He squeezes the backs of my thighs, fingers biting into the thin cotton. A glowy good feeling rolls up between my legs as he turns his face up, kneading my thighs ever so slightly.
I tighten my fists in his hair. I must push him off. I’ll push him off soon.
He turns his face back to my belly and tips his head down so that his mouth is level with my sex, but he doesn’t touch me. “You always loved it when I talked here, breathed here. You loved to feel the close space between us. You always loved the space where nothing and everything happens—the space between, you called it. You were fascinated with this.”
I close my eyes, aware of the heat from his mouth. Aware also of the answering heat from between my legs.
“You loved when I almost kissed you there,” he says. “When I almost touched you. Almost licked you. You loved that. I had only to touch you here to end you.”
He touches the fabric between my legs. The fabric doesn’t connect to any part of my body, just to the space between my legs.
I nearly faint with the feeling. Because now he must kiss me there.
I push him away. “I don’t play your games anymore.”
He rolls back on his heels, gazing up, beautiful eyes warm and sparkling. “You would feel everything. So sensitive. The game would make you feel everything.”
I killed a person. I can’t let him make me feel good. “Leave me.”
He rises to his feet. “One touch of my finger and you’d come apart screaming…”
I gather my garments. “Look what you did. It’ll take hours to sew!”
“You’re not sewing it. This costume isn’t for you.” He rips the robe and shift from my hands and pulls my scarf from my head and storms off. I chase after him. “Viktor, please!”
Down the stairs he goes.
“Viktor!”
He stalks through the living room to the fireplace, where embers still glow. He tosses it in. I dart after it, but he grabs me by the arm, fingers digging into my flesh. With his free hand he takes a poker and shoves at the burning fabric, shoving it around over the embers. I watch in despair as my garments go up in flames.
He lets me go.
I fall to my knees in front of the fireplace, despairing.
“There’s a closet full of clothes for you up there. Beautiful clothes you once loved. You’ll wear those. You’ll wear the clothes of Tanechka from now on.”
Chapter Fourteen
Viktor
She tromps down the stairs the next morning in a T-shirt and jeans, bright hair flowing over her shoulders. The breath goes out of me. “Lisichka.”
She continues toward me, big black boots clomping. “Don’t get used to it. I’ll be back in the serge. You can’t stop me from it.”
I smile. She chose those clothes for a breakout, of course.
We worked together too long for me not to understand her the way a sailor understands the ocean.
Does she know how obvious it is? She’ll pull a knit cap over her head and tuck in her hair as soon as I’m gone. Then she’ll don a black jacket filled with whatever rope she can find. Other supplies. The old Tanechka would carve up the treads of the boots for better gripping. I would give anything to go with her, to be allies again. United.
I wish I didn’t have to go, but I do.
On my way out, I stop Pityr, one of the guys I have guarding the street. He’s on edge. I clap him on the back. “Blatnye,” I say.
He’s not feeling so blatnye, so badass. He addresses me in Russian. “Bloody Lazarus’s patsani just passed by. Three cars.” He lifts his phone. “Everybody’s been texting about it.”
I clench my jaw. “What was your impression?”
“They don’t know about your place,” he says, grasping the direction of my thoughts. “They’ve been crawling up and down every street, daring us to engage. Suggesting that this is their town. A threat. Show of force. They’ll do something here soon, I think. He’s exerting power. A new leader.”
“Wanting to engage. Start something,” I say.
“I don’t know why they haven’t already,” he says. “Perhaps he wants to keep his cops happy.” He uses the word mussor—“garbage”—but he really means cops.
“Bloody Lazarus doesn’t care about keeping anybody happy. Aleksio says it’s why he’ll be easy to take down.”
“They’re saying Lazarus is a decent leader. Everybody’s surprised.” He fills me in on the rumors that the rabid killer thing was only an act; now that he’s taken over the family, he’s clever, thoughtful.
