Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance

by Annika Martin

  “Like a fucking armored car?” Tito asks. “Like that? Where you need the two keys?”

  “Exactly,” she says.

  “Who would have the key to the code?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. Somebody who worked there at the time. Somebody who needed to access the files. Probably not the lowliest person, but probably not the highest, either.”

  “We don’t have time to find people who worked there two decades ago,” I say.

  “Hmm.” She twists her lips, and in a flash I’m back with her in the shade of the fort, watching her draw her horses, lips twisting this way and that. Concentrating.

  “I have a man,” Viktor says. “His father was a KGB code breaker. He could get his father to look at this.”

  I turn immediately to Mira, to see what she’ll say. Her lips quirk. “A KGB code breaker, you say.” She tips her head. “Well…if that’s all you got…”

  Viktor scowls. “They are masters at code breaking, the KGB—”

  “She’s kidding,” I say. “Let’s do it. Quick.”

  She smiles at me, and I come to my senses and look away. Our connection is too alive suddenly, and it fucking burns. It burns worse than Konstantin’s cigarette.

  We send a group to make copies of the files and get a set of them to the guy, keeping the other set for us. I send another guy to book a suite of rooms at one of the waterfront hotels. It’s not safe for her to know where any of us live, and we need to stay mobile and central to snatch up Kiro.

  It’s night by the time we reach the hotel, one of many in a row of glittering lakefront establishments. “I’ve missed Chicago,” she says.

  “What, Paris and Milan don’t measure up?”

  “Well, they’re not home.”

  Mira walks through the hotel lobby with me, behaving perfectly, thanks to the gun in my suit jacket pocket. She’ll make a break for it soon, but not in a way that will endanger the public. She’s a woman with a code, too. She always was. I tell myself it’s easy to have a code when it doesn’t cost you anything. When your code doesn’t push you places you don’t want to go.

  The first time Konstantin made me kill a guy, I was twelve and shaking like a motherfucker, and I didn’t get him square between the eyes with the first shot like I should’ve; I got him in the shoulder and then the gut, and he was on the ground fucking begging for his life, pleading. He was a killer who deserved to die ten times over, but you don’t know what it’s like to have a man plead, arms stretched out like you’re either God or the devil.

  I raised the Glock, dropped out from inside myself—like I wasn’t even home—and blew his head off.

  Just do it. That’s how you do the hard things—you just do them.

  The six of us set up in the central suite, which is a kind of generic living room with a great view of Lake Michigan, now appearing as a dark expanse dotted by lights, the moon a crescent with a corresponding streak in the waves.

  Stupidly picturesque. Like somebody else’s view.

  We split up names and start going through Facebook pages, looking at photos. Like we’ll get lucky and recognize Kiro. It’s stupid, worse than a needle in a haystack, but this is what desperate people do.

  Mira wants to help, but there’s no way I’m giving her an internet connection. So she sits across the room in an overstuffed chair looking out at the view. Is she looking for a way out? I’d be. If she got a weapon off of one of us now, would she use it? Mira was anti-gun as a kid. But people who are threatened will do a lot of surprising things.

  We send guys out to run down leads. It’s not looking good. Mira thinks we should try to get the Worland employment records from the year Kiro was adopted out. “We can get the key to the code that way—I’m sure of it.”

  Yeah, it’s the way we’d go if we had all the time in the world. But we don’t.

  It’s just her and Viktor and me when the call comes in. Viktor’s man can’t crack the thing—something about the code being one-to-one.

  My heart sinks.

  This means we have to go at Aldo Nikolla with everything. Because Kiro is in some serious danger, and that asshole knows where he is. Even Mira has to know he was holding back.

  I look over at her, and she goes pale. Yeah, she knows. Because this is a woman who listens and observes, something the surveillance photos never showed. Something those plastic smiles never revealed.

  I click off the call.

  She stands. “Dad wouldn’t gamble me like that. Play chicken like that.” It’s more a wish than something she actually believes. I hear it in her voice.

