It’s Saturday afternoon. No rush hour. Aleksio’s making phone calls. Marshaling troops.
We eventually pull up in a garbage-strewn alley on the poor end of a business district where a lot of charities operate. The buildings on either side are nondescript office buildings, not old enough to be cool but not new enough to be nice. One of the white vans from the house pulls in behind us. A few guys with assault weapons come around, some of them Russian, some Albanian-American.
I’m alone in the car for a second, and then Aleksio’s back with handcuffs. He cuffs me to the door.
“We’ll be a few minutes.” He pauses, then continues, “You still have a chance to get out of this alive. Don’t blow it by hitting the horn or something.”
The pack of them are at a shadowy side door. I hear an alarm beep, and then suddenly they’re all in and the alarm is off. Tito remains outside, guarding.
I lean all the way over, trying to check where I am, see whether anybody is around to signal. I catch sight of a small metal plate over the door. Worland.
That’s the place my father told them about. Worland Agency, he said.
Moving fast—they didn’t even case the place. This tells me they think Kiro’s in danger. Obviously. Why else take a risk like they did today?
And what if they can’t find him? Worse—what if he turns up dead?
CHAPTER FIVE
Aleksio
The adoption agency smells like new carpet and Lysol. There are two rows of cubicles surrounded by meeting rooms and a shitload of file drawers and computers.
The guys are flinging open drawers and pulling the lids off file boxes, packing up everything that could lead to Kiro.
Kiro is vulnerable as hell right now. He could be a guy working in a suburban carwash or college kid sitting in Accounting 101. No idea what’s coming at him. And if anybody figures out what we’re up to, there are some heavy hitters coming for him.
It’s a miracle Aldo Nikolla and Lazarus didn’t kill him or Viktor that bloody night, considering the prophecy. My guess is that Nikolla didn’t have the balls to kill two tiny kids. He thought he could lose them. Thought they’d stay lost.
And we thought we had time.
Tito and the rest of my tight little crew knew I’d found Viktor, and that was containable, but we recently found out the whole of the Russian mafia has been talking about it. The baby sent away, presumed dead. The brother from America comes to get him. The sleeping king. Heirs to a crime empire in America.
Fucking gangster grapevine.
The guys are taking every file and every shred of paper related to the year our family ended. A few of them are downloading the computer files. We’ll take the laptops, too. I help stack the boxes at the door. I get updates from the guys watching across the street. So far, so good.
Worland is a charity that has a pregnancy counseling and adoption arm—I vetted it on the way over. It’s the kind of place people bring babies they don’t want, no questions asked—that’s one of the things on their home page. And apparently it’s also the kind of place a guy sends a baby he wants lost.
It really is possible Aldo Nikolla doesn’t know anything beyond the agency name. The agency could’ve set those terms to protect itself.
The files are building up. I have some guys check the basement, and I get others started on bringing the shit out to the van. It’s amazing to think the key to finding our baby brother could be hidden in all this paper.
Kiro.
My mom let me hold him when she brought him home from the hospital, so tiny and squirmy. Just so tiny. And he looked up at me with those big brown eyes, and instantly I loved him.
Viktor wanted to hold Kiro, too, but Mom said he was too little, but more like too reckless. Viktor was a one-boy wrecking crew. So he laid a careful hand on Kiro’s little belly.
Kiro needs you to be a good big brother to him, my mom said to me. Kiro needs his brother to protect him.
My heart nearly pounded out of my chest—that’s how proud I felt when that she said it. I promised that I would.
I hold that promise like a blaze in my heart. The slaughter happened soon after. Did Mom know there was trouble coming?
It hurts to remember her, but somewhere maybe she can see I’m fighting for Kiro. She needs to see I won’t let him down.
Little Kiro.
He could be in the army for all we know, though I doubt it. Marching in formation is not in the Dragusha DNA.
