“A name and an address,” my captor says.
“I don’t have that—I swear!” Dad says. And I don’t believe him.
When in my life has my father not bent over backward for me?
Cold horror slides through me.
Chapter Three
Aleksio
Aldo Nikolla looked so much bigger when he was slaughtering our parents. But then, I was small. Just nine.
And then there’s Mira. I have this weird feeling that she almost recognizes me. It screws me up a little.
I shake it off. No woman makes me lose my focus. Not even her.
I take Mira back, reminding myself that she’s his weak spot. I hold her a little more tightly than I should, and she glares.
Maybe she has some of that bravery in her still.
It affects Aldo. I see it in his eyes. Good.
I slide my rough, scarred finger over the unbroken creamy expanse of her cheek—a metaphor for the two of us now.
Mira was there in the background of a lot of the surveillance photos over the years, the cherished daughter in the castle that her family stole from us. We’d been friends before the attack—as much of friends as nine-year-olds can be. I’d study her expressions when new pictures came in. Always smiling.
She smiles, so happy, Konstantin would say. She has the life you should have. She shops with your millions while you hide like a dog.
Konstantin imagined I hated her for those smiles. Sometimes I did, but sometimes I’d enlarge the shit out of the images, studying her face. Wondering what she was doing. Wondering if she knew her own father was capable of slaughtering his dearest friends in cold blood.
Needless to say, I didn’t admit any of this to Konstantin. He was a hardened Kosovo war vet, out for bloody vengeance. He’d say I was fixating on her. He’d think I couldn’t do what needed to be done. He’d be wrong.
Over time, those smiles intensified, and Mira transformed into a plastic princess, a black-haired Barbie doll. Meanwhile, I transformed into something cold and dark and barely human.
We both got molded by the lives we were given.
I hold her a little more tightly than I should.
I always wondered what her skin would feel like. Now I know.
I feel her pulse pounding. The plastic princess is frightened, but she puts on a good front. For him? I continue down to her collarbone, I stop just before the perfect line of it disappears into her filmy white top. I’m scaring her in order to fuck up the old man. A means to an end.
It’s not supposed to be fucking me up.
“I’ll kill you,” the old man says.
I smile. I’m getting to him.
He’ll gamble Mira—to a point. I need to push him to that point.
“Let her go,” he growls.
I aim the piece at him. “Mira is mine until we have Kiro back. That’s done. What you do now determines how bad it goes for her. That’s all that’s on the table…” But why am I pointing a gun at him? I put it back on her. That perks him up.
“Take off your panties, Kitten,” I say.
Her chest jerks with an intake of breath.
That’s right, I think. I’m the motherfucker who will cross every line to get my baby brother back. I turn my head and growl into her ear. “Take ’em off.”
Viktor shoots me an approving look. He loves when things get really twisted. He and the Russian mafiya guys he brought over, they’re all insane.
Daddy speaks up, finally. “I don’t know where your brother is. I have one thing you could try.”
“One thing we could try?” Riiiiight. Meanwhile, he hunts and kills us. “You think I’m screwing around here? Off, Kitten. Now. Your panties or Daddy’s kneecaps. Something’s gotta go here.”
This gets her moving. She reaches under her pink skirt, grabbing at the panties underneath. She starts shimmying, eyes full of fear and emotion.
I look away, reminding myself that she’s just a spoiled mafia princess now, not the loyal, happy tomboy pal she once was. She probably has a diamond-studded pink lace thong under there or something. She’s not the same, just like I’m not the same.
She leans over and pulls them off her feet. They’re blue. Simple.
“Toss them on the ground. You won’t need ’em where you’re going.”
Viktor’s lips quirk in dark delight.
She hesitates. I feel everybody’s attention, wondering how fucked up I can get. But we’re running out of time. We need answers—fast.
Which means I have to get very, very fucked up.
She throws them onto the grass.
“Get them, Daddy,” I growl.
“Pervert,” she whispers.
“I’m a lot worse than a pervert, Kitten. As you’ll soon find out.”
She looks disgusted.
Good. I’ll be as fucked up as I need to be to get our baby brother back. I’ll trash my very soul to save him.
“If my dad says he doesn’t know anything more, he doesn’t know anything more.”
“I won’t ask again,” I say.
He bends and snaps them up from the ground. “Good,” I say. “Our brother. Kiro. Address.”
“I only have a name. The adoption agency.”
