She’s in jeans that are a size too large and a T-shirt knotted at the waist, thick hair in a ponytail high up on her head, cheerleader style. She and Viktor’s Russian guys seem to be joking around. She smiles at one point.
“We should put a stop to that.”
“She’s under control,” Viktor says.
Control isn’t the issue.
But I don’t have a good explanation for what the hell the issue is, so I turn away. “Did you offer her coffee? In the mug we brought from the mansion? And food?”
“She took coffee—in her mug. She says she won’t eat.”
“She needs to eat.”
Viktor shrugs. “A person can go weeks without food and be just fine.”
Of course he would say that. Even now, he sees three meals a day as an extravagance. “Not somebody like Mira.”
“Yes, somebody like Mira.” Viktor turns to me. “What a person can’t go without is sleep. You need to sleep.” He walks out.
Right. Sleep. A peaceful sleep for me is never going to happen. Not in this life. Every time I close my eyes, I’m right back there with Konstantin’s cigar-smelling fingers sealing my mouth like my life depended on it, keeping me quiet. The way my mother screamed when Lazarus caught her. Her terrorized eyes, reflecting in the window. The flash of the blade in Aldo Nikolla’s hands.
More laughter. They’re teaching her Russian. She repeats a phrase, trying to get it right. Her eyes are so big—they sometimes remind me of those Egyptian drawings from those tombs, except not fucked-up and wrong. Her eyes are perfect.
I decide to make a proper breakfast. I inspect the refrigerator and identify all the ingredients for frittatas.
I dump paprika into the bowl, turning my attention to the meal I’m making, but she’s still a ghost on my skin. The gouges she made in my thighs burned while I ran. A good burn. She almost seemed into it. An act, I know. The human animal will do anything to survive, to help its own kind.
I slice a lemon and squeeze it into the mix.
Viktor comes back in, and I know what he’s going to say the second he looks at the meal I’m cooking up. “Seriously, brat? When I see all this—” He waves his hand around the kitchen. “—I do not think that this is a man who plans to show that video to a girl’s father as she cries.”
“Have I ever not done what I had to do?” I give him a hard stare. It’s simple to do the hard, bad things. You learn to turn something off. Make yourself dense, like cement, and just do it. This is knowledge we share.
One nod. “Okay, then.”
I go back to work. “And there’ll be frittatas for you, too.”
He watches me work. His silence doesn’t fool me.
“What?” I ask.
He nods in the direction of the patio. “You can never have her. She’s so far out of the game…”
I know he’s right, but all I can think of is how she looked up at me while she sucked my cock. The tightness of her lips, the slide of her tongue, the way all that derision cranked the temperature to nine hundred degrees. Pure hot flame.
And then I made it ugly.
“You can never have her,” he continues. “If you let yourself think it, it is only pain.”
“Are you questioning me here?”
“I am watching you make frittatas.”
I made them for him once when one of his top guys was killed. I told him it was my magic meal.
Viktor takes his gun and cleaner out. “Princess in the castle. Her father took our things and gave them to her. She does not deserve anything good. You should tell her what he did. What you saw.”
He saw it too, of course, but he was just two. “We’re taking enough away from her,” I say.
He starts taking apart the action.
“Not near the food,” I say, waving at Viktor’s gun oil. “I don’t want it picking up the smell.” I slice the cherry tomatoes into halves. They’re easier to eat that way.
“She is the enemy.”
“Your guys out there are chummy enough with her.”
He snorts. “They’re teaching her lines from Russian gangland movies. They think it is funny.”
I go near where he works. They’re all out there twirling their weapons now, teaching her how to do it. “What the fuck are they giving her a weapon for?”
“Relax. They would not give her something loaded.”
Of course not.
“They’re teaching her to be Sergei Kazan. In the movies, he twirls his gun like that and says, ‘You go ahead and try it, baby, and I’ll fill you so full of lead it’ll be coming out of your ass.’ It’s funny if you know Sergei Kazan. Very brutish. Teaching her these lines. Like teaching a cat to talk.” He smirks. “What? They’re bored. You want to let them fuck her instead? I’m sure they would like to make a movie for her father, too.”
In a flash my fists are on his lapels. I drag him out of his chair and push him against the wall.
“You see?” he says, panting. “You let yourself think you can have her.”
My blood races. I watch myself being fucked up, putting him against the wall, nose to nose with my brother.
His gaze is steady.
Fuck. I lay off.
He stands, not bothering to straighten himself back up. “Konstantin did some things very wrong, I think. He should not have shown you so very many pictures of that girl. You watched her grow up.”
“So?”
“She ate when you starved. Laughed when you cried. Kept safe while you hid. But I think that’s not what came through.”
“Maybe I was jacking off,” I say.
He smiles. “You are good at that.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“You are good at answering a question with a question. That’s what you did just now. Like a fighter. Slipping the hit.”
But he’s wrong. His questions were, in fact, a direct hit. I spent long hours watching her, wondering how she was faring. If she’d found other friends. Trying to remember what it was like to feel good. Safe. To have people who care for me. And more, people like her to care about. I owe everything to Konstantin, but we weren’t like a family. We were more like weaponsmith and sword.
