Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2)

by Annika Martin

  Viktor

  We land in a small airport in a small city named Duluth. The last time we were through here, the hunt for Kiro seemed doomed. The investigator was not hopeful. I wanted to hurt him.

  Now this lead!

  We rent cars and drive west from there with enough hardware to vanquish a small army. I’m in the lead car. Yuri rides up front with Tito driving. I sit in the back with Aleksio, reviewing satellite images of the imposter professor’s hunting cabin. This man, this Pinder, has hundreds of acres of wild hunting land. He’s supposedly dead, but it’s all very mysterious.

  Our P.I. did good work. I am happy I did not kill him.

  “If Pinder has done anything to our brother, I will make him eat his own eyeballs.”

  Aleksio frowns. Love has made him lose his taste for violence a little bit. “Maybe if Kiro is as wild as they say, maybe this is the kind of place he likes. Maybe this isn’t sinister.” Aleksio. Trying to stay positive.

  I say nothing. I do not feel so positive.

  Aleksio blows a puff of air from his lips, moving a lock of hair from his eyes. Mira once said he had the haircut of a teen idol. It’s just a haircut grown out, he growled. They had a silly fight. Aleksio and Mira can have fun over anything, especially the little things. The big things are more difficult. She’s a lawyer who hates crime. He’s a criminal.

  On some things they agree. Like shutting down Valhalla. They are powerful allies who make each other better, I think.

  Tito thinks it, too. Tito is Aleksio’s right-hand man. He has short hair that he dyes wild and bright. Americans love their hair.

  Tito and Aleksio are like two hoodlums, and Yuri and I are like two military men. Our hair is short. Dark. Severe. We have dressed in cargo pants and camouflage jackets.

  “We could have him with us in one hour. Riding between us,” Aleksio says. “Assuming he’ll even tolerate a car.”

  “Right.”

  A man we met with told us that when Kiro came out of the forest, he was wild and uncivilized. Like a savage, he said.

  I look forward to meeting this brother of ours very much.

  It is difficult not to check Tanechka’s feed on my phone, difficult to disconnect from her, like disconnecting from my own heart. But Aleksio needs to see that I can be focused on this trip. It is not easy, knowing the live feed of Tanechka goes on, knowing she could turn her face. I long to see her face so very much.

  But I show Aleksio the reasonable brother he needs to see. We talk about the imposter professor, this Harrison Pinder. We talk about what we will do to him if he’s hurt our bratik.

  The cornfields flow by. American corn, much of it harvested. It is autumn. Stalks dry in the field. This we see in Russia, but everything else is so different—the buildings, the feeling of the people.

  I miss it.

  Up front, Yuri is arguing with Tito over nothing. Like stags, playing at locking horns.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I say to Aleksio. About Tanechka. He knows what I mean.

  Aleksio is hurt; I see it in his face. “Why didn’t you?”

  I look at my hands. “I didn’t want you to stop me from…” I wave a hand.

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  “It’s not,” I say.

  He regards me with concern. Love, even.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, so ashamed. “I would give my own life to take back what I did to her. I didn’t have faith in her. I didn’t have faith in us.”

  Aleksio grips my shoulder. My brother—with me, no matter what. “Your gang had evidence that she was keeping secrets from you, that she was working for a rival gang. You saw her kiss your worst enemy. It’s a lot to take. She lied to you.”

  “I know why she did it.”

  “Still, she lied to you. She made it look like she betrayed you and your gang, and when you found out, she let you think it.”

  As it turned out, Tanechka was playing an elaborate con to save her mother. Pretending to betray us when she wasn’t. “I should have believed in her.” I force myself to feel the daggers of what I did.

  “You’re no psychic, Viktor.”

  I stare ahead grimly. “My faith in her should have been strong enough to withstand anything.”

  “Your gang, the only family you ever knew, made you kill her.”

  “I should have believed.”

  Aleksio squeezes my shoulder again as if to say, I am here no matter what. He is a good, strong brother.