I need more. I press the gun to Mira’s temple and her eyes go wide and dark. In a flash, she reminds me of the girl I knew. That’s what the mind does, though. It pastes memories over what’s really there. “You really don’t want to see her again, do you?”
“It’s all I have—I swear it! She’s not in this. She’s innocent!”
“You’re telling me you didn’t bother keeping tabs on our baby brother?”
“The Worland Agency insists on anonymity. It’s where I’d start if I needed to find him.”
“What’s going on?” Mira asks. “Somebody tell me what’s going on! Dad?”
The clock is ticking. Is he gambling with his own daughter? I close my eyes and try to think, but all I can see is Konstantin in his wheelchair, warning me off of this: Once you start that fight with Nikolla, it’s a fight to the death. Once he sees you’re back and that you have Viktor with you, all the firepower in Chicago turns on you. Their cops, their made guys.
Only the three Dragusha brothers together can win such a fight.
Except Kiro is out there somewhere, and he needs us.
Viktor doesn’t remember Kiro, but I do, if only in the barest flashes. A happy baby waving his tiny hands in the air. Big eyes. A sweet nature. Not like Viktor and me.
If Kiro is dead, I will destroy the world. I grab Mira’s dark hair and pull her to me.
“Don’t touch her.”
“I’ll touch her as much as I want,” I say. “She’s mine, isn’t she? Didn’t you say I could have anything of yours I wanted?”
The old boss’s lips move, but nothing comes out. The great boss—the krye—of the Black Lion clan, is finally feeling desperate. They say when you have your enemy on his knees, you start to feel sorry for him, but I’ll never feel sorry for Aldo Nikolla. He’s as dangerous as a king cobra, even with his supposedly bad heart.
“If she’s mine,” I continue, “I can do anything I want with her, can’t I?” I press my face to her hair.
“You’re a dead man,” Nikolla growls. Yet he gives no more.
“Fine.” I glance at Viktor. Time for plan B. Viktor and me, we’re brothers up from the shadows, no need for words. Viktor gets on the phone.
I slip an arm around Mira. “Probably a good time to adjust your expectations for your weekend downward, Kitten.”
She stays perfectly still. She never did scare easy.
“Kitten.” Nikolla gives his daughter a doleful look. “We’re okay.”
“I might not go with okay,” I say.
“His heart is bad, you jerk.” She rips away from me and hauls off, like she’s going to hit me.
I catch her arms and get her back under control. I give her a long, hard look that lets her see the cold parts of my soul, and finally I fe
el her tremble. I flash on what it would be like to have her naked at my feet, trembling like that. I shake the thought out of my mind.
The sound of breaking glass up at the house tells me Viktor’s guys are in there looting. Mira looks stunned. “Bind him, gag him, and take him away,” I say.
Tito moves on the old man and sticks a needle in his arm. Mira screams and jerks. The old man is out like a light. “Where are you taking him?”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “We won’t let him die.”
She looks up at me with something like hope in her eyes.
“For now,” I add.
Tito loads him up into the ridiculous golf cart and they haul him up the hill.
“Note to self,” I say aloud. “Have Viktor shoot me if I ever get one of those things.”
Viktor grins.
A few more of our guys have arrived, sliding across the grounds like shadows. The Russians reporting to Viktor.
“Come on.” I push her toward the house.
She stops and turns. “Just tell me what’s going on.”
“You don’t know?” I’m a little surprised she hasn’t figured it out by now, but then again, she believes we died that day. Everybody thinks that. Except her father and Lazarus.
“Tell me,” she says.
“This is the part where we remove weapons, cash, and other valuables from your place. Maybe wreck a few things. I believe the technical term is pillaging. Or is it plundering? You’d think I would’ve looked into that.”
Mira stares at me with a stunned expression.
“What’s wrong?” I growl. “I got a bluebird on my head or something?”
“If he dies, then you die. What’s the point?”
Again I hear old Konstantin’s warning. If you hit the hornet’s nest, if you show that you and Viktor are alive and together, all of Nikolla’s firepower turns on you.
As if on cue, some windows break. Then gunfire sounds out.
“They found the antique gun collection, I think,” Viktor says.
I push her. “Go.”
The princess looks up at her precious castle. “Can I keep…one thing?”
I’m guessing jewelry. Shoes, maybe. She’s always talking about her shoe collection on Instagram. “Depends. Can it shoot bullets? Because, lenient as I am—”
“It’s just a coffee mug. Nobody’ll care about it.”