A call comes in. The investigator has tracked down the old Worland director to a yoga class. “I’ll have him within the hour,” he says.
Viktor is back at his gun cleaning. I pull out the tomatoes and parmesan. Then I get an idea. I call Tito. “That accountant old man Nikolla used—Ligne. Go back at him.” I give him instructions—he’s to act like we got something new. Try to shake him that way.
“We decided Ligne knows nothing,” Viktor says once I get off the phone. “That he was kept in the dark.”
“I want to look at all the angles again. We have these few hours.”
Viktor holds part of the action to the light. He tends to channel his passion into weaponry, just like Konstantin. He fucks women now and then, but he’s indifferent at best. “You really think the old accountant holds something back?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to show the movie to the old man,” he observes.
I let the chopping fill the silence.
“Don’t let the breaking game break you, brat.”
She’s lying in a deck chair when I go out there with the plates. Book in her lap, face to the sun. Even from feet away you can see her lashes, dark and thick.
The Russians are invisible around the perimeter now, but she knows they’re there. Growing up, Mira and I were always aware of our bodyguards. Our distaste for them bonded us. Slipping them was a game. Mira would be laughing and running, same as me.
I set two plates down on the table and pull out a chair. “Come on.”
“Any word about my dad?”
“Not awake yet. Come on.”
She looks out at the forest perimeter. “Any leads on who can give us the key to the code?”
“Our guy’s in pursuit. He tracked him to a yoga class.”
<
br /> “Thank goodness.”
“It doesn’t mean he has the code. We might still go with plan B.”
“Dad gave you everything he could. He wouldn’t gamble me.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell her she’s wrong, to tell her she’s letting her optimism keep her stupid. Such a Mira thing to do, believing in him like that. Her optimism burns like a taunt.
I yank her chair out another noisy inch.
She gets up. Comes over and sits. She eyes the food. “You gonna shove this in my mouth, too?”
She stiffens when I touch her glossy ponytail. Even her hair feels impossibly smooth. All those pictures. The smiling girl in the perfect life. I pull her ponytail aside and touch the spot at the back of her neck. Soft and secret. Sensitive. It’s a good spot. A spot I love. “I bet you’d enjoy that.”
Red floods her cheeks and the back of her neck.
“Hard and fast and mean. How’s that sound? Because you liked it fucked-up.”
She gets this thoughtful look. “I did kind of like it fucked-up,” she confesses. “I don’t know what to think about that.”
My heart pounds. Only Mira would repel an insult with an honest confession. Most people put the shields down, but not Mira. She lifts them. She shows you her heart.
You can never have her. I repeat Viktor’s words like a mantra. You can never have her. Never have her.
“I’ll be honest, part of me is just a little horrified I was into it, but I was,” she continues. “I mean, what is that, right? At first I didn’t know what to think. Then it just took me. I felt like we went somewhere, or just were weirdly connected in this new way and—”
I close my fist around the ponytail and pull—not hard like last night, but just enough to make her look up at me. Her eyes have caramel-colored flecks in the sunshine. Like shards of beer glass. “You think we had a connection? Wake up. I fucked your face and took a movie of it.”
Pain in her eyes.
I don’t know why I do it. I just think she needs to not have that candor, that vulnerability. It’s how people get hurt. It’s how people get hurt by me.
She pulls her hair from my grip and puts her napkin in her lap and picks up her fork. She pivots it on the end tine, making a little arc. “Oh, Aleksio.”
My pulse races. I don’t even know what she means by that. Oh, Aleksio. It means everything and nothing, and my fucking pulse races. I swallow down my emotions and take my seat across from her. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to play with your silverware?”
She stops with the fork and presses it into the side of the frittata.
Tito and Viktor ate theirs with their hands, but she has perfect manners in everything. I remind myself she’s Aldo’s spoiled daughter, with her smiles and her safe life.
I have this insane impulse to kiss her and promise I’ll protect her, but I can’t protect her and save Kiro both at the same time. My pulse races with the torment of that. I want to protect her. I want to kiss her. I want to get lost with her.
She takes a small bite.
I should look down, but it’s too late. I’m watching her. I’m holding my fucking breath.
Contrary to what you might think, when somebody first tastes something they find delicious, you’ll rarely see a blissful look on their face; it’s more like stunned horror. I don’t know why people go with stunned horror when they taste something delicious, but they always do.
So when I see her getting that stunned-horror look, I’m stupidly gratified. I lower my gaze like I don’t care, but I’m a fucking hound panting at her feet.
“Oh my God,” she says. “Who made this?”
“Didn’t I tell you? We kidnapped Wolfgang Puck, too. Got him back there cooking up a storm. I’m gonna buttfuck him with a baseball bat later.”
She snorts. “Come on, Aleksio, be serious.”
I turn my eyes down to my plate. I shouldn’t be striving to give her good things. I should be doing the opposite, that’s the whole point here.
She takes another bite. This time her eyes drift closed.
“Oh wow. Does this have hazelnuts?”
“What are you, a reporter for Gourmet Magazine?”
