“What?”
He stumbles toward me, seeming out of his mind, and pushes me to the doorframe. He presses his forehead against mine, his breathing heavy.
He grabs the back of my head, like he can’t bear for our foreheads to stop touching. He’s rubbed raw, a violent man in pain. “I wanna let loose,” he whispers. “I want to kill everyone.”
I grab hold of his hair. “You’re better than that.”
“Get out of your fantasyland, Mira. I’m not.”
“Fuck you,” I say. “You are better than that.”
He looks up, expression torn. Does he hear me? Everything in his world is raging full blast.
So I say it again. “Fuck you. You are beautiful. You still have your humanity, and that’s what’s beautiful about you.”
“Kiro’s dead.”
“But Viktor’s not dead. Tito’s not dead. Konstantin’s not. I’m not. Right?”
His grip on me tightens. He presses me hard to the wall. “I need you, baby.”
You have me, I think.
The thought scares me to death.
The way he looks at me now, it’s like he hears my thoughts.
That scares me, too.
He smashes into me with a savage kiss, flattening me, claiming me. He shoves his tongue into my mouth. He shoves his pelvis into mine.
I grab onto him, letting him take me, taking him back. All his emotion goes into that kiss.
I want him like crazy.
He pulls away, panting. “You’re mine,” he says suddenly. A feral man’s way of saying I love you.
My heart pounds. I feel wild, like the world is changing.
Or maybe it’s going right.
He kisses me again. Stops me from talking. Footsteps at the door.
Viktor.
“Fucking hell, come on.”
We return to the car and roll out. Aleksio slides in the back with me. I can feel the rage and grief washing over him. I feel it as sure as I taste the blood in my mouth from a savage kiss that was pure Aleksio. A savage kiss I loved way too much.
I’m his.
Sometimes it feels like we’ve never been apart. As if some dreamer far, far away has been dreaming us in a life together, and we’re only now discovering it.
Just another one of the reasons I have to get away.
Chapter Sixteen
Viktor
I stare out at the endless farmland as Yuri drives. Morning. Aleksio and Mira in back.
So much farmland. It’s no wonder Americans have so much food. I think of poor Kiro. Keith, they called him. I don’t have the bad associations with the name like Aleksio does. But if Aleksio says it’s a shit name, it’s a shit name.
I want to kill old man Nikolla and Bloody Lazarus and all of the crew. I want to cut a bloody path through Chicago. Finish off every one of them with my bare hands. I want my face to be covered in their blood.
Killing does not dull the pain, but it changes the pain.
When you are in pain, any change is good. Even a change to the worse seems like relief.
This pain I feel for Kiro. My little brother. My bratik. I would change it to anything else.
But, yes, Aleksio is right. Be smart, be deliberate. Be dangerous.
But really I want to get bloody. If Aleksio were not here, I would get bloody. It is my way.
You would think, after Tanechka, that I would know better.
The pain of Tanechka’s betrayal was unbearable. Like battery acid in my heart.
Then I killed her. And that was worse.
Tanechka was the only woman I loved. I would be dead if not for Yuri.
I should be dead, but Yuri needed me. And Aleksio needs me. I stay alive for them.
Aleksio remembers Kiro as a baby. I have only the old photo, and now this boy on a tricycle, looking very much like Aleksio. On the back, it says Keith Knutson, 5 years.
“He is very big for a boy of five,” I say, fingering the stiff rectangle of paper. “Our brother would have grown to be big. Strong. A good fighter.”
Aleksio stares bleakly out the window. “We have to tell Konstantin ASAP.”
I nod.
This news will devastate Konstantin.
I look back down at the photograph.
I never had a tricycle, or any kind of bike. I do not know how to ride one. If not for Mira’s father, I would have known how, and maybe I would have helped this little boy ride one, too. We would have ridden together.
Chapter Seventeen
Mira
“Really?” I say as Aleksio pushes me into the windowless bedroom at the Stonybrook house. “After all this? You can’t lock me up like a dog in a kennel.”
He and Viktor are about to head out to Konstantin’s to break the news about Kiro. “You have to stay. It’s how it is,” he says.
Our gazes meet. There’s so much emotion in him, so much heat and rage, it frightens me. But most of all, I want to pull him to me. Hold him.
Fuck him.
So wrong.
“You can’t keep me.”
He shuts the door and locks it. I fly to it and jiggle it.
Crap.
I listen for the car roaring out. I put my ear to the door. Loud music comes from somewhere—the kind of metal that Viktor and his Russian friends like to listen to. I listen for a long time. The last time I was trapped in here and listened at the door, I could hear the clicks of a phone and the sound of a man clearing his throat once in a while. There’s nothing here. Just the music. Probably the kitchen—that’s where they like to hang out.
I’m still in the clothes I went up north in—a drapey embroidered white shirt and the short summery skirt. Sandals. Not the best for running, but I’ll take them with me. I’ll go in bare feet across the lawn and then put them on for the woods.
I listen at the door. No sounds. “Hello?” I call softly.
Nothing. Nobody out there.
