Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance

by Annika Martin

  My head spins as I replay the horrified look of recognition on my father’s face. Dad was holding back. I can always tell. “Well, you weren’t exactly being civil,” I say. But Aleksio has a point.

  “You need me to spell it out? He sent Kiro away. He needs to tell us where he is. And he’s going to.”

  Kiro. The baby.

  Why would Dad send baby Kiro away? Did he send all the boys away?

  “If he sent you guys away, Aleksio, it was to save your life. To protect you from the Valcheks, coming to finish the job.”

  “Your dear old dad, protector of defenseless boys. Like sending baby Moses down the river to save his life. You’re really going with that?”

  “My dad went completely crazy on the Valcheks after what they did to you. He and Lazarus took out half that family. They mourned you. Avenged you. He loved you.” We all did.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He would’ve done anything for you.”

  “He would’ve done anything for what we had.”

  Heat rises to my face. “Excuse me?”

  “Your father got rid of the Valcheks, an enemy he’d always hated, while he took over the most powerful clan this side of New York. Worked out pretty well for him.”

  “What the hell, Aleksio? What are you implying here? He loved you. Your father was his mentor, his partner, his greatest friend. He owes him everything—he always says it.”

  “That’s ironic.” He looks at a text.

  “Wait—remember the old crone? The evil-eye crone, Miss Ipa? Everyone thought she had the evil eye and the sight and all that?”

  No answer. I know he remembers. She was a legend—the boogeyman and Elvis rolled into one, come down from the Pindus Mountains in her colorful head scarf. Evil Eye Miss Ipa’s words had more power than bosses of bosses.

  “Remember how she had that prophecy about you and your brothers? It was at that giant New Year’s party, and she kept pointing to you and saying that. You boys. Together you rule…you boys, you three boys. Maybe that’s why Dad wanted to get you out of there. You were a threat to all of the clans, not just the Valcheks.”

  I wait for him to look up, needing to see my old friend underneath this cold, dark man.

  “Don’t you see? If my dad sent you away, it was to protect you from the Valcheks and everyone else who worried it would come true! Because he knew people would believe her crazy shit. People always believed her crazy shit. Don’t you remember?”

  Aleksio gets another text.

  “Look at me!”

  He won’t.

  “You were like a brother to me…” With a thundering heart I picture the way he slid his finger into his mouth. The hot, dark things it put into my mind. Not like a brother.

  A stray brown curl falls over his forehead as he does more phone stuff.

  I swallow past the dryness in my mouth. “And now you’re trashing your own family house? It’s your house now that you’re back. You’re alive. You’re fabulously wealthy. People will want to know you’re back!”

  He snorts with bitter amusement. “You think I should’ve just walked in here? You think that would’ve worked out for me? Maybe with a fruit basket?”

  The ice in his heart chills me. Aleksio.

  We had a secret fort in the yard that last summer. We’d sit in it and draw while our moms drank and our dads ran their crime empire together. Back then we didn’t understand our wealth was built on a mountain of blood and violence—not consciously, anyway. But I think we felt the poison. Aleksio would draw robot cars. Such a stupid boy thing to draw. I would draw horses. Maybe we were both imagining escape.

  Our link feels just as fierce now. It’s no longer innocent, like something hot got charged up along the well-worn pathways of friendship. But it’s still a link.

  “You’re not going to kill me, Aleksio.”

  A muscle in his jaw fires.

  “I know who you really are. I know your beautiful heart.”

  “That’s not a theory you want to test.”

  “Maybe it’s not a theory you want to test.”

  He looks at me straight on. So cold. “People change, and sometimes they lose their fucking soul.”

  The honesty of his words hits me. Being around juvenile court means I’ve seen firsthand the way beautiful, innocent kids can be robbed of hope, their goodness erased. Made into monsters. Predators. But there’s always some sliver of humanity in them left. I have to believe that to do what I do.

  We were nine when I watched Aleksio’s little casket get lowered into the ground. Not too late to turn a kid dark.