  Cellphone service is shit out on the iron range of northern Minnesota, but Aleksio and his guys have satellite phones. Planes, equipment, hired muscle—we have so much now, thanks to the money our father hid for us. As if he knew what would happen. That we would return to avenge his death.

  We leave our SUVs at the edge of Pinder’s property, then trudge through the heavily wooded area.

  The trees blaze yellow and red; the sky is a vibrant blue. Tanechka loves nature, loves being outside. She always noticed the sky. Look at the clouds, she’d say. Always telling me to look at the clouds or the sun or stars or something. Always looking up.

  She can’t see the sky where she is now.

  “We could find him today,” Aleksio says. “Today!”

  I grunt. I do not have such high expectations.

  It makes me angry that they took him to a mental hospital for being wild. A boy who grew up wild is not crazy. There were some children like this in Siberia.

  Our brother would be twenty now.

  Distant gunshots. It’s hunting season, which is convenient, considering we are a group of men wandering the woods with guns, except our guns are not quite the same as other guns. And we do not wear blaze orange. We ignore the “No Trespassing” signs and head in.

  I would not want to be the one who tries to stop us.

  The cabin we located via satellite is many miles in. We hike until we reach a ridge that’s near enough for a visual.

  I look through the field glasses, and my heart sinks.

  You can see from the foliage alone that the place is abandoned. Roof collapsed. Tall weeds in front of the door. I hand the glasses to Aleksio without a word. He looks. Says nothing. Simply gets back on the satphone to Carlo’s party on the west side of the area. “We’ll go first, move in carefully,” he says. “You watch, ready for anything.”

  “I don’t think people are there.”

  “Could be arranged to look abandoned,” he says.

  I nod. Aleksio is a smart, careful leader. I do not think this is mere appearance, though.

  We cast around for traps as we move through the trees and thick underbrush. Finding none, we approach the cabin itself and push open the door with a long branch. It gives.

  Aleksio and I go in together, weapons drawn. The place smells of rot, mold, and dung. I turn on my flashlight. Papers all around. Warped husks of furniture with the stuffing pulled out. There are even a few small trees growing through the floorboards, straining up toward the holes in the ceiling.

  And then I see the cage that takes up half of the main room. The bars are heavy and thick, running from floor to ceiling. Inside is a sleeping pad, a broken toilet, and a sink.

  A cell for a lone prisoner.

  The door hangs open. The area around the latch is blackened, as if it were torched open.

  “Blyad!” I walk right in, right through the cobwebs. I don’t care. “Blyad!”

  We search the place. There are dusty books everywhere—philosophy of the ancients, mostly. Some evolution, anthropology. Spiral-bound notebooks with the pages stuck together.

  “Fuck,” Aleksio says, reading one. “Some numbers and then, ‘This is how much he’ll rattle the cage even while the bars are electrified. Subject shakes bars until unconscious even when I smile, giving the appearance of enjoyment.’ What the fuck? Subject?” He throws the notebook. “Fuck you!”

  I pick up a chair and smash it into the iron stove again and again, until I’m holding only bits. Our brother. Kept in a cage. “I am going to
peel Pinder’s skin from his fucking face while he watches!”

  Kiro was here. Kept in a cage. He could see out the windows to the outdoors. Like a taunt.

  It’s Tito who finds the bloodstain on the floor near the cage. What happened? Is this Kiro’s blood? Pinder’s? And what of the torch marks on the door to the cage?

  Yuri tosses me one of the philosophy books. There are little marks in the margins all the way through. I check another. They all have marks, horizontal lines and here and there, exclamation marks. “Did he read books to him? Marking his reactions?” Yuri asks. “Teaching him?”

  Aleksio gives us a stormy look. He is feeling less optimistic suddenly.

  Carlo pulls up a map on his phone. “There’s a little town down along the river, population 880. Whatever happened out here, it would’ve been news. People talk. There’s a little diner.”

  Aleksio surveys the books and notebooks. “These could provide some insight, maybe.” He has Carlo’s team gather them up.

  It’s nearly dinnertime when Aleksio and Yuri and Tito and I arrive at the diner. We take a booth and order burgers. The waitress is young. Her name tag says Britta. Her first job, perhaps.