Dad once had one of his best guys tutor me on how to get out of places—handcuffs, trunks, locks. Picking a lock won’t help here, but he made the point that you go for the weakest link where you can.
The weak link here isn’t the bolt, it’s the door itself. It’s an interior door, a bedroom door. It’s not hollow like some of them are, but it’s soft. I’m not under any illusions I can muscle through it like the Kool-Aid man, but the place where the screws grab the wood—that’s the weak link.
I scour the bedroom and the bathroom for something to use. I settle on the hinges from the cabinet under the bathroom sink—they’re flat metal triangles. I could slide the wide end into the door crack and then whack it. It’s the same principle as a chisel, except I’m not trying to pry something apart so much as pop it out the other end.
I use a barrette from my hair as a makeshift screwdriver and pull one of the bathroom cabinet hinges off. I try to fit it into the crack. It’s tight, but I shove hard, and it works—it slides in and stops when it hits the metal of the bolt on the other side.
Then I evaluate mallets. The wood base of the bedside lamp seems best. Really solid. I unplug it and do a few practice swings, but not connecting. There will be a loud sound. I’m hoping the music is loud enough to cover it.
I put my ear to the door. Nobody there. As the song gets fat and loud, I do it—I smash it once, twice. Listen at the door. Nothing—except a lot of noise.
I whale on it then, just slamming it, and finally the metal plate goes through and pops the hinge.
I ease the door open and push it back into place. I sneak down the hall away from the direction of the music. I slip into another room. It’s an empty bedroom, and the window is open—just a screen. I punch the fucker through, climb out, and find myself in the dizzying sunshine, bare feet on the warm grass.
I run across the expanse of grass, legs shaking. Free.
I don’t look back until I’m in the woods.
Nobody coming. Just the sound of distant music.
I keep on, feet getting torn on branches and sharp thing
The woods get thick and brambly. My legs are getting torn up. There’s no path here, but I can hear a highway in the distance. I need to get to that highway. I’ll hitch a ride and hide at my friend’s cabin.
I think about Aleksio with me in the dark back seat of the car. The way he felt as I held him. So much violence in him. So much pain.
Aleksio will be shocked that I’m gone. Angry. But it’s best for everyone. We belong in different worlds.
Chapter Eighteen
Aleksio
We head over to Konstantin’s place, west of the city. We’re wild with grief and vengeance. Dreading the news we have to tell.
“You don’t touch Mira,” I say. “You understand?”
He says nothing.
“You understand?”
“I understand what you’re saying,” he says.
I give him a hard look. He gets it.
Konstantin lives in a beautiful old red brick building on the edge of a park. He has his own place, and a nurse lives in a place next door, there to care for him. I support them both. My gang isn’t huge like the Nikolla army, but we’re smart and lucrative.
“Old man is more interested in ducks than in people. If he was in the city it would be the pigeons,” Viktor observes as we pull up. “It’s the same in Moscow, with the old people. It is suddenly the little things.”
But Konstantin still sees the big things, too.
He’s in his wheelchair in front of a fireplace when we arrive.
He’s made a nest of comfortable furniture and photos of old buildings, mostly from Albania, Greece, and Turkey, mostly that he shot himself.
“Boys!” he says. “My boys!” I bend down to kiss his cheek, and he pats mine, then turns to Viktor and clips his chin. “Who fucked up your face?”
“It’s nothing.”
The nurse puts out a plate of cookies and kafe turke, then leaves, back to her flat. Konstantin notices I’m limping. “You need that looked at.”
“Konstantin,” I say. One word.
The old man’s face falls. He knows me that well.
I think about Mira in the car, the way she reached out to me. I find myself wishing she were here beside me. In the past few hours, she’s begun to feel more like an ally than a hostage.
Viktor takes a sugar cookie and chews it angrily.
I tell Konstantin about Kiro. For a brief moment we thought we’d get our baby brother back. Telling Konstantin makes it worse. Makes it more real.
His wrinkled hands tremble as he examines the newspaper article we took from Lila and Ronson. He clutches the photograph of Kiro.
“I still feel him in my heart, though,” I say. “They never found the body, but…”
“Things are typically as they seem,” Konstantin says curtly.
I know he’s right.
“He was such a happy baby,” Konstantin says. “Beautiful, happy, good. A gift. Strangers would stop on the street to admire him. He was loved.”
Viktor takes another cookie. He was too young to remember Kiro, but I know he tries. Like grabbing onto clouds.
“Viktor,” Konstantin says, looking at him sadly, as though he can read his thoughts. Viktor shrugs.
I can’t stop thinking about Nikolla. Wishing I could kill him.
“You were loved,” Konstantin says to the photo.
I have to do something—anything—so I go out to the car to get a bottle of vodka and bring it back.
Viktor looks over with his usual darkness as he takes his glass. Just us now. Two brothers instead of three.
We make a toast to Kiro, the three of us.