  I can’t believe he’ll kill me—I refuse to believe it. But what about Dad? Whether he finds Kiro or not, he won’t have a choice—not after the way he treated him today. You don’t take shots at Aldo Nikolla and threaten his daughter in front of him unless you’re willing to go all the way.

  He eyes our mansion as he talks, like he hates the mansion itself. The muscle guys melt off to the sides, to the cars. He can’t possibly think Dad had any involvement in what the Valcheks did. And what’s up with Little Vik—Viktor? The Russian accent, the barbarian attitude.

  His eyes look even larger when he’s looking down. Large lids ending in a line of sooty lashes spearing sideways.

  “If Dad had anything to do with sending your brothers away, it was to save their lives. Don’t be dense, Aleksio—think about this. Everyone knows it was a Valchek hit.”

  He says nothing.

  I suck in a breath. “Leksio D, Leksio D, slowest runner you’ll ever see.” I don’t know why I say it. A stupid taunt from the cobwebs of my memory.

  He spears me with a white-hot shock. Anger, maybe—I don’t know. I can’t read him anymore. “You need to concentrate on not pissing me off, and you definitely need to stop reacting like I’m the boy you remember.” I shudder at the force of his words.

  A familiar roar sounds from behind me. I spin around.

  Viktor and some other scary guy pull up in Dad’s pearl-green Maserati convertible.

  From behind me, Aleksio says, “You especially need to be careful with Viktor. He wasn’t raised right.”

  Somebody comes up and puts a duffel into Aleksio’s hand.

  Aleksio takes my shoulder and pushes me toward the car.

  “Did you get my coffee mug?” I ask.

  Aleksio turns to the guy. The guy nods.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “You think I got it to be nice, Kitten?” He yanks open the back door and shoves me in, then crowds in next to me. “You should never let your enemies know what you care about.”

  I buckle my seatbelt. “You’re not my enemy.”

  His gaze shimmers with heat. He reaches out and sweeps a lock of hair from my forehead, tucking it behind my ear. His touch is electric. His voice is husky. “I’m the most dangerous enemy you’ll ever have because every time you look at me, you see somebody who’s not there anymore. Because every time you look at me, you fool yourself about what I really am.”

  My pulse races. My gaze strays up Aleksio’s corded neck to the jewel of a black freckle on his cheekbone. The boy I knew never felt dangerous like this.

  “What are you, then?”

  Aleksio says nothing as Viktor pulls out. He turns to watch our house as we head down the long stately drive. Technically his house, now that he’s back from the dead. There’s something strange about the way he keeps his eyes fixed there. Then he takes out his phone and pulls up some kind of app. “You ready?” he asks.

  “For what?” I ask.

  He nods at the house. “Watch.”

  I twist around. “What am I watching?”

  He pushes a button on his phone. There’s a loud pop from inside of the house, and then two more, and then a roar and a flash. Instinctively I duck as the place goes up in a flaming fireball—several of them. Heat blasts my face even as far away as we are. I touch my hair to make sure it’s not ablaze as flames rage through. Nearby treetops catch fire, too.

&nb
sp; “What have you done?” I whisper, horrified. Our beautiful mansion. Destroyed.

  “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  “Our home.”

  “Not anymore.” There’s a note of warning in the way he says it. Not anymore. Don’t push him.

  I’m too stunned to answer.

  He holds out his hand. “Purse.” I hand it over, and he goes through it. He throws out my phone and my mace, then hands the purse back to me.

  Life as I know it burns behind us.

  Aleksio puts on a pair of aviator shades, cutting himself off from me there in the windy back seat, dark freckle on his right cheekbone like a tiny dark jewel. He’s right next to me, but a million miles away, his curls like dusky flags, slapping in the wind and sun.

  I shouldn’t want him to look at me again. I shouldn’t want to see his eyes, to feel that intensity. He’s no longer that boy I knew, seeing impossible things in the clouds—I understand that, now.

  We head south on the highway, and I press him about my father. He’ll tell me only that he’s alive, and that they’re planning on keeping him that way.