  Aleksio smiles in the charming way that he has. “You been around here long?” he asks when she delivers our meals.

  Britta smiles. “All my life.”

  “We were up northwest of here and came on this abandoned cabin that had a big cage in it,” he says. “What’s up with that?”

  “Oh,” she says. She knows it.

  “And the door had been torched open, it looked like,” Tito adds.

  “Oh, man, it was this whole crazy thing. You didn’t hear about it?”

  “We’re from Chicago,” Aleksio says.

  “It was crazy,” she says. “This guy was keeping an insane prisoner in his cabin. For like a year, and nobody knew. It was like something on one of those crime shows. He wasn’t from around here. Neither of them were.”

  Aleksio maintains his charming attitude, makes a face that mirrors hers. “What happened?”

  “Nobody really knows fully. You would hear hunters talking about sounds and things from there, but this professor, he told people he had dogs out there. Nobody imagined he was holding a person. He’d come into town for supplies. He ate here once or twice, but it was before my time.” She looks around, grabs a ketchup from one table and puts it on another, then comes back, barely missing a beat. “And one day, they think, he got too close to the cage, and his prisoner strangled him to death. Then the poor guy managed to call out and alert some hunters. It was right after bow season opener. He was lucky in his timing—any other time of year and he’d be locked there for good.”

  My pulse thunders in my ears. I’m thankful Aleksio is here to keep her spinning the tale. He nods. “They heard him?”

  “Yeah. The hunters called the cops. Nobody knew this prisoner he’d been keeping was crazy at first. He carried on regular conversations, and he seemed totally sane. He’d gotten the body of the professor out of sight, dragging it along the edge of the cage to the wall, so they couldn’t see he’d strangled this guy right through the bars, not that anybody would blame him. They were giving him food and stuff.”

  Yuri catches my eye. I grit my teeth as she continues. “…then the cops arrived and they found the body right off. I don’t know what happened—a lot of it is sealed in records, but I heard from a friend of a friend that this caged man seemed completely normal while they blowtorched him out of there. They get him out and start questioning him, but at some point he starts freaking out. He’s just tossing the cops around like rag dolls, trying to get out of that cabin. He kicks through the closed door—I kid you not, he didn’t even use the knob—he’s just out of there like the freakin’ Kool-Aid guy. Again, would you blame him?”

  “I would not,” I growl.

  “Me neither,” she says. “But you don’t beat the shit out of the cops who just saved you. So he’s running through the woods, and there was this manhunt because they didn’t know what he was going to do. I don’t know why he had to attack the officers. Yeah, you’re locked up, you want to get out, but the cops are getting you out, right? But of course, he was insane.”

  I bite my tongue.

  “What happened to him?” Aleksio asks.

  “Well, they got him. They hunted him with tranquilizer guns—one of our regulars is a large-animal vet who works the farms, and he hooked them up. And then I don’t know.”

  “How bad did he hurt those cops?” Tito asks.

  “Oh, one was in the hospital. For a long time.”

  I put on my best American accent. “Did he get arrested? Sent to jail?”

  Britta shrugs.

  Aleksio smiles. “I’m so curious. I really want to know what happened.”

  “Hold on, I have food up.” She heads around the counter and through a set of swinging doors.

  I ball my hands.

  Tito lowers his voice. “He’s locked up. I can tell you that right now. He fucked up those cops real bad? He’s been put away.”

  Aleksio swears softly. Breaking a man out of prison is no easy thing, even for us.

  She delivers her food and comes back. “So nobody knows what happened. People say he got sent to Stillwater, but no one actually knows.”

  Stillwater. A prison with a psych wing.

  This is clearly the end of our information.

  We thank Britta, pay our bill, and pile into the SUV. Tito Googles for reports. There are none. It’s all very strange.

  “We need the police report. That’ll tell us what the fuck,” Aleksio says. We look up the precinct roster and study the names of local cops. We email them to Konstantin, the old hit man who saved Aleksio. Aleksio thinks Konstantin might have a connection.