  “Kitchen stores won’t be open this time of night, but restaurants are.” Viktor’s talking about getting a knife. A cleaver, probably. He grabs his jacket. Unlocks the door.

  She flies for it, but I’m ready. I catch her, fit my hand over her mouth, and pull her onto the couch, keeping her head against my chest, mouth sealed nice and tight. I pull out my piece and put it to her temple. She needs to see I’m serious. “Are you going to scream?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Go,” I say to Viktor.

  Viktor leaves. I let up off Mira’s mouth, but I keep her there.

  “Please,” she whispers, looking up at me with those large brown eyes. “You’re not a bad person.”

  She’s wrong, but it feels good in a way that’s painful, her believing that. Like a good feeling I don’t get to have.

  “You’re a decent person.”

  “No, baby. Not anymore.”

  “He told you all he knows.”

  “I doubt it,” I say. “If he has more, this’ll jar his memory.”

  “Jar his memory? Sending him his daughter’s bloody finger? All you’ll do is kill him.”

  It’s a risk we have to take. Once Lazarus hears that the Worland Agency got hit, he could put it all together about us going for Kiro. He could be closing in on Kiro this very minute.

  “Please—he can’t handle it. His heart is really bad. Please. Let’s just try my way. To find the person with the key. Dad can’t handle it if he thinks I’m being hurt. If he gets my finger…he can’t handle it.”

  Right about here I realize she’s more concerned about her dad seeing her severed finger than about actually having it chopped off her hand. I can’t believe she’s protecting that scumbag. It blows me the fuck away. He doesn’t deserve her.

  “You’re thinking about it,” she says hopefully.

  “That’s not what I’m thinking about.” I stand and set my piece aside. The handkerchief I tied over my burn has long since come loose. I pull it out of my sleeve, stuff it in my pocket, and take off my suit jacket, setting it carefully over the back of the couch.

  She watches me wildly.

  “You want some booze?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “It’ll go easier if you’re drunk.” I roll up my sleeves.

  “Oh my God. You don’t want to get your nice coat bloody,” she says. “Is that why you took it off?”

  I don’t answer. The truth is that I can’t imagine cutting off her finger.

  But that can’t matter. I’ve done a lot of bad things I couldn’t have imagined doing beforehand. Like that first kill and all the fucked-up things after. You put one foot in front of another, and you don’t stop until it’s done.

  But this feels different.

  “Oh my God,” she says. And then she wraps her arms around herself and begins to sob, there alone on the couch.

  It fucks me up, so I sit by her and pull her into my arms and let her shake and sob. It’s the worst thing I can do. I wish she was drunk. I wish I was drunk. I force myself to think of Kiro out there, unprotected. Innocent. I promised my mother I’d protect him.

  It’s Mira’s finger versus Kiro’s death.

  “You’ll be fine,” I say softly, holding her tightly. Comforting her for what a monster I have to be to her.

  Mira’s his weakness only if he thinks we’re serious. If he thought we were serious, we’d have an addr
ess right now—that’s what I’m thinking. Threats weren’t enough. We need to panic him, make him understand. I try to think of any other way to do that.

  “Will you take a picture of it?”

  “What?”

  “Take a picture of it. So I can remember it? I don’t have a picture of it.”

  “Of your pinky?”

  She holds up her hand and looks at the back, then the front. “I like how it…” I feel her chest convulse with unshed tears.

  Bends, I think, finishing the sentence for her. It bends a little bit inward at the knuckle.

  Fuck.

  “Fine.” I say it like I’m annoyed. I drag her up and over to the window. Beyond her is the moonlit Lake Michigan in all its fake postcard glory. “Which side?”

  She looks at her hand front and back. “Back.”

  “That’s the side I’d pick, too,” I say.

  “What happened to you, Aleksio?”

  Your father slit my mom and dad’s throats and sent my brothers to the ends of the earth. But I don’t say it. We’re hurting her enough.