  For now. He doesn’t have to add that part. We both know it’s there.

  Dad.

  Dad promised me that he’d gone legit over the past decade, but I’m not stupid. If he’s legit, it’s only as part of a symbiotic relationship with guys like Bloody Lazarus, who runs the bad stuff now. Less stress for Dad’s heart.

  Without thinking I turn to Aleksio with the impulse to tell him how worried I am about my father, like we’re two against the world the way we used to be. It’s so stupid—Aleksio is the whole problem here. He wants to scare my father—that’s the mindfuck game he is playing right now.

  The wind presses his dark suit to his chest, outlining his muscles, seeming almost to caress them. Now and then he texts.

  We’re heading for Chicago, right into the center of Dad’s operations. Right where Lazarus probably is.

  Just over the Illinois line we pull off at a gas station attached to a trucker store, a lone outpost at the center of endless weedy fields. I think about my chances of making a break for it. No way would Aleksio have muscle in this area, ready to step out of the weeds.

  Or would he? He’s twenty-eight now. He’s been off building his army—that’s what you do when you’re readying to go up against a man like my father.

  They all get out. I get out, too, just checking how far my leash extends. Viktor starts filling up the car. Aleksio gives the other guy money and writes a list of things he wants from the market inside.

  Tito, they call him. Tito wears a winter-type hat over his hair, which would be jet black if it weren’t bleached at the tips.

  I slip over to a square pillar that holds up the ceiling over the pumps.

  Aleksio comes around to where I am, sunglasses propped up on his head. They may as well be down for all that I can read his eyes. “Going somewhere?”

  I back up. Hit the pillar.

  “What is it, Kitten?” he asks.

  “I told you not to call me that.”

  He tilts his head. “I’ll call you what I want.”

  “I want an update on Dad,” I say.

  “I want to know what you’re thinking.”

  Anger flares in my chest. He can’t even give me an update on Dad? “You want to know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that you turned out to be a real fucking bastard, Aleksio. It’s sad.”

  There’s a hint of humor on his face as he searches my eyes.

  “Am I amusing you?”

  “I wouldn’t say you amuse me, Mira, no. Not at all.”

  I can’t help but feel like he’s looking right through me, reading my secrets like the pages of a magazine. I flatten myself against the cement pillar, wanting, needing to escape his gaze.

  “What, then?” I ask. “Do I sadden you, too?”

  “Oh, a little. I mean, that blog shit? Mira Mira? Are you fucking kidding me?”

  My face goes red.

  “You never cared about that shit,” Aleksio says.

  I plant a finger on his chest. “Step back.”

  He grabs my finger. “You’re not in charge.”

  “Ow.”

  He tightens his grip. He bends it.

  I get the feeling he’s testing himself, seeing how far he’ll go. I want to tell him to fuck off, and that he won’t do it, that this isn’t him. But he never responded well to being defined. So I just say, “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “I’ll scream for help.”

  “You could probably do that,” he says. “You could probably make a run for it here. I don’t know what kind of runner you are these days. Not fast enough to get away from me, but you could make trouble if you got the right person on your side, couldn’t you?”

  My pulse races as he lets go of my finger and matches his palm to mine, takes hold of my hand before I can pull it away.

  “Are you thinking about it, Mira?”

  Yes.

  “You could even get the cops involved and tell them the story. They hold you while they call around. The feds get involved at that point.”

  There’s a shadow of a smile in his eyes as he examines our clasped hands. Our hands together like that are a perversion of what we are. What we were. It shouldn’t feel exciting.

  “But you can’t really be sure which people are mine, can you?” he says. “And you gotta think, how concerned are the authorities going to be about some bastard tearing down enemy number one’s networks? A lot of them would be team bastard. Because I did what they’ve been wanting to do for years. So you need to be smart.”

  He lets go.

  My heart sinks. Of course he’s right. The cops who aren’t on Dad’s payroll would probably be amused. They’d help—in the way that cops “help” when they’d rather not help.

