.
We argue about who’ll go in. “I’m not sending anybody in somewhere where I won’t go myself,” Aleksio growls. He’s like that, a strong leader. But the girl will be trouble. I saw his face in the video clip. I saw the way he looked at her.
Aleksio creeps up the side and leaps to the lowest rung of the fire escape. The apparatus creaks as he begins to climb, balancing on the edges, seasoned criminal that he is. When he is the three stories up top, he throws his jacket over the sill and lifts himself up by his fingers.
He makes it look easy. I know it is not. Aleksio is a strong ally, but a girl like that Mira will weaken him.
I loved a girl once, and then I had to kill her. It was very hard.
An explosion tears out from the second floor below him. The wall buckles—with Aleksio half in the window.
“Fucking hell!” I spring out of the darkness, running toward him as he drops onto the fire escape and grips the rusty pole. The structure separates from the building with Aleksio clinging on. It twists and groans.
Aleksio drops to the alley. He makes himself into a ball and rolls. I grab him, pull him behind the dumpster. He is hurt. His ankle, I think.
“Fucking hell,” I say as the assault weapons start.
Our men shoot back.
“Where the fuck did they come from?” he gasps.
“We have it, brat.” Our men are suppress
ing. The cops will be here soon. “Can you walk?”
Aleksio wears a grim look. He will.
“I got him,” Tito says. “You help cover.” Tito wants me shooting because I am the marksman here. I rest my forearms on the metal lip of the dumpster lid and focus my senses on our attackers. I focus and calm myself, breathing, squeezing the trigger, breathing, squeezing. My bullets find their targets as Tito gets Aleksio away.
Soon the guys scream up in an old Cadillac. I dive in the back with the others.
We head out, losing our attackers easily. They thought we’d be inside for the explosion. They were set up to pick off survivors, not for a full firefight.
Aleksio rides in back with me. He concentrates on breathing, pushing back the pain. Yuri throws back the first aid kit. I pat my thigh, and Aleksio heaves his leg there. He grimaces as I begin to untie his shoe.
I instruct Yuri to call his guy—the one holding Aldo Nikolla. It is time to send the clip.
I get his shoe off. The pain on Aleksio’s face is not just his ankle. Yes, I know what those frittatas meant.
“Just sprained,” he grates out.
“You hope.” I touch his anklebone. He winces. I touch another spot.
“Fuck! Stop it. The ankle is fucked up, okay? Is there something we need to know beyond that?”
I rip up an old shirt and begin to wrap it.
It is very bad that we did not get those files. There is only one route to the information now—through the old man. Aleksio does not want to show the cocksucking clip to Aldo. He’ll do what it takes to save Kiro, though.
His head is tipped back. He’s out of his mind with pain of every kind.
“Aldo Nikolla’s awake,” Yuri calls from the front.
“Good. We go now,” I say. “We show the movie. Tell him how much worse it will get for her next.”
Aleksio hisses out a breath.
I grab his phone, unlock it and scroll. He knows it has to be done. Lazarus is hunting now. He killed Ligne, torched the Worland Agency. He wants to get to Kiro before we can.
“Where is the movie?” I ask.
Aleksio takes it and scrolls. Scowls.
“What?”
“Wait,” he says, and he taps some more. Then, “Fuck.” Then, “Fuck!”
“What?”
“Gone.”
“How?”
He casts his gaze sideways. “She erased it.”
I shut my eyes. Our leverage on the old man is gone. Or at least the video is.
CHAPTER TEN
Aleksio
Yuri’s got us moving at top speed in that old Caddy with its shitty shocks the Russians have been driving around. Every bump sends starbursts of pain through my ankle and jars my vision, because yeah, I hit my head on something in that fall, and focusing isn’t that easy.
Viktor wants to stop at an office supply store. He prefers the paper cutter to the cleaver.
“No,” I say.
“The paper cutter is cleaner, brat. More leveraged. I have seen it both ways. The butcher knife leaves room for error. It’s good in a pinch but—”
“We can’t—”
“You would let Kiro die?”
I’m feeling dizzy, having trouble focusing. “We’ll cut up the old man—”
“Until he passes out from pain?” Viktor says.
That’s the intel on the old man. Pain doesn’t crack him. People have gone at him before.
“She shouldn’t have erased it,” he says, like she brought it on herself.
“Fuck you,” I growl, head spinning to find another way to show the old man we’re serious.
The car takes a corner, and my ankle fires like shards of glass.
Suddenly Viktor’s in my face, pinning me to the inside of the car door. He has my arms trapped up to my chest, panting with the exertion of it.
He calls up front to Yuri—a stream of Russian.
“What are you doing? What did you say to him?”
Yuri is talking back. The car is slowing. Yuri’s pulling over. It’s Yuri and Mischa up there. Both of them Viktor’s guys.
Fuck.
I lash out at Viktor, going for him with everything I have, going for every blow I can think of, even a head butt. He’s ready for them all. The car stops. Mischa’s out. I struggle harder, get an elbow into Viktor’s jaw.
