Eventually we’re out of the city on a two-lane road. The terrain is darker. Signs less frequent. He clicks off his phone, but he still looks at it. A blank, black screen. “I know he’s still alive.”
I say, “He’s lucky to have you.”
Aleksio turns away, staring out at where our headlights flash on the edge of rows of crops. He presents such a good front, but there’s so much underneath with him. “Unless Lazarus got there first. Because of us. Because of me.”
“No, even then he’s lucky to have you.”
More phone staring. Viktor and Tito converse softly in the front. It’s as if Aleksio and I are in another world. Even when we were kids, we managed to make our own world.
“You think he’s lucky to have us even if us looking for him is what gets him killed? Because I’m not so sure about that.”
“You’re risking your life to find him,” I say. “Don’t you think he’d risk his to find you?”
“It’s a choice that should be his.”
“I would risk my life to see my mother again,” I say.
He nods solemnly, eyes averted.
“And you’re risking your life to find Kiro,” I continue. “Why wouldn’t he want the same?”
He takes my hand, touches the finger Viktor wanted to chop off. “I’m so sorry for what Viktor did. And your ring.”
“Who cares?” I say.
He keeps my hand, there in the dark back seat. I slide nearer to him. He pulls in a breath as I lay my head on his shoulder.
“I think you might be getting Stockholm syndrome.”
“Oh, Aleksio.” I enjoy his nearness. I found him again, and I’ll lose him again. “What do you think Kiro will be like?”
“I have no clue. Maybe like Viktor and me, but maybe not. He’s twenty. He could be in college with a chance at a nice life. He may be going to school to be a cop, who knows. I don’t need him to join Viktor and me. I don’t care. I’ll love him no matter what.”
“You and Viktor hit it off right away, I bet.”
“Yeah.”
“You look alike,” I prod.
“Yeah,” Aleksio says. “The guys at the place he was working in Moscow, they all knew the minute I walked in that I was his brother. We have the same sense of humor, too. We were both of us in gangs a world apart. Separated at birth, but still like we share a brain.”
“A year ago? That’s when you found him?”
“Yeah. It was magic, how we linked right up. We were instantly stronger together. I found my brother, you know?”
A passing car strobes our cocoon of a backseat. “I can’t even imagine that,” I say.
“It blew my mind. Especially because I always thought Kiro and Viktor were dead. I think I felt every emotion in the world.” He lowers his voice, speaking only to me. “Kiro has to be alive.”
“He was a sweet little baby.”
After a span of silence, he says, “Tell me what you remember.” His tone breaks my heart.
“Just snapshots. Kiro with his little lick of brown hair. Kiro waving his fists all around. Always so alert. Smiling.”
Aleksio’s trying not to grin, but I can tell he likes that I remember. “He was…active.”
“A crazy bundle of energy.”
Aleksio’s love for a brother he hasn’t seen for two decades is beautiful. “Yeah. Flying fists. Just like his big brother, huh?” His smile fades then, and he stares darkly into the distance. “I promised my mother I’d protect him. I’ll give anything to see him safe.”
“Why do you have to give up anything? Maybe you’ll find him, and he’ll be thrilled to meet you and you guys…I don’t know, go out for a beer or something.”
He looks at me like I’m an alien.
“What? That could happen. You think everything has to be hard. You think you have to give a pound of flesh to get one good thing. What if it’s easy? Why not trust that things can be okay for once? Why can’t the universe be good to you? Why can’t people surprise you?”
“Is that the way the world looks from a penthouse apartment in Rome?”
“Aleksio.” I lift my head from his shoulder, not wanting any more secrets between us. “I don’t really have those apartments. It’s fake.”
“What?”
“I live in the Bronx. With two roommates. I’m a lawyer at an advocacy center.”
He just stares at me.
“What?” I tease. “Is there a bluebird on my shoulder?”
“What the fuck?”
“Lawyer. The Bronx. As in New York. And not the nice part.”
I catch sight of his smile in the glow of passing headlights. “Tell me you didn’t write that fucking blog, either.”