  “It is public information, right?” I say. “We ask for it.”

  “Yeah, it’s public, and we could ask,” Aleksio says, “but I’m guessing they’ll make us file for it—a Freedom of Information request. And what if the officials here are connected to Lazarus’s people? Lazarus had meth operations up here for a while—he could have eyes and ears here. He doesn’t have this lead on Kiro, and I want to keep it that way. If we could bribe somebody, that’s nice and quiet.”

  Konstantin gets right back to us—he doesn’t have connections to the police here, but he thinks Lazarus does for sure.

  “We could do a takeover of the police station,” I say.

  Aleksio snorts. “We could, but…” He thinks about it a while.

  “It would be easy. They would have nothing but a few clerks in a police station out here. Right? Easy to take.”

  Aleksio considers this. “Yeah, but if we didn’t get what we wanted, Lazarus would definitely look hard at this place. And he has the reach to find things faster.”

  “And it’s robbing a police station,” Tito says. “There’s that.”

  I snort. “You Americans.”

  Tito laughs. “Dude.”

  “No, this feels like a time to go sure and slow and smart,” Aleksio says. “For Kiro.”

  Aleksio has a plan—one of the investigators we use writes history books, loves his dusty records. “We’re going to send him up like he’s writing a book on the area and have him file for several things at once, not single out the cabin incident. We’ll have him file for every big incident report of this area for the year so they won’t be alerted to that specifically. It’ll take a few days, maybe a week, before they let him go to the county courthouse and examine the records, but it’s safest. Safest for Kiro.”

  “Unless Lazarus has this lead.”

  “I don’t see how.” Aleksio makes the call and gets the P.I. right on it.

  We’re silent for much of the drive home, all of us thinking about that cage. Kiro in that cage. Midway back to Chicago, Aleksio starts talking about the money-laundering heist. Another way we have to hurt Lazarus.

  It feels good. I want very much to hurt Lazarus right now. If I can’t watch Tanechka
or rescue Kiro, I want to fight Lazarus.

  Aleksio thinks they run their dirty cash through a restaurant supply warehouse on the South Side.

  I turn to him. “Say the word, brat. We could attack there as soon as we land. Make it bloody. Divert their attention.”

  “Tempting,” Aleksio says. “But let’s do the recon first.”

  I sit back, fighting the urge to take out my phone and check on Tanechka. I remind myself that Aleksio needs to see that I am not obsessed. I remind myself I’m recording the feeds at home, that I will see everything when I get back. I’ll watch Tanechka and review the feeds of the other girls. Catching up on the feeds can be confusing and time-consuming when you’re trying to watch them live at the same time, but I’ve done it.

  After we land, Aleksio decides that he needs my help with recon of the warehouse. I know what he’s doing—keeping me from watching Tanechka.

  Fine. I go with him.

  We drive by the restaurant supply warehouse owned by Lazarus. This is a run-down part of town. Many buildings vacant. Many windows broken. I take note of the entrances and sightlines all around.

  Most interesting is the warehouse right next door to it. It has a broken chimney on top. A broken chimney is a good place for a man to hide while he studies Lazarus’s money-laundering operations.

  A sign over the door of this warehouse with a broken chimney says “Brenner Industries.” Aleksio looks on Google and tells us Brenner is imported textiles. We head around to a door marked “Deliveries Only” and ring the bell. A security guard opens the door. He is a retired man.

  Aleksio and I don’t bother drawing on this retired man; we just push our way in.

  The man raises his hands. He knows what it is, what we are. The place smells of chemicals they use to keep the cloth free of moths and other vermin.

  Aleksio says, “This is either your worst day ever or your best day ever. Which do you want?”

  “Best day,” the man says warily.

  Aleksio makes the deal with him. This retired man agrees to let one of our men go up and hide in the chimney and stake out Lazarus’s warehouse. He and Aleksio discuss how they will get the other guard who works there to play along.

  This retired man sees that it can be a good day for them both. They’ll both be paid. The warehouse they protect will not be harmed.