The door I’m backed up against opens. I freefall against a tanklike chest and feel an arm loop around my neck, muscles like iron. Precise pressure. Mischa.
I kick out.
“This we do for you, brat,” Viktor says, suppressing my legs as Mischa puts the choke on me. A perfect triangle hitting the veins that feed the blood to my brain. The edges of my vision dim.
Fuck!
I wake up curled on my side, enclosed in darkness. The vibration below me tells me I’m in the Caddy trunk and that we’re back on the road. My head is woozy. My ankle screams. I pound like a madman. My good leg and two fists. Nothing.
I check my pockets for my phone, thinking to call Tito and have him put a stop to this. I can’t let them hurt Mira. I have to protect her.
No phone.
I go crazy on the trunk top in the darkness.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mira
The two guys who stayed back to watch me think it’s hilarious to hang around by the pool and help me get my gun spin down while I say the Sergei Kazan phrase. They told me it means, “You go ahead and try it, baby, and I’ll fill you so full of lead it’ll be coming out of your ass.” A really tough movie star apparently says it.
The better I get at it, the more they laugh.
I don’t see what’s so funny, but then again, American movie lines don’t seem like much out of context, either.
I monitor them for signs that they’ve heard something from the Worland raid. Have they gotten there yet? What if something goes wrong? Will they know? They don’t seem worried, but I am. If things get dangerous, Aleksio will be front and center. It’s how he is. If there’s trouble, he’s at the center.
The Russians have their suit jackets off, shirtsleeves rolled up. They’re lounging around like disreputable waiters from a thug café, smoking and drinking Beluga vodka like there’s no tomorrow. Petitioning me again and again to do the gangster character impression.
It’s taken a while to get the double gun spin down. I dropped them a lot at first. Obviously they’re not loaded. I keep practicing, though, the amusing trained monkey. I even try to say the line with the intonation they prefer. It’s not that I want to amuse them. I have to believe that one of these times, one of the guns they’ll give me will be loaded. Or somehow they’ll drop their guard.
So I practice the line. I adjust it for maximum shock. I get good. This is about escaping, about getting back to who I really am and away from Aleksio’s orbit. He’s like a dangerous black hole—he’ll pull you in if you’re not careful. I can feel his pull working on me with every hour we spend together.
The world I escaped to is a place where laws trump blood vendettas. Where people work together to protect the weak. Where even one death through gun violence means everybody failed. Where kids can still be saved. That’s the world I need to get back to.
It’s true what I said to Aleksio—I miss Chicago. But I can’t be who I am here.
Suddenly the phones are going off. The guns are taken from me. The joke of me being Sergei Kazan is over.
“What’s going on?”
The guys are shrugging on their jackets. They’re acting like men going to their battle stations. A hit back? Lazarus?
“Are they okay?”
Yuri bursts out onto the porch. He looks intense. He points at the picnic table that’s out there. “Sit.”
I sit.
Viktor comes out with a bottle of vodka and sets it down on the table, and then he sets down a glass. “This is for you. It’s nice. You should drink it.”
“Where’s Aleksio?”
“Aleksio is not coming.”
“Is he
okay?”
“He’s okay, yes.” Viktor pours the vodka into the glass.
“It’s not even dinnertime.”
Viktor sets the glass in front of me. “Was not a request.”
“What’s going on?”
Viktor pushes it toward me.
Yuri watches Viktor darkly.
“Did something happen to my father?”
“I’ll tell you if you drink it.”
I take it with shaking hands. “Is he okay?”
Viktor nods at the glass.
I down it and slam it onto the table.
“Your father is not dead.” He pours another.
“What, then? Where’s Aleksio?”
Again Viktor nods at the glass.
“I don’t want another.”
“Yet you will have another, sistra.”
“And then you’ll tell me the rest?”
“I will.”
I take the glass and drain it, then slam it on the table, feeling a weird sense of vertigo.
“Your father is awake. We will kill him, of course, but for now he lives.”
“You fucker.” I go at him but Yuri grabs me and turns me and pushes back down on the rough wooden bench, forces me to sit, using his weight to hold me still, and there’s nothing nice about it.
“Another,” Viktor says.
“What’s going on?”
“Your father needs to tell us more. He needs to get more invested in our cause.” He pours another.
“What are you going to do?”
“You know what I am going to do, I think,” Viktor says. “Now that we have no movie to show him. It was stupid what you did.”
A wave of wooziness washes over me. “No.”
“You are right-handed,” Yuri says, holding my hands and inspecting the pinky with the birthmark. I try to pull my hands to my belly, but he won’t let them go.
Tears come to my eyes. “Get Aleksio.”
“Aleksio will not come.”
I try to get up from the table, but Yuri won’t let me. He seems to know everything I’m about to do before I do it. “You can’t. My father can’t handle it. His heart can’t handle it. You need him alive, don’t you?”
Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance Page 9