Viktor had no idea of his roots, and he grew up from nothing to become a key assassin in the Bratva—the Russian mafiya—in Moscow. Meanwhile I ran my own gang just under the Nikolla radar, developing my clan. It was like Viktor and I were living parallel criminal lives on either side of the world without knowing it.
Viktor comes up, and I clap him on the shoulder. Kiro. Alive. Maybe.
“A lot of paper to go through,” he says.
I grumble. It’s a lot, but we’ll go through it all the same, because they may not have computerized the older files. A low-rent place like this. Half-illegal.
“Good thing we have guys.”
Viktor checks a text. “Old man’s still out cold.” His Bratva guys are holding Aldo Nikolla in the basement of a chop shop.
He shakes his head. He doesn’t like it. We were hoping for an address, and this is so roundabout. And Mira’s father is not a man you can hold on to long. It’s like kidnapping the president of the United States—even if you manage to pull it off, you know you’re not keeping him long. He’s too big, and there’s too much heat.
“All this paper,” he says. “I say we send Aldo a finger.”
My gut twists. Sending Mira’s body parts was a plan we’d made while drunk and full of rage—and fearful for Kiro. She’s not a fucking soldier. She’s not in this. And the way she looked at me when she remembered…
“Let’s see what we get. No need to spill all our jelly beans in the hallway.”
“Brat,” he says. I never get sick of Viktor calling me that—it’s the Russian word for “brother.” “You guessed her candy.”
“Nah. I already knew. That’s the kind I used to steal for her when we skipped out of church choir. As a bribe to skip church choir.”
“The fashion princess used to skip church choir?” He snorts.
“She was quite the rebel.”
“From rebel to consumer running dog,” he spits.
I narrow my eyes, not so sure I like that last part.
“It is even worse that you remembered her candy,” Viktor says. “I think it will not be so easy to cut off her finger.”
“Have I ever not done what it takes?” I ask him. “I’ll cut off my own fucking fingers if it saves Kiro’s life.”
He grunts and grabs a box. He’s right, though. It was a lot easier to talk about sending her body parts to her dad in theory.
A text comes in. Suspicious car circling the block twice. Not good.
Viktor doesn’t have to see it to know there’s trouble—he can tell from my face. One year together and it’s like we were never separated. He’s hustling everyone out with the last of the boxes.
Back outside in the alley, I uncuff Mira, pull her out of the Maserati, and shove her into the back of the van with the files and boxes of laptops. Then I grab Tito. “You watch her. No one touches her.”
We continue loading up. When it’s done, Viktor swings in the front of the van, and I take the wheel. I don’t like putting somebody else in charge of Mira like this, but if things get hot, Viktor and I need to run the show. Our fucked-up talents as criminals know no bounds.
Viktor’s lieutenant, Mischa, pulls out in front of us in the flashy sports car. If there’s someone out there, Mischa’ll draw that person away while we get the van full of files out of sight.
By now, Bloody Lazarus and the rest of Nikolla’s crew will know there’s been an attack, but they won’t know who we are or why we came. People will be focusing on the house, combing it for Aldo Nikolla’s remains, trying to fig
ure things out, buying us time.
Only Mira and her dad know what’s going on, and they won’t be talking.
But no plan is foolproof.
“Got something to say?” I ask as I pull out.
“No, brat.”
Yeah, right.
We drive in silence.
In books, the feeling of being followed is always a tingle down the spine or your hair standing up on the back of the neck. But for me, it’s more of a buzzing in the awareness. So faint you don’t notice unless you tune into it.
Getting out of there, that’s how I feel—awareness buzzing, even though I turn one way and then another and I can see, technically, that nobody is following us, but there’s that buzzing, and I have the sense of eyes on the streets. Could they be after us already? Guessing our purpose? Nikolla didn’t get to where he was by surrounding himself with stupid people.
Viktor scowls, but he doesn’t question my maneuvers. He just scowls. He’s always ready for something to be worse than expected. He was pulled from the orphanage at an early age and raised the way really sick assholes raise kids. I don’t know whether he even feels his kills anymore.