Apparently one of the Russian guys heard Lazarus was giving bonuses to all young American Russian warriors who would defect to him. He tells me the American Russians are getting jumpy about it. And jumpy about the fighting that seems ready to erupt. There was peace until we came.
“We came into this neighborhood to get more solid with them. Blyad—what if we’re alienating them?”
Pityr shakes his head. “Dunno, brat.”
“If the wrong person defects, we’re fucked.”
He nods.
Aleksio won’t like this. I point to the roof, the path Tanechka would take. “She’s going to try going high. You remember how well she could do that?”
“So fast and light,” he says. “The nun skirt’ll hinder.”
“She changed out of it.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“Keep a watch,” I say. “Don’t underestimate her. And call me if anything happens. Even insignificant.”
I call Yuri and Tito and tell them what’s happening. They need to be ready—especially with Lazarus’s people crawling around.
Aleksio is waiting at the Tiptop Diner some ten blocks away. I slide into the booth across from him and tell him what Pityr said about Bloody Lazarus. All the bratki rallying around him.
“I don’t get it. They’re just cool with the whole psycho thing?”
“They’re saying the psycho thing was an act,” I tell him. “They’re saying Bloody Lazarus became what he needed to when he was enforcer and now that he’s leader, he’s no longer this psycho.”
“So he’s gone from John Wayne Gacy to King Solomon?”
I shrug. I don’t know these names. I order orange juice.
“Fuck. The American Russians start losing guys to Bloody Lazarus?” he says once the waitress leaves.
“Back home, the only way out of the gang is feet first.”
Aleksio snorts. “We need to start bonding with them more. We need to start spreading more money around. And I missed that fucking sit-down with Dmitri yesterday.”
“Blyad! You can’t miss meetings with him.” Dmitri is the leader of them.
“It was an emergency. I had to.”
“It’ll be seen as disrespectful.”
“We’ll do better,” he says.
I nod and look out the diner window. We are both anxious to hear about Kiro, but we don’t want to jinx it by discussing it. I ask about Konstantin. “I want him to meet Tanechka,” I say. “I never got to bring a girl home to my family. Konstantin, he’s the grumpy grandfather I never had. The grumpy Albanian grandpa with his shit Turkish coffee.”
“Shows you don’t know dick about coffee.” He checks his phone. The P.I. is late. A bad sign. “He’ll be here. Lazarus couldn’t know about him. He couldn’t.”
But anybody can know anything.
If Bloody Lazarus knows about our P.I., it means the P.I. is dead and they probably have the information he sought. And a way to Kiro.
I get my juice. I sip. “We could find Kiro today. That’s the other side of it.”
He looks at me with interest.
“What?”
“Look at you, Susie Sunshine.”
It is unlike me, I suppose, to look at the bright side, as they say. But Tanechka’s back. Anything’s possible.
“But you’re right. We’ll find him, and if he’s in a supermax, then we’ll be the first motherfuckers to break a man out of a supermax.” He eyes me. “How is Tanechk
a?”
“Adjusting.” I picture her walking down the stairs in her regular clothes, hair fanned out over her shoulders. Eyes shining with challenge. It was almost her. “She knows about some of the…things she did.”
“Things. Meaning hits?” I nod. “Shit. How’s she taking it?”
“Not so good. I didn’t mean for her to know yet. At least she’s wearing normal clothes now. T-shirt and jeans. So nice to see her in that.”
He straightens. “She changed out of her nun’s outfit? How’d you get her to do that?”
“It wasn’t so voluntary.”
“Viktor, what the fuck are you doing? What happened to surrounding her with familiar things and letting her go at her own pace?”
I shrug.
He sits back and unwraps a straw. “I didn’t respect what Mira wanted, and I almost lost her.”
“Your Mira was not in the home you bought for her kissing the feet of another man.”
He furrows his brow. “Another man?”
“Jesus.”
He gives me a look. “Dude.”
“What? You say I should respect her, this is about respect—respect of who Tanechka truly is. She wouldn’t want this. Tanechka would expect me to fight for her. I’d die to have her back in the world.”
“What if that is Tanechka?”