“God, no. And if I don’t come out of this, you need to let the world know it.”
“Don’t joke like that.” He shifts beside me, strong and solid. “A fucking lawyer?”
I breathe in his scent like I’m breathing in his raw passion, his loyalty, as if I can store it up inside me for when I escape. “Yeah.”
“But not the kind in a tall glass building. No, that’s too much like your dad. That would be robbing people with a briefcase.”
“A tall glass building is not on my vision board, no.”
“Advocacy for what?”
“Families in crisis. It’s mostly just poverty. You can’t imagine the spiral people get into just from losing their home. A little bit of immigration work. I’m more of a generalist on that, though.”
He touches my collar in the dark. “I’m thinking of this one time down at the marina beach—you remember that place?”
“Oh, yeah,” I say.
“Some kids had made a sandcastle. They were gone, and it was just there. I went over and kicked it down.”
“I couldn’t believe you did that.”
“It was just there and so fucking kickable,” he says. “You remember what you did?”
I bite my lip, imagining the twinkle in his eyes, feeling just fucking happy. “No.”
“You spent the whole fucking day putting it back. Rebuilding it.”
I laugh. “I did?”
“You got some other kids to help. I even helped. That’s who you are. Rebuild, repair. You made it better. I should’ve known the shopping thing was bullshit. You’d be gunning for justice. Wait—”
I bite my lip, imagining the twinkle in his eyes, feeling just fucking happy.
“To help people. To help kids,” he finishes.
Aleksio. People were so quick to buy shopaholic Mira. But not Aleksio. Nobody has ever focused on me so intensely or seen me so clearly from every angle. He even guessed my candy bar. Or maybe remembered it.
“A lawyer for kids? Am I right?”
“Juvenile and family law. Keeping kids out of the system before it’s too late. Before they end up—you know…”
In the darkness, he says, “Like me.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Then why not finish that sentence? Before those poor kids end up like what? What were you going to say?”
My throat feels thick. “They lowered your fucking coffin into the ground in front of me. They put you in the ground.”
Aleksio seems so cool, even detached, but when you come to know him even a little bit. you know he feels deeply, endlessly. Then he says, “Now you fight to uphold the law, and I break it.” And I hear the emotion in the statement. It’s like the statement scrapes everything out of him. Outlining our differences.
“Do you still have that photo of you three that you showed Dad? I want to look. I want to see.”
He leans up and gets Viktor to hand it back. Aleksio lights it with his phone flashlight. I hold it by the corners. It’s one of those staged photography studio photos. Aleksio is a boy in a suit, same dark eyes and dark hair, sitting on a velvety backdrop with his two tiny brothers. Viktor caught midcrawl, and baby Kiro on his back in front of them, so tiny. Mr. and Mrs. Dragusha in back.
“Look at his sweet little face.
Happy.”
“I remember him happy like that,” Aleksio says. “Part of me hopes he turned out different. Viktor and I remember that day in the nursery. The violence of it. But maybe Kiro doesn’t.”
I look at the scrap of paper, a moment in time, and my heart breaks for the three of them, and for their parents. To be ripped from those little sons, not knowing what would become of them. My father did that. I look up at Aleksio, and I can see the knowledge in his eyes. “I want so fucking bad for you to find him.”
He takes the picture from me and turns off the light. We ride there in the back seat flying through the night.
It’s five in the morning, nearly dawn, when we reach Glenpines Grove. The guys pull off at a townie gas station, talking between cars about how to approach the house, studying satellite images from Google Maps. The town is tiny, and our cars—a shiny Hummer, a slick SUV and a vintage souped-up Jaguar—are way too obvious here, not to mention how they’ll stick out in the driveway of Kiro’s adoptive family.
Aleksio decides to have the two backup vehicles orbit on the main road while he, Tito, Viktor, Yuri, and I take the Jaguar and scope out the scene at the home.
We start back up and head off the main drag onto a small road that runs alongside the river, lined with run-down homes on either side and lots of huge trees. This is an old neighborhood. River neighborhoods usually are.