“We want to get dead fucking serious here, Konstantin,” I say. “You always said to be smart. Kiro is gone, but we can still go after them the right way. The way you wanted. We weaken them. We take our empire back. I know we don’t have the element of surprise, but…” I almost say we have nothing to lose. It feels like that, a little. “You always said I was rash. I get it. Going after Kiro that way?”
“You wanted your brother,” Konstantin says. “In the end, you were right not to wait. We would’ve had to wait forever.”
“I’m ready to do some real damage. And I don’t give a shit about the old bat’s prophecy, because we are together—Viktor and me.”
“And Kiro is with us here.” Viktor slams a fist into his chest. “The brothers are together.” I wonder whether he really believes it, or whether he’s just saying that for Konstantin.
I grab my glass, drain it, pour some more. “Keith,” I spit. “No wonder he ran away at the age of eight.”
“You are the sleeping king, Aleksio. And you, Viktor, the prince.” Old Konstantin straightens in his chair and speaks slowly. “Best you didn’t kill Aldo Nikolla. Bloody Lazarus would rise up, and he is violent and unpredictable—too hard to fight. We do this the right way. It’s time.”
Konstantin commands Viktor to go to his desk and bring out his laptop. He has something important to show us.
I push up his TV table that fits over the armrests of his wheelchair.
Konstantin turns on the computer and shows us spreadsheets, flow charts, graphs. “I have made something for you boys. Years ago I began the long game, filling in names and places.” He goes on to detail what he has been doing. As he speaks, I realize that he has been slowly putting the puzzle of businesses together using a network of private investigators and administrative assistants.
He has been working in the dark, working in the quiet, to prepare the way for us to weaken the Nikolla empire and take it back.
An old criminal at his jigsaw puzzle.
“We choke off their cash, their protection, then we strike…”
“Jesus,” I say, amazed. “You had this all this time, and you didn’t tell me?”
“I was saving it for after we found Kiro,” Konstantin says.
I hit the keys, flipping through. The spreadsheet is madness. It’s everything we need.
His plan is to infiltrate their flesh trade, their most profitable business, especially their underground brothel, Valhalla.
“The nerve center of their billion-dollar operation,” Konstantin says. “The jugular. No one understands this as I do.”
He has more—blueprints to the money laundering, the chop shops, people in and out of the clan who can be bribed or blackmailed. “I helped stack that empire,” he growls. “I know how to make it fall. Then the true sons step up.”
Konstantin wants Viktor to infiltrate the brothel. Viktor grumbles like a kid who got the bad Cracker Jack prize. Infiltrating a brothel isn’t bloody enough for Viktor.
Konstantin shakes his head. “It needs somebody who can speak Russian but pass as an American. A lot of the pipeline is Russian.”
Viktor avoids my eyes as he grabs the paper with the URLs Konstantin has written. “Writing websites on a piece of paper like an old man.”
“I am an old man.”
While other old men do crossword puzzles, Konstantin has been up to this.
Viktor is darkly focused on his flesh-trade flowchart, looking at the names. A lot of Russians. The names of the victims are mostly Russian, too. I see why Konstantin put him there.
“I would like to kill them,” he says. “All of these on the chart.”
“But you won’t,” Konstantin says. “Because you know others will replace them. We will destroy the structure itself. Like termites. Your father would never have run such a place as Valhalla.”
Viktor frowns. “I will be a termite for a little while. Then we will kill the shit out of them.”
“Good boy.”
We discuss how to get the American side of the Russian mafiya involved.
He closes the laptop. He reaches out to grip my arm, tightening and loosening as if in extreme emotion. “You two brothers together take your vengeance.” Konstantin lets go of me and beckons Viktor over. He adjusts Viktor’s tie. “Some of Aldo Nikolla’s people may come over to you. Some you will be able to trust, some not. Use your gut. As you weaken Aldo, there will come a tipping point where you can finally pull everything to yourself.” He looks up, so full of emotion. “Your father built his empire to pass on to you, his sons. He would be proud.”
Chapter Nineteen
Mira
I crash on. I think I hear people behind me, but it could be my imagination, like footsteps in the dark.
The way up ahead gets lighter, as though there are fewer trees up there. It’s a good sign—it could mean I’m coming out the other side. My legs are bleeding, but I don’t even care. I burst out from the trees, and there it is, a two-lane highway. Not much traffic, but all I need is one person, one driver willing to help.
And coming, in the distance, is a black car. I slide down the steep, grassy slope and wave and jump, right in the middle of the road, thankful I’m wearing bright colors.
The vehicle slows. Coming.
I move to the side, waving more frantically. “Help!” I call out.
And then I recognize Yuri. Eyes boring into mine. Angry.
I turn and scramble back up the side.
The vehicle pulls off. I run into the woods. My feet are getting torn on roots and branches. I trip, and suddenly he’s on me.
He pushes me down and presses a knee to my back. I’m squirming, trying to get free, as he makes a call.
A voice on the other end. Viktor. They speak in Russian.
I feel something cold and hard on my arm. I jerk away too late. The Taser shock jolts through my body.
And then the darkness closes in.
* * *
Familiar arms around my shoulders, under my knees. “Mira. Baby.”
Aleksio.
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