“It’s not. You didn’t know her. She deserves at least to remember who she was, so she can make a choice. Tanechka hated to be ignorant. She deserves to know everything of her life.”
“Are you giving her a choice? Or steamrolling her choice? I mean, I get it, Viktor, a nun is a hard limit…” I barely hear him over the pounding in my head.
Suddenly Sykes, our P.I., is there, hat shoved down over his head. Aleksio slides in next to me so the man can have the other side of the booth to himself.
“Not loving this public place,” Sykes grumbles.
Aleksio slides him cash, and he spins a thumb drive across the table to us. He has a wide face, a womanly nose, and skin the color of American spray tan. “That’s the filings. A lot of bullshit in there, just so you can see what I did. I got your brother’s report. That’s the good news.”
That gets our attention.
“He got arrested, all right,” Sykes says. “It’s pretty much the story you heard—he attacked the officers who freed him—attacked without provocation. Guy really fucking went to town. In testimony, one of them said it was because they tried to restrain him. Guy doesn’t like to be restrained.”
He sits back and slides his hands to either side of him. This P.I. Sykes, he’s a man who takes up two seats when he can.
“Bad news: He went before district court, and they had a sanity hearing. Apparently he was committed, but I can’t get anything definitive, and certainly not where he was sent. A certificate of commitment was created at some point, but it’s been deleted on corresponding spreadsheets. I have one more idea, but it’ll take another round of FOIA filings. I went ahead and did that.”
“Hold on—committed?” Aleksio says. “As in, an insane asylum?”
“Possibly. They had a hearing with two lawyers—one for the state, one for him—and a psychiatrist. It’s procedure in a commitment case, so yeah. That’s a likely outcome. I’ve got the lawyer’s name, but he retired soon after. I’m tracking him down. He’ll invoke confidentiality, but I’m guessing you want me to put the hurt on him.”
“Whatever it takes,” Aleksio says.
“Something strange, though—the psychiatrist’s name was blacked out. And the hard copies were filled out with a different font than other papers in the batch.”
“What does that mean?” Aleksio asks.
“Irregular. Could be a lot of reasons. Some innocent, some fishy. Thing is, he went to town on all those cops. My guess is that he’s in the system for sure on an MI and D—mentally ill and dangerous—but where? Hence another filing.”
“Meaning he may be in a prison for the criminally insane,” Aleksio says.
I hiss out a breath. “Rotting in a lunatic asylum?”
“It could be that, we just don’t know,” Sykes says.
“It’s not as bad here as in Russia,” Aleksio says.
I growl. It’s all bad.
“He could’ve been in for a term and then released to a halfway house,” Sykes continues. “I’m going as fast as I can here. You said not to push it, not to draw attention. There are difficult personalities involved down at the records desk. Buying a fucking vanilla frappé for the desk guy. Like a fucking little megalomaniac behind his fucking desk.”
I feel rage flare hot in my head. I speak through clenched teeth. “What is this man’s name, please.”
The P.I. glances nervously at Aleksio, who holds up a hand, as if that will calm me. “We have a legal right to this information,” Aleksio says. “He won’t hand it over?”
“Policies are only as fair as those enforcing them.”
Now Aleksio growls.
“Take a chill pill, guys,” Sykes says. “We’re close.”
I turn to Sykes. “Did you see signs of anyone else poking around?”
“I’d tell you if I did,” he says. “My writer thing is legit. I have a book on Amazon.”
I take a deep breath, trying to be the man Kiro needs me to be. “We need to get our facts before acting.” I say this to myself more than anybody else. I eye my brother. “If we act rashly now, we could be sorry forever.” I don’t really feel it, but I say it.
Aleksio meets my gaze. A lump forms in my throat because I know he’s thinking about me and Tanechka, too.
“Fuck me,” Aleksio whispers. “Don’t look around.”
I stiffen.
“We’re being watched,” he says.
This is bad. We’re vulnerable here. We could be surrounded.
“Fucking hell.” I find my piece and set it in my lap.