It’s hard to make out the addresses, but we don’t need to—the red lights flashing in the treetops tell us where the Knutsons’ home is.
Emergency vehicles. It’s a bad sign.
Aleksio slams a sideways fist into the door. Viktor slows the car.
The blue and cherry lights intensify as we near; there’s a fire truck, an ambulance, and three marked police cars in the Knutsons’ long driveway. Two empty stretchers are lined up near the door. Personnel all around.
“Bloody Lazarus.” Viktor pulls the flask from his pocket and drinks, angrily wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
Aleksio’s face is bathed in red from the lights, steely gaze fixed on the house. “Fuck that. Kiro is not dead.”
I’m blown away by Aleksio’s faith in his own gut, his own heart, whatever you want to call it. Aleksio sees himself as such a twisted person, but he’s not. He has heart like I’ve never seen, and he has no idea how beautiful this quality of his is.
We pass by. A cop eyes us from afar, but we probably aren’t the first to have driven by. There’s a light on at the next-door neighbor’s place.
“Pull in here,” Aleksio says. “Into this drive, and right into the garage.”
“Seriously?”
Aleksio texts, face lit underneath by the garish phone light. Probably telling the guys up on the road what’s up. “Small-town neighbors, they know each other’s business. Konstantin and I learned that pretty fast when we were on the run. Pull it in. Now.”
Viktor shuts off the headlights and heads into the yawning mouth of a garage.
We get out quietly. It smells like lawnmower and turpentine. A door on the side leads into the main house. Viktor strolls up, shoves something into it, and pulls it open. Aleksio signals the rest of us to wait in the cool, dank garage. Moments later there’s a scream.
“Damn,” Tito says, heading in after him.
Aleksio tightens his grip on my arm.
Tito comes to the door. “Mira. You keep these oldsters feeling calm, okay?”
“They better not be hurt.” I wrench my arm from Aleksio’s. And I’m thinking I could find my chance to escape soon.
We enter a cozy little kitchen. Viktor leans on a counter holding a revolver on a couple sitting at the kitchen table. The man wears a dark blue Atari T-shirt; he’s bald on top, with strands of longish gray hair in a ponytail. You can tell from his skin he used to be a redhead. The woman is slim, with bright white hair—very short, very beautiful—contrasting with her turquoise robe.
A mug lies broken on the floor in a puddle of coffee. A tray of muffins is cooling on the electric burners of the goldenrod-toned oven.
“They don’t know what happened,” Viktor says.
Aleksio and Tito go upstairs, probably to see what kind of a view they can get of the Knutsons’.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” I say, eyeing Viktor.
Aleksio comes down. “Can’t see shit. Who was home over there?”
“Donald and Shauna Knutson.”
“How old is Donald?”
The woman holds a napkin in her trembling hands. “Maybe sixty-five?”
Aleksio and Viktor exchange glances. Aleksio sends Tito and Yuri upstairs to monitor the scene.
“We’re not here to hurt you,” I say. “We think somebody attacked your neighbors and that they’re really after one of their kids. We need you to help us find him first. What’s your name?”
“Ronson,” he says. “This is Lila. You’re not the ones—” He nods at the Knutsons’ home.
“No, no, I swear,” I say.
“Which kid are they after?” Ronson asks.
“An adopted son. He’d be around twenty now.”
“No son like that,” Ronson says. “Mike’s twenty-eight, and Glenda is nineteen.”
“Kids are grown and gone,” Lila says.
“No. That doesn’t work.” Aleksio’s on edge. Desperate. “You’re lying.”
I give Aleksio a hard look. He takes a seat at the far side of the table and sets his gun in front of him, right out where they can see it but not close enough for them to take it. I take the chair between Aleksio and Ronson.
“You close to them?” I ask.
“Our dearest family friends,” Lila says. “A good family.”
Aleksio scrubs his face. I put my hand on his arm and give him a meaningful look. Then I stand up. “Where’re you going?” he asks.