When I’m confident we’re not being followed, I pull the van into a wasteland area at the edge of the tracks and park in the shadow of some junky abandoned strip mall. A daycare and a bakery used to be here, long closed, but the payday loan shop down the block is still going full blast. We’ve used this area before. The sightlines and escape routes are killer. Another of our vehicles pulls up.
I hop out and send a few guys to the nearby corners, and then I go around and open up the back.
Tito jumps out. Mira stays huddled in a far corner, glaring, squinting, long dark hair pushed all around to one side, so that it hangs off one shoulder like an onyx waterfall, glinting in the streetlight.
“Everything go okay?” I ask Tito.
“Yep.”
I climb into the back and pull out a few files, feeling her eyes on me.
She feels too familiar, like gears clicking into place.
She still looks at me like I’m that kid she knew—I see it in her eyes. Fucking Rangermaster. She even remembered Rangermaster. And yeah, it was stupid to give her the English toffee because God, the way she looked at me.
When she looks at me like that, I want to shake her, because that’s a road to a whole lot of fucking pain for her.
I don’t need her looking at me like that. Saving Kiro might mean hurting Mira. Bad.
Tito and few other guys and me are in the back with her. I’ve put myself across from her, far away as possible and separated by boxes of files and stacks of papers, like a signal to myself that she’s not mine.
She glares. The glare is good. It’s right. Hell, she had the right idea with the spitting, reckless as it was.
A black SUV rolls up with two of my book-smartest guys. They back up and open the tailgate, and between the back of the van and the back of the SUV, we’ve got a bit of a work area between the six of us guys.
The problem becomes evident pretty fast—all the names of the kids are blacked out. The names of the families, too. File after file has blacked-out information. There are codes and numbers at the top of a lot of them that don’t mean much. We trade files, comparing.
“This is bullshit,” Viktor says. “If the old man thought we were serious, we’d have a fucking address. He’s playing for time.”
“Can you uncuff me, please?” she says. “The edges are biting into my wrists—”
“You’re lucky they’re cuffed in front of you,” I growl.
“I could help.”
“No.”
I don’t look at her, don’t meet her eyes. I wish I still had the mirrored sunglasses on. My nowhere-to-run, nowhere-to-hide bit at the gas station definitely backfired. I don’t know what I was thinking, pressing her against that pillar, watching the fear in her eyes like there might be a little bit of lust in there. It was fucked up that I let myself think that.
Mira is everything I can never have. I’m here for one purpose only—Kiro.
And then I put on that boyfriend act for the civilians, pressing my hand to her cheek like that. I thought I’d combust—literally. The moment I touched her, all the people around there could’ve decided to rush at me all at once and I would’ve been no good for stopping them, being that my world had shrunken to the silky space between the curve of her cheekbone and the drumbeat of her pulse in her neck.
I imagined pressing my face there and feeling that drumbeat with my lips, like it was the most erotic fucking thing. She would’ve let me, too. Not out of desire, but because she didn’t want to embroil innocent bystanders in a firefight. Because unlike me, she’s apparently still a decent person.
I remember Konstantin and me doing a lot of reading in the run-down hideouts we’d move between. Usually he’d only want me to read shit like The Art of War, being that I was to grow up to be a capable killer and all, but sometimes I’d get my hands on regular stories.
I remember reading this one crusty old one—The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. This guy stayed forever young while the painting of him aged.
I would feel like that, looking at the photos that had Mira in them. Like she stayed safe and happy in that mansion or in the Chicago penthouse, while I got hammered into something dark and deadly. Two sides of a coin.
Nothing’s on any of the computer files, like we feared.
We go through more paper files. The dead ends have me feeling angry and fucked-up. “What the fuck good are files if everything’s blacked out? There have to be the names and addresses somewhere, or why keep files?”