Sykes sucks in a breath. “What the fuck? Will they move on us?”
“Depends,” Aleksio says. “And they’ve seen us together now. Dammit. How long does it take them to put a name and address to your face?”
“Not fucking long,” Sykes growls. He begins to get up.
I clamp a hand over his wrist. He’s shaking. “Where’re you going?”
“The fuck out of here.”
“No. Our orders now. We think how to get out of here, then figure where to put you.”
“Because you can’t go back to your place,” Aleksio says.
“What? I have a dog,” Sykes says.
“Gimme your address, we’ll get him out of there. Hurry,” Aleksio says.
“I can’t not go home.”
“We got places,” Aleksio says.
“It’s not cool,” Sykes says.
“You prefer interrogation? At the hands of Bloody Lazarus, maybe? It’s just until we find Kiro. You’ll keep investigating from a safe place we put you in. We’ll send a tail to keep you clear. You won’t be useful to them once we find Kiro,” Aleksio says.
Sykes is scared and pissed. He gives his address voice shaking. Aleksio pulls out his phone, texts Tito to grab the dog and the things he wants.
“Are you guys not worried your enemies are out there to gun us down?”
“We don’t know that’s why they’re there.” Aleksio’s phone vibrates. He checks the screen. “Tito and Nikki’ll get the dog.” He looks up at me. “Together. That’s interesting.”
“My dog’s gonna freak out if strangers come and take him.”
“Tito knows how to handle dogs. He’ll bring meat.” He looks up at me. “We have to split up. I’ll get Sykes out. You come around back and cover us if need be. We pretend not to notice them unless they make a move.”
“Running from a fight like kozel,” I say. “Like goats. I don’t like it. I could come up behind. Pop.”
“Viktor, no. We don’t even see them, got it?” Aleksio says. “We have to hurry before they get backup.”
“They’re in our face. They followed one of us, they
drive our streets. We need to hit back.”
“Not the time,” he says. “Maybe we’ll find something to do after this.” He gives me a significant look that I understand immediately. He means we’ll do something on their money-laundering business. That works. I feel like getting bloody.
“You’re going with me in my car,” Aleksio tells Sykes. “Viktor’ll ride your motorcycle. Give him your keys.”
“And I do what you say or else?” Sykes complains. “Is that the situation here?”
Aleksio gives him a hard look that says yes, that’s the situation here. The man hands over his keys.
It’ll feel good to ride on a motorcycle. I’ll ride fast, and maybe the wind will blow some of Tanechka from my mind.
I fix Sykes with my own hard look. “Move with calm confidence out to the car. That’s the feeling that you want to show.”
Aleksio smiles at me. He loves when I talk like that. So much of blatnoy warfare is image.
“I’ll see you at that McDonald’s,” Aleksio says.
I nod. There’s a McDonald’s near the money-laundering warehouse.
I head to the bathroom and slip out the window, piece drawn.
Nobody’s in back. Maybe it really is just two guys. Spotted one of us.
I ride Sykes’s bike to a snaggle-toothed industrial zone southwest of downtown and pull into the McDonald’s. Aleksio shows up with Yuri after a while. We ditch the car and bike in the shadows and go on foot to the textile warehouse with the broken lookout chimney.
This textile warehouse is next to Lazarus’s main money-laundering node—where cash is collected to be used in the import scheme that makes the money legit. An old technique. This chimney gives us a perfect view of everything that goes on there. If we hit his operation when coffers are full, he’ll be reeling for weeks.
The textile warehouse security guard we threatened is there and not happy to see us. We proceed on in to the back room and call up to Santino, the man Aleksio posted. Italian. New muscle from Milwaukee.
Santino’s happy to see us. He opens his laptop and shows us the footage he’s taken from his perch, many photos in different light. He created a PowerPoint program that shows the guard roster and details. Aleksio and his patsanis, they love their charts and bullet points.
Wicked Mafia Prince: A dark mafia romance (Dangerous Royals Book 2) Page 12