Prince of the Brotherhood: A Mafia Romance

by K. Alex Walker

  A medic placed an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth.

  The redhead glared at her. “I’ll fucking deal with you later. The South exit? Really? And I said put your hands behind your head, Sokolov.”

  Dom complied, but the man’s days were marked. The redhead had no idea who the fuck he was messing with or what the fuck he’d stepped in. By the time he found out, it would be too late.

  The redhead swiped the gun again, this time knocking Dom clean out.

  Chapter 24

  The sun could have risen and fallen at least a dozen times since the redhead and his band of merry men had tossed him in this cell—Dom wouldn’t know. There were no windows, nothing he could use to etch lines on the walls. He didn’t know where he was, where Eija was, but it had required a flight and a host of knockout drugs.

  Where’d they tossed him definitely wasn’t a Danish or Swedish prison. There, he’d have bedsheets. A desk. Soft lighting and IKEA furnishings. Here, the walls were all cinderblock, the bars reinforced steel. The outside of the toilet was more soiled than what went inside it, and urine-colored water came from a sputtering faucet they expected him to use to wash his face and brush his teeth.

  He looked up when a shadow appeared just outside the cell bars. Every day since his confinement, it had been the redhead asking questions. Through the questions, he’d learned that Ekaterina had died from injuries sustained in the blast. Mikhail, in an attempt to shield her, had suffered critical injuries and had been hospitalized. Yuri’s status was unknown—bodies were still being identified. Whenever he’d asked about Eija, the redhead had rewarded him with his head being smashed into a tabletop or a trip down the hall to an even grungier torture room. They’d tried everything from waterboarding to starvation to breaking his left wrist, but he’d taken an oath not to reveal his country’s secrets.

  “You are one tough son of a bitch,” the shadowy figure said.

  He momentarily ignored him, deciding the cracked mirror above the sink was more worthy of his attention.

  The cell door slid open, and the man stepped inside. Dom switched from lying to sitting on sheets filled with straw and rocks they’d attempted to pass off as a mattress.

  “Why the fuck was INTERPOL at the ceremony?” he asked.

  “Cool it, Dom. I’m still your superior officer.”

  “INTERPOL works for the CIA on this one, not with them. I thought they understood that.” Dom held up his wrist cast. “And you took your fucking time getting here.”

  Randy grated out a sigh. “We both know you wouldn’t have talked. And I didn’t even know you were here until two hours ago when I got the call that we’d apprehended ‘Dominik Sokolov’ in Moscow.”

  It was odd how his mind could recall everything except the actual explosion. He remembered Eija’s lips on his and her fingers on his forearms, but there was no memory of an actual sound. Of any bright spots of light or Eija being torn from his arms. When he closed his eyes, it was all screaming. The smell of burned flesh lived in his nostrils.

  “Yuri’s the rat,” Dom said. All the “free time” he’d accumulated while imprisoned had led him to the conclusion. “There’s no snitch in the Bratva. Yuri was the snitch. I think he orchestrated the attack.”

  “To escape the Bratva and leave everything squarely on his son’s shoulders,” Randy said, pacing and picking at his bottom lip. “Apparently, he’s been setting it up that way for years. That’s what I was researching when I got the call that you were here. As of right now, Yuri’s clean. I could argue until my tongue bleeds about everything he’s had a hand in, for years, but I’d have no proof to back it up.”

  Dom snorted in disbelief. The sly motherfucker always had a trick up his sleeve. The only reason Yuri had come for him when was six, “rescued” him from strange men and starving nights was because of this; Yuri had wanted out of the Bratva and needed a different neck in offering when the world’s counterintelligence and law enforcement agencies came swinging the hatchet.

  One afternoon during his first year at Stanford, Randy had stopped him after class. Before that day, he hadn’t known his mother and aunt had grown up with an older brother. Neither his mother nor Nasrin had ever spoken about Randy “Rahman” Almas, the golden child.

  After confirming with Nasrin that Randy was who he’d said he was, he’d granted Randy the meeting he’d requested. During that meeting, they’d talked about Yuri.