“It’s delicious.”
I look down at my plate with my heart soaring because I made her feel good. Stupid. It’ll just make hurting her harder.
Don’t let the breaking game break you, Viktor said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mira
Aleksio has unfairly long, lush eyelashes—giraffe fringes, Mom used to call them—and when he gazes down at his food, those fringes hide his eyes completely. He knows it, of course. He wants to cut me off, shut me out.
He’s not that good kid anymore—I know that. He’s no longer my friend. But he held me as I cried—that was real. The way he told me about his burn felt like a secret just for me.
And the way I felt with him was real.
And I know something else—he won’t cut off my finger. There’s still some of that mischievous but good-hearted boy inside him. I wouldn’t feel that connection with him if there wasn’t.
Which is good, because the shock of seeing my finger could kill Dad—for real. Aleksio doesn’t know it, and I can’t tell him, but Dad gets violently ill at the sight of blood. And that’s the kind of shock that’s dangerous to his heart.
Nobody knows about Dad’s aversion to blood. It’s a secret he guards even from his closest associates. A secret he asked Mom and me never to divulge. An aversion to blood makes him look weak in the world of the Albanian clans, and it’s especially bad for the supposedly fierce leader of the vicious Black Lion clan.
My guess is that he’s been around blood plenty of times in his life, but that he never looks directly at it—he pretends. That’s how he hides it. But if he opens a box with my bloody finger in it? The shock would be too much for his heart. The shock would kill him.
But the film clip could kill him, too.
No—we’ll find the key code. It’s out there somewhere. Their guy tracked down the director already.
Nobody can see that fucking clip.
Except maybe me. What would it be like to watch us like that?
I flash on the way he looked down at me when I had him in my mouth, like I was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen. Like we were connected in this crazy, wrong way. Aleksio, sitting over me in all his brutal glory, familiar old Aleksio grown into a dangerous man. Fuck, it did something to me.
Moving up Aleksio’s legs felt wrong and good. I had no choice. And I was glad I had no choice. I was into it.
How twisted is that? Into it. All my life I’ve been trying to get out from under the thumb of men like him, and suddenly I’m crawling up his legs, begging to be used. But that’s the thing about having no choice—you do it no matter what. You do it if you hate it, and you do it if it’s a twisted thing you find out that you enjoy.
It took me by surprise when he grabbed my hair, taking control so violently. My whole body came to attention. His cock tasted of man and secrets and sweat and need. I wanted him to push me harder. And he did.
God, the way he talked to me. The names. The intensity of his breath as the whole thing spun out of control. The roughness of him.
His roughness a forbidden gift. Aleksio always went too far. The roughness felt beautiful. I know you, I thought.
And then he turned it into something ugly with the camera and the gun.
I sigh and twirl my fork.
He doesn’t have his suit jacket on; just a loose tie over his white button-down shirt. All that white in contrast with his chocolaty hair that’s a little too long. He went on a run earlier, and he apparently shaved after; his cheeks are smooth and clear, making him look deceptively innocent. Angelic.
“We’re showing it to him as soon as he wakes up.”
“It’ll kill him.”
He stabs his fork into the greens. “You should pray we find the key, then.”
“It’s just a matter of time.”
He cuts a bit of frittata and holds it up, examining it. “How does a spoiled princess who does international shopping as an extreme sport know about anatomization keys or whatever?”
My face burns. But that was the whole goal, wasn’t it? Aleksio is the exactly kind of person we don’t want knowing about my real life.
I shrug. “Are you telling me you never picked up any useless information in life?”
If he realizes I’m answering a question with a question, he doesn’t show it.
I take another bite of the best meal I’ve eaten all year, not that Aleksio seems to care.
Little Vik comes out. Whatever he has to say, it’s bad.
Aleksio sees it, too. “What?”
He shakes his head.
Aleksio stands and pulls his brother away. I sense trouble, chaos. Doors slam inside the house. Guys moving out.
I stare at Aleksio’s phone, still on the table. His phone.
I look from Aleksio and Viktor to the phone and back to Aleksio. I could grab it and delete the video—this is my chance. He may have backed it up, but I have a feeling he didn’t, considering how busy he’s been.
He’ll be angry. And it’s a gamble, but I don’t believe Aleksio will take my finger in the end. I snatch the phone and figure out what he used. Fuse. I find the file, hit delete, confirm delete. Just like that it’s gone. I set it back down and pick up my fork.
Aleksio comes back and grabs his phone and suit jacket. He swings it on and fixes his shirt cuffs.
Blood whooshes in my ears. I hope I made the right choice. “What’s going on?”
“Ligne is dead.”
My jaw drops. “Frankie? Frankie Ligne?”
Aleksio nods.
“Are you sure?”
“Most certainly dead, yes,” Viktor says.
“He’s just a sweet old man. Why would you—”
“We didn’t kill him,” Viktor spits.
“Who?”
“Bloody Lazarus,” he growls.
“Why would Lazarus kill somebody from his own organization? My father’s confidante…”
Viktor gives me a jaded look. Like, really? Two of the Russians come out, all suited up and holstered.
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