I head to the bookshelf lined with floral photo albums, each with a date on the spine. I pick out a selection—the year the Knutsons would’ve gotten Kiro, and some of the years after. It’s possible they’re lying. Lazarus could’ve gotten here first. But if they’re dearest family friends, there will be photos. River photos, picnic photos. I bring the stack to the table over the protests of Ronson and Lila.
“You can’t go through our things,” Lila says.
“Shut up,” Aleksio says, grabbing one of the albums.
I take another and page through. There are lots of shots of Lila and Ronson’s family, but eventually I get to the multifamily photo. I spot a baby that looks like Kiro.
“That’s him,” Aleksio says, pulling it toward himself greedily. “That’s him.” Aleksio slides the photo out of the sleeve and pushes it across the table. “You fucking lied!”
“No, we didn’t,” Ronson says.
“A name,” Aleksio growls. “Now.”
“Keith Knutson,” Lila says. “But that boy died.”
Everything seems to still.
I press my hand to my mouth.
Aleksio’s eyes glaze over. Refusing to believe it. “No,” he says.
Lila takes a deep, ragged breath.
“That boy, he died camping up in the Boundary Waters. He drowned in a spring torrent up there, camping with his father and his brothers. Age eight or…” He turns to Lila.
Lila’s napkin is pretty much shreds. So frightened. “Eight,” she says.
“It’s okay,” I say to her. I feel like I’m connecting with her, like she gets I’m okay. “You’re okay,” I say aloud.
“He drowned…” Ronson says.
Lila grabs one of the albums and takes a folded newspaper article from a pocket in the back. My heart is breaking for Aleksio and Viktor. I look around at exits. My heart is breaking, but I can’t be stupid now.
Aleksio takes it, reads. “It says they never found the body.” His voice sounds so far away. “Maybe he survived. You can’t be sure—”
“It’s sure,” Ronson said. “It was the dead of night. Donald heard the shouts. They think Keith stole a blowup floating toy, a sort of inner t
ube, while the rest of the group slept. He was like that.”
“He was like that,” Lila says.
“They searched for him for days. Cops, volunteers. You think they wouldn’t have found him if he’d survived? They even had the copters out. But the spring torrents up there, with the snowmelt out of Canada, it’s dangerous on those rivers,” Ronson said. “The inner tube was found downstream caught in some roots, but Keith was never found.”
Aleksio sucks a breath in through his nose.
“Half of the camping area was impassible that spring.”
“Then why the fuck bring the kids up there?” Aleksio says.
I squeeze his arm.
Ronson defends the Knutsons, telling us how they’d adopted three special-needs children over the years. “They were good parents, upstanding.” He tells us how Donald Knutson owned the hardware store and some properties in town. The kids would build everything with him, but Keith was wild. They had a lot of trouble with him. He’d fight with the neighborhood kids. He hurt some of them badly.
I go to Aleksio and rest my hands on his shoulders. My heart is breaking for him.
“He had a lot of…spirit,” Lila says. “He was protective of his sister.”
“Keith always went too far.”
“His name is not fucking Keith,” Aleksio says softly. “Fuck. They named him Keith?”
Aleksio was so sure Kiro was alive.
He turns back to the album, tearing through for more shots, like he might find them in there. He does—Kiro at age seven or so, looking a lot like Aleksio. The big eyes, the dark lashes, the lush, dark curls.
Tito comes down. “What?”
I shake my head.
Tito stills.
“What’d you see?” Aleksio barks.
“What you’d expect,” Tito says. “It’s not ketchup.”
Viktor comes down. The second he sees Aleksio’s expression, his tough-guy beaten-up face softens with pain.
“Gone,” Aleksio stands. “They say he died. Eight years old. But he still feels alive…” He presses his hand to his heart.
“Brat.” Viktor’s eyes shine as he covers the distance between them.
Viktor pulls Aleksio into a bear hug. Aleksio slams his face into his brother’s shoulder.
Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance Page 14