  “Are our covers intact?” Dom asked.

  “Solid.” Randy stopped pacing and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Dominik Sokolov still has an INTERPOL Red Notice. I’m still head of a task force on the Russian mafia. Only me, you, and a few others know we’re from the agency.”

  “The redhead, what’s his name?”

  “Dom, he was just doing his job. As his superior, real or fake, I’ll talk to him.”

  “And say what? Not to rough up your late sister’s kid? Your ex-partner’s son?”

  Randy pressed his lips together and passed his fingers through his hair. “Look, my orders weren’t to detain you. Favreau did that on his own. I told you not to get cornered. Shit, we put you in the same building as him. You were supposed to be keeping an eye out. What happened? Did you get distracted?”

  Like a motherfucker.

  Distracted wasn’t the word. When he was with Eija, he forgot he had a job to do. The odds of her still feeling the same way about him if she found out he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency were slim to none. He’d lied to her since the day they met. There was only so much forgiveness one person could extend. When he’d told her he was Bratva, he’d wanted to go one step further, but that would have been too much information at once.

  He stood, stretching his arms behind his head. It wasn’t his first time in a jail cell, but he was ready to get the hell up out of this one.

  “What about Nikolai?” he asked.

  “Safe. We got the message from your coffee cup dead-drop in London.”

  “And the nanny? Is she…all right?”

  “Eija?”

  “Both she and Pavel were with me when I was arrested. She was hurt. Did she live?”

  “Well, first of all,” Randy began, “Pavel’s fine.”

  “I know he’s fine. Even if we don’t get Yuri, he sure as fuck will. That Pitbull’s teeth sank into Yuri’s ass a long time ago, and he’s not about to let up now.”

  Pavel had been Yuri’s righthand man for the better part of a decade, and he’d been an informant for nearly as long. The Bratva was responsible for the death of Pavel’s parents, uncles, and aunts, so Pavel had made it his mission to destroy as much of the organization as he could. His ultimate goal was to go Frank Castle on Yuri and his men.

  “As for Eija,” Randy continued, “she’s on suspension.”

  “From her domestic duties? Why? Nikolai isn’t even—”

  “She’s not a nanny.”

  Dom’s wrist throbbed. “Then what is she?”

  “Understand this wasn’t my call,” Randy said, easing into an explanation Dom could already tell he wouldn’t like. “David and Linda wanted to work Sokolov from multiple angles. The man used to be one of us, and he’s slippery as fuck. Eija is an insanely talented recruit.”

  David Smatters and Linda Vincent were their liaisons back at the agency and members of the select few who were privy to the entire Sokolov undercover operation. If their names had come up in the same sentence as Eija’s…

  “Who is she, Randy?”

  “She’s one of Linda’s,” he confessed. “At least, she used to be. Linda had Eija working light Bratva duty back in D.C., and Eija’s primary focus, at the time, was Bratva cells in the US. Somehow, she found out that Yuri had a son. And, if you think Pavel’s a Pitbull, Eija’s a fucking Rottweiler. So, a few years ago, Linda sent Eija to me at INTERPOL to…refocus her attention. Eija’s main purpose was to ID you. If she did before the dostavka, then we’d know we had to pull you out.”

  Dom stared at his uncle, speechless
for a moment.

  “Oh,” Randy squeezed the bridge of his nose, eyes shutting, “and she’s okay. Colin rushed her straight from the scene into surgery. He can be an ass, but he loves Eija. She wouldn’t have died that day with him there.”

  Colin, Dom realized, was the redhead in Grenada who Eija had slipped the note with her name written on it.

  Colin, he’d address later.

  “She’s my handler,” he half-said, half-asked. “You sent me a handler without telling either of us.”

  A lot of things could have been avoided had they both been clued in. Things Dom honestly wasn’t sure he’d prefer not to happen.

  “Eija’s a tracker,” Randy went on. “She’s good, Dominik. I’m telling you. She’s a chameleon.”

  “So, her specialty is adapting to environments.”

  Lying about who she was.

  But she hadn’t been lying with him. To do that, she would have had to know who he was…unless she’d assumed she was seducing the Bratva prince.