  “Tell me—”

  “I turned into a real fucking bastard, I guess,” I say. “A bastard who’ll take this nice picture for you. Press your hand here.”

  She presses it to the window. Her hair has come loose, dark curls around her face, a face I would hate like the devil if Konstantin had his way. I snap a picture with my phone.

  When I show her the photo, she starts crying again.

  “Come on.” I wrap my arms around her. She’s trembling, turning into a total basket case. Finally I just pick her up and carry her to the couch. I sit down with her still on my lap.

  Suddenly she stops crying, seems to stiffen. “Did someone torture you?”

  “What?” I ask, startled.

  She touches my arm, the spot just to the side of the mottled pink burn scar. She turns up to me, eyes shining with tears. Even after a cry she’s beautiful. Really beautiful. “This is a cigarette burn.”

  God, I remember this about her—the one way to stop her from crying was always to show her that someone hurt worse. To give her something to care about outside of herself. But I can’t. It can’t be me. “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing,” she says. “It’s a cigarette burn. A really bad one. Somebody would’ve had to hold it very deliberately to your skin for a very long time.”

  “You want a gold star?”

  “Somebody hurt you.”

  “Somebody saved me.”

  “Whoever did this to you, Aleksio, that person didn’t save you. This is not what a savior does.”

  I push down my sleeve. I’d rather eat glass than be exhibit A for Mira’s sympathy. Even if it’s what she needs to calm down. “You say that because you don’t know.” I adjust her on my lap, let her sit more naturally. I put my gun and my phone aside, just out of her reach. “It was an accident,” I say.

  “Doesn’t look like an accident.”

  “He didn’t know. He was helping me hide. He was playing a part, and I had to stay invisible. Not move.” For a moment I’m back there letting my arm burn. Trying to be a soldier for mighty Konstantin, the only person I had left in the world. I’m glad she can’t see my face.

  “How old were you?”

  I don’t tell people stories from then—not ever. This isn’t even one of the dark stories, the lose-your-faith-in-humanity stories. But if it gets her mind calmed, things will go easier with the finger. I take a strand of hair between two fingers, remembering huddling there next to Konstantin, eyes and lips squeezed tight. “Nine.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Shit happens.”

  “Shit happens? That’s your astute commentary? Shit happens?”

  “You remember Konstantin? The old bodyguard?”

  “They said he helped the Valcheks.”

  Valcheks were just the scapegoats, but I don’t argue with her on that. She’s upset enough. “Konstantin saved my life. He got me out of there before they found me. They hunted the two of us everywhere. I mean, we could not stop running. We had no money—we ran with clothes on our backs. I was actually in PJs.”

  “God—”

  “Better than being in Spiderman underwear, right?” I pull her tight to me and put my chin on her head. I shouldn’t be doing this tenderness shit. Maybe just for a moment, I think. Just a moment of rest. Of something nice.

  I tell her the story. It’s like an out-of-body experience, watching myself tell her. Suddenly I don’t want to stop. The way she listens is a kind of nourishment.

  In those dark days I would sometimes think about her and me stretched out on the lawn under the badminton net, splitting apart blades of grass—it was a kind of happy place, I suppose. The boy I was back then needed the sympathy she’s giving me now. But here in this hotel room, her sympathy is hell on the man I have to be.

  I have to be that man. That monster. I owe it to my baby brother. To my dead parents.

  “You did it. You survived.”

  “Survival isn’t amazing, Mira. People are animals in the end, and you do what you have to do to stay alive. It’s built in. Like breathing. You want to believe the best, but it’s a fucking lie.”

  She pushes my sleeve back up and rests her fingers on the burn spot, as if to heal it with her fucking sympathy.

  I close my eyes as she moves her thumb, back and forth over nearby healthy skin—absentmindedly, maybe, but it’s a caress all the same, and it gets me a little hot because nobody ever touches me like that.