Finally we find some actual names and addresses, but they don’t help. They all seem to have a number, more codes. Hundreds of codes, maybe thousands.
We decide we have to start matching things up, and then I catch sight of Mira, following our progress with interest. Like she understands something we don’t. She knows. She’s listening. Tracking.
“You got some insight here? Something for the class?”
“You want to let my father and me go free?” she asks.
I grab the next sheet. I tell myself it’s stupid to think that a mafia princess who’s spent the past few years on international shopping trips could help.
Kiro is out there, and as soon as somebody figures out we’re going for him, he’s fucked.
“Illegal adoption agency,” Tito says. “Maybe they didn’t keep real records.”
“No, there have to be records,” I bite out. “The answer is in here.”
We go through each file, one reading off numbers, and the other guys hunting. It’s like matching serial numbers on dollar bills or something.
We send a guy for pizza.
I can’t shake the idea that she could help, that she’s not as stupid as she acts in that blog. When the pizza comes, I join Mira on the far end and offer her a slice.
She takes it with both her hands, cuffed together as they are, and thanks me.
“If you can help, you should,” I say.
“And I should help you why?”
“Because if this doesn’t work, we go to plan B.”
She doesn’t react. She had to know something would come. She chews, staring thoughtfully out the window. Does she have an idea of what plan B is? I follow the direction of her gaze.
“What are you looking at?” I ask.
“The cartoons of laughing baby animals. Side of that building.”
I spot the shitty mural on the side of the old daycare. Smiling cartoon animals half-peeled off in the distance beyond a wasteland of rubble and trash.
“Ugh.”
“I like it. It’s sweet. Something nice in all this decrepitude.”
My face goes hot. Mira Nikolla with her dresses and parties on the boat and sunny smiles. “That’s because you never look at them,” I say. “If you stare at them too long, happy baby animal cartoons start to look maniacal. Don’t you see it? You look at them too long, and all
you see is death.”
I can feel her eyes on me. “That’s nice,” she says. “You ruin cartoon baby animals for me? Thanks. Is there anything else you’d like to ruin?”
I’m glad she’s annoyed, because I said too much, and I would hate if she gave me sympathy on top of everything else. I take her cuffed hands and turn them over, ignoring the zing of electricity between us. I inspect her fingers and spot a jagged scar on the pinky. “This is a very distinctive scar,” I say. “We’ll start with this one. Or maybe the one with the ring.”
She goes white and tries to take her hand back, but I don’t let her. “What?”
“Send it to your father.”
“You can’t.” She tries to pull her hand away.
“This is a very recognizable ring. You think he’d recognize it?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“If we find Kiro, we won’t have to.”
She looks over at the files. “If I help you find Kiro, will you let my father and me go?”
“If your help gets us Kiro,” I say, “we’ll let you go.”
“What about my father?”
“Let’s put it this way—a lot of people are going to start hunting Kiro. And if somebody gets to Kiro first and manages to kill him? And your father was holding out? If you love him, you don’t want to know what we’ll do to him then.”
“Unlock me.”
I unlock her cuffs, trying to handle her as an enemy, but the feel of her skin sends a white-hot flash of desire through me.
She rubs her wrists and motions for a box. I slide it over. She pulls out a folder and opens it, studying the papers inside. She pulls one out. “These parts that are blacked out? That’s done as part of a process known as de-identification. These files are de-identified. Anonymized.” She stuffs it back in and riffles though.
How the hell does the spoiled mafia princess know this?
She examines a paper. “I don’t know what Illinois law was twenty years ago, but there would’ve been protocols in place to make it hard for people like you to trace these kinds of things. And that’s how they did it. They still do stuff like this today, but with computers. They make it so you could never identify families and children from just the files. There’s a probably a key to the code offsite, or maybe on a computer. Some trustworthy person holds it. You need both pieces—the key to the code and the file—if you’re going to read it.”
Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance Page 5