  Still, it wasn’t possible to fake the smiles she’d given him. The laughs and the way she looked when she came. The joy on her face during the treasure hunt. After the attack, she’d directed him to the “wrong” exit. That meant, until the very end, she’d tried to protect him. That couldn’t be faked.

  And he didn’t know what he’d do with himself if it could.

  “Dominik, your situation was a little different because you actually are Yuri’s son,” Randy said, leaning back against the bars. “If you’d come on your own to join the agency, Yuri would have tracked you the entire way. You wanted to take him down and, as a valuable asset, we started building your cover when you were nineteen. That made you both easy and difficult to identify, all contingent upon whether someone found out Yuri had knocked up an Iranian girl from California.”

  Dom was so stunned, he couldn’t figure out whether he had a right to be upset. Who’d lied to whom? He’d told Eija his name was Andrei and that he was Bratva. He’d never mentioned the CIA. Therefore, his two lies appeared to cancel out her one. That meant he had to find a way to apologize. He had to see her again, to do more than apologize. Their personas might have been fake, but his attraction to her was real. If he’d fallen in love with a snake…

  “Wait,” he snapped his fingers, “why is she suspended, though? For finding me?”

  Randy clicked his tongue. “Well, Eija violated protocol in a major way. April, the agent you saw with Favreau, wasn’t initially supposed to go to Moscow, but Colin and Eija pulled her on last minute.”

  “And?”

  “They brought her to secure the kid.”

  Dom's mouth filled with cotton. “What kid?”

  “Look, like I said, Eija’s one of the best we’ve seen in years. I respect her, really. But she’s more like one of the guys than a…Suzy Homemaker, if you will. The difference is, you and I can’t get pregnant.”

  “Randy, spare me the chauvinistic bullshit that nearly left my mother, your sister, homeless.”

  Randy held up his hands in defeat. “You’re right, you’re right. Anyway, she met some guy in Grenada. Andrei…something or the other. They hooked up and, I’m assuming, the condom broke. “

  “Andrei?”

  “April went as the first line of security for the kid, but she had an entire team on standby. The baby’s name is Shiloh Grace Barrett, code name Nana. I’ve met her a couple of times, when she was still a newborn. Cute, cute little girl. And, let me tell you, it was like they were hiding Sasha Obama in Afghanistan.”

  “Shiloh Grace…Barrett?”

  “Eija’s last name. The father, Andrei, he’s not in the picture.”

  That no longer appeared to be the case.

  “She asked me to take her off the Sokolov project. At least, going undercover. Truthfully, she’d been asking for months.”

  “And you said?”

  “We needed her, Dom.” Randy slapped a cell bar. “When I found out about the kid, I asked her to make sure the baby didn’t change our plans to get inside the penthouse.”

  “What?”

  “No one else could go under. No one. So, after Eija hounded me for weeks and weeks about letting April take her spot, I told her to find a caregiver for her daughter or…or she’d lose everything I could take from her. Pension, severance. Fuck, her self-esteem. I’m not proud of it, but this came all the way from the top. My hands were tied.”

  Dom made a fist to send a sharp flash of pain through his injured wrist. If nothing else, the pain was just enough to stop him from stepping forward and driving his uncle’s head through the bars.

  Eija, it appeared, also had multiple secrets, but that second one…

  He didn’t know how he was still on his feet. Now he knew why the resort had given him the brush off when he’d called to talk to “Eija.” He’d assumed she’d asked them to screen his calls after he’d skipped out, but “Eija” had never worked there.

  He felt like shit knowing he’d given up trying to find her. Had he tried harder, he would have known. He would have been there. Neither CIA officer nor Bratva Dominik were the type to skip out on a woman who…

  Shit.

  And he’d seen it—times where she’d seemed distracted. Where she’d go from smiling to depressed and back. Times where she’d looked at him as if seeing someone else.

  The morning of their flight to London, she’d been completely out of sorts. Had it been because she’d had to leave Shiloh in Russia while she spent the week in London with someone else’s kid? And then she’d gone to London with Shiloh’s father, who she couldn’t tell he had a baby without risking her daughter’s future.