  She’s warm and soft in my arms, and suddenly there’s a kind of wrong energy spinning between us—utterly sexual. Her breathing is even a little ragged. Maybe it’s fear or maybe arousal. Maybe both.

  My mind crowds with images of her under me. Skin flushed. Hair spread around her head like a dark halo. Pale breasts. That Mira gleam in her eyes. Mira was always up for a dare, to go someplace we shouldn’t.

  Mira always liked things extreme—it’s why we always got along. In a flash of intuition, I know that’s how she’d like to fuck. I’d hold her down and do it hard and dirty and connect with that place deep down inside her where she knows her sunny, plastic smiles are a lie.

  Stop it.

  I shut my eyes and drag in the scent of her hair like a drug. It’s all I get. I’ve threatened to cut off her fucking finger, for Christ’s sake. I can’t fuck her too, as much as I’m desperate to.

  “He must’ve felt awful when he found out.”

  “What?”

  “When Konstantin learned what he did.”

  “Oh. He didn’t know.”

  “Afterwards, I mean.”

  “And why the fuck would I tell him?”

  “You didn’t tell him about the burn?” She pulls away. “What? Like, not at all?”

  “He would’ve just felt like shit.”

  “So you didn’t tell him? It would’ve been an unGodly amount of pain.”

  “It wasn’t like my leg got blown off. It was war, Mira, you don’t stop for something you can handle with a Band-Aid. I grew up different than you. You need to understand that. I’m different. I went somewhere you don’t come back from.”

  She settles back against me, nestling into my chest and starts sliding that thumb back and forth again along the good part of my arm. It’s connecting right to my cock.

  Her voice is husky. “There’s no such place. Where a person can’t come back from.”

  My heart pounds, and the way I’m holding onto her isn’t right. Like the twisted fucker I am, I pull her closer, up against my body for maximum control. It’s a hold for a hostage. With just a shift or two, it’s a hold for a lover.

  I look at the spot on her hair where I want to press my face, overcome by the intensity between us, listening to her ragged breathing, feeling her gentle touch. If I were in the habit of lying to myself, I’d say she’s touching me because she wants to, like it’s not a self-soothing thing—or self-serving.

  During those early days w
hen we were on the run with nothing to eat, Konstantin would take me past restaurants and tell me to breathe in the smells. He lied to me and said that smells were just as nourishing as food if you really sucked them in. He actually had me believing it for a while.

  We’d stand behind some of the nicest restaurants in the towns where we hid, me like an idiot full of longing, eyes shut, breathing in what I so desperately needed.

  It’s what I do now. I suck in the scent of her and try to make that enough. I suck in the scent of her when all I really want is to bury myself in her. Lose myself in her.

  Instead I’ll take her finger. I owe it to Kiro.

  “You love the one who protected you,” she says. “You wanted to protect him back.”

  “I would’ve died for Konstantin,” I say, breathing in her scent again.

  She pulls away and looks at my eyes. “It’s what we do with the people we love.” She’s looking at me like she really wants me to get what she’s saying. “He can’t handle seeing my finger, Aleksio. You have to find another way.”

  I stiffen, heart thundering.

  “It’ll kill him,” she says.

  “Are you seriously comparing me and Konstantin to you and your dad? Seriously? Your fucking father?”

  She rises off my lap, alarmed. Her knees hit the coffee table. “Whoa!”

  I grab her arms to keep her from going over backwards, but I don’t let go.

  I hold her in limbo between falling backward and falling into me, a little off balance. My cock is raging. My cock likes this.

  That’s when it comes to me that there’s a way I don’t take her finger. It’s twisted. It’s not the other way she would’ve had in mind.

  But it’s another way all the same.

  I tighten my hold on her wrists.

  “What?” she gasps. She senses something.

  Slowly I guide her down. Not into my lap this time, but down to her knees in front of me. Because I’m a twisted killer, and fuck if I don’t want her mouth more than my next heartbeat.