  I have to get away. Save myself.

  A man and a woman come out of the gas station with giant sodas. They smile, and Aleksio breaks out a beautiful smile that’s like the sun. He’s breathtaking.

  It shakes me to see him wield such allure, such wild sexuality, but I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me. People were always galvanized by him, even back when he was nine. He was never the star runner or the star ball player or anything, but the kids always wanted to be on his team.

  These two coming out of the gas station don’t even see me. They would never notice I’m here against my will; all they see is an impossibly beautiful man in a suit at a gas station in the middle of nowhere.

  “They look like a nice couple,” he says softly, pressing the back of my hand to the rough concrete pillar. “How much would it suck if things got hot? If all of these nice people die because you got stupid?”

  He draws nearer.

  I hate how intensely aware of him I am. How I feel him all around me—on my skin. I tell myself it’s the danger. The mindfuck of him coming back from the grave so dark and twisted.

  He’s acting like a fucking predator—of course I’d be aware of him. The prey is always wildly aware of the predator.

  Another car pulls up. A capable-looking man wearing a T-shirt with what looks like a firefighter insignia on the pocket gets out. Firefighter. That’s close to a cop. Sort of.

  I gasp as Aleksio cups my right cheek, staring into my eyes.

  “You’re not playing fair,” I say.

  “Really? That’s your complaint here? I’m not playing fair?”

  “One of them.” His hand on my cheek feels electric.

  He studies my eyes. He thinks I’m fucking with him. “And you don’t want to try anything. Not with this guy, either. He’d get involved, and it wouldn’t go well for anyone.”

  I regard my old friend with a steady gaze. Like I don’t care. Like I’m not scared. “Seriously, Aleksio, you can’t just kidnap the most powerful man in Chicago.”

  He smiles. Kidnapping the most powerful crime boss in Chicago is exactly what he’s done, of course. His smile creates a sparkly sensati
on that goes clear to my core. It’s fucked up. I push him, and he steps back, smiling like we’re just playing.

  There’s a clunk over by the car. Gas gun settling back in its place. The clang of the little door to the gas tank.

  “Aleksio.” Viktor.

  The other guy, Tito, arrives with a white plastic bag.

  Aleksio takes my hand and leads me to the car like a lover, opening the door for me, so chivalrous. Unless you feel how tightly he grips. “Ladies first.”

  I get in.

  We take off, and Aleksio grabs the bag. He passes around waters and candy. He gives me a bottle, a small baggie of English toffee, and panties.

  I hold the stuff, stunned.

  “Sorry, Kitten. Made in China was the best designer label they had.”

  He thinks I’m surprised by the panties, but it’s the chocolate-covered toffee that gets me. English toffee is my favorite. Always has been. It’s a treat I never let myself have these days, because if I start eating it, I’ll never stop.

  Did he remember?

  He turns to stare out at the cornfields. “Go ahead.”

  “Thanks,” I say, too baffled even to bristle at the designer tag insult. I put down the candy and the water. The panties are the cheap synthetic three-for-the-price-of-one kind attached by a plastic thingy that goes through a cardboard square. I yank them apart and put one of the pairs on, shimmying them up under my skirt. When I look over I catch him watching. With a bored expression, he tears into his Snickers bar.

  I pick at the string on the toffee. It’s the kind of candy you’d find in the sad little “fancy” section of a rural gas station. “Why’d you pick this?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “You had him buy me English toffee.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  Right. As if he remembered. I break off a corner, chew it indifferently. I need to get my mind around the fact that I’m in actual danger. I need to be smart. To get the hell away.

  I ask a few times where we’re going, what we’re doing, but Aleksio only talks when he feels like it. He’s back to surly silence.

  People change, and sometimes they lose their fucking soul, he said. Maybe that’s the best he can do, warn me who he is now.

  They put up the top of the convertible, and we drive around Chicago a while, staying out of areas my father controls—or controlled. I’m not really sure about the status of the family. But if Lazarus has found out what happened, there’s going to be trouble.