  Shiloh Grace Barrett.

  At least for now.

  “Where is she now?” Dom asked, taking a seat.

  He needed to sit.

  “Here. We’re in Lyon, just outside INTERPOL headquarters.”

  “I need her address. And the clothes I had on. Specifically, my tuxedo jacket.”

  Randy laughed, but when he realized Dom was serious, his laughs turned into a series of coughs.

  “Dom, I can’t give you that information.”

  “You saw me with Eija in London at the Japanese restaurant. Didn’t we look…cozy?”

  Randy shrugged. “Yeah, but Eija’s pretty easy to get along with.”

  Dom shot him a look.

  “That’s not a sexual reference. She’s an amazing person, even when she’s disobeying a direct order. I really do care about her.”

  “Randy, get me her information. See it as recompense for threatening to put your family on the street, just like your parents did.” When Randy raised an eyebrow, he added, “I was in Grenada. If a man named Andrei, who Eija met in Grenada, is Shiloh’s father, then that’s my little girl. Shiloh’s your great-niece.”

  “Colin, get out.”

  Eija limped around her flat, picking toys up off the floor where she’d been playing with Shiloh before Colin arrived. Shiloh had just discovered she could crawl, and then hold on to things. Add an injured leg, and chasing her daughter around was more effective than physical therapy at getting her back to full strength.

  Colin bounced Shiloh on his knee on the living room sofa. “You haven’t talked to me since Moscow.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Talk to me now.”

  She whirled around. “And say what? What, Colin? What do you want me to say?”

  “That you compromised our op, fucked the enemy, and lied to me. I knew you’d take him to the wrong exit. I fucking knew it.”

  Eija rolled her eyes and continued to Shiloh’s toy box.

  “You threw everything away for a penis, E,” he pressed. “You really think Dominik Sokolov, of all people, cares about you? Because he carried you like a knight and gave you a little forehead kiss? He’s a piece of shit, like his father, and he only cares about himself.”

  No, she didn’t think Dom cared about her.

  She knew he loved her.

  Thos
e three words had fucked her over, repeating so much through her mind, she couldn’t look at her daughter without hearing them. They appeared in her dreams, kissed her cheek in the shower, and left indentations in the empty pillow next to her head.

  “Right now, E, I don’t know who you are. Maybe you should go back to pre-Andrei, Eija. Stock up on dick.”

  “Fuck you, Colin.” She set narrowed eyes on him, grateful her daughter would remember none of this conversation by the time she learned to talk. “I’ve played along with that whole ‘Eija is a cum bucket’ shit from you assholes for long enough. You and your dick ran through half of the level-one analyst floor, yet nobody’s given you a reputation. Hell, you made April, who’s way too damn good for you, fall for you, and then you cheated on her. You’re a piece of shit, your damn self. Tell me, Colin, how many people at work have I slept with?”

  His lips parted.

  “None,” she answered. “Outside of Dom, how many times have I had sex while actively on the job?”

  “Well—”

  “None.” Eija flipped up a finger with each name. “Tatiana, Raisa, Yuli, Carmen, Obi, Drea, Aimée…shall I go on?”

  “No. I get your point.”

  “My point is this. You say you love me, I’m your best friend, whatever. Yet, you talk about me like I mean nothing to you. Like I could never mean anything to anyone.”

  He lowered his gaze to Shiloh, who’d fallen asleep back against his chest. Shiloh looked so much like her father, she wondered how Colin hadn’t put the remaining piece of the mystery together. Hopefully, they’d allowed Dom to at least keep his clothes. As a condition of her suspension, Randy had prohibited her from stepping foot inside the building, so she didn’t know what was happening to him.

  “I’m sorry,” Colin finally said, meeting her eyes. “You’re right. I do love you, and I’ve been a huge fucking dick to you. I’m really, truly sorry. It’s just…Eija, why him?”

  Her lip twitched.

  A fifty-pound weight dropped onto her chest.

  It made little sense to keep hiding it. Everything else was out in the open.