Another window breaks. Viktor’s guys’ll break a lot of the stuff, but they’ll keep what’s good to sell. They’ve brought vans for the loot.
“It’s easy to find. It’s just a chipped mug with a picture of a cat head. It’s in the lower kitchen cupboard. No—it’s out on the counter…”
I motion to one of Viktor’s guys and send him ahead for the mug. “Mind the time.”
I flash on the old Mira, all pigtails and grass stains. Champion of trapped bugs and bullied kids. Everything in the house and she picks a coffee mug.
I snort. Like I think it’s stupid. Maybe a trick. Trying not to think what I might have to do to save Kiro’s life.
Chapter Four
Mira
We’re up at the drive in front of the house.
I plead repeatedly for news of my father, if only to know he’s still alive. My captor just texts.
I can barely watch as thugs carry off the beautiful things my mother collected—the period chairs, the Warhols, the chinoiserie. I stifle a sob as I catch sight of my mother’s inlaid harp. Mom loved that harp. It’s like they’re taking the last little pieces of my mother from me.
A crash from inside. They’re wrecking the place.
“This is pointless.” When he doesn’t acknowledge me, I grab his wrist. “What does this get you? Come on!”
He looks at my hand and then looks up at me. For a moment, I think he, too, senses that weird familiarity between us. As though we knew each other in a dream. He drops his phone in his pocket, and takes my wrists. “You need to stop focusing on your beautiful life in there and start praying that Daddy decides to come through.”
“Ow,” I breathe.
“Good. That’s you getting with the program. I’ll do whatever I have to do to get my brother back. Do I want to hurt you? No. I don’t. Will I?”
My heart races.
“Will I?”
“I get it,” I whisper.
His grip is too tight, his gaze too intense, like he sees everything inside me.
People rarely look too hard at me. When they look at me at all, they accept the version of me I serve up to them. The shopaholic mafia princess. The dedicated lawyer in glasses.
“Dad’s innocent. He’d tell you if he knew anything else.”
“Wrong, Kitten. Dad’s playing the odds.”
“Don’t call me that.”
A ping sounds. He lets me go and pulls his phone out of his pocket. A twenty-first-century general waging battle.
Whatever the person on the other end has texted him, it troubles him.
That’s my chance—I take off running, tearing for the trees and the main road.
I get maybe ten feet before guys seem to materialize around me, taking me by the shoulders. I twist and fight. They lift me right off the ground, carrying me back.
The strangely familiar intruder is still on the phone, eyeing me with that intensity, watching me struggle. A model between photo shoots if you didn’t know any better.
They put me back in front of him. He lowers the phone and addresses me quietly. “Do it. Go ahead, Mimi, do it again. See what happens.”
Mimi.
A whoosh in my chest.
Mimi. Only one person ever called me Mimi—Aleksio Dragusha. My childhood friend. But Aleksio and his family were slaughtered by a rival clan back when we were kids.
Five caskets lowered into the ground. Three small, two large. I was wild with grief. They had to sedate me.
I focus on the familiar freckle on his cheekbone. This man is so much bigger. So much harder and meaner. But his freckle…his eyes… “Aleksio?” I say in a small voice.
“Ding ding ding, we have a winner.” This like it’s all a joke.
“Oh my God! Aleksio?”
He keeps his eyes fixed on the mansion with its majestic stone wings stretching out on either side. The place where he once lived. Prince of a mafia empire.
I grab his arm, try to shake him. He’s made of stone.
Mimi is what his baby brother, Little Vik, used to call me. Little Vik couldn’t say the r. Aleksio would tease Little Vik about it, and the name stuck. A nickname. His brother. Viktor Dragusha.
“We thought you were dead. We buried you!”
“You buried a few rocks. Maybe some boiled cabbages, who knows.”
I can’t believe he’s being so…flip. “Aleksio! We buried you.” I’m repeating myself. “I thought they killed you…”
If my life were postcards on a bulletin board, the image of Aleksio Dragusha’s casket being covered up with dirt would be central, affecting everything around it. He was my best friend. I doubt I was his. Aleksio had lots of friends. Everybody loved Aleksio.
“And Viktor. Little Vik! Oh my God. You’re both alive…”
He focuses on his phone, running his guys.
“We went to your funeral. It was so, so…”
“Sad” isn’t the word. “Sad” barely touches it. He was my best friend in the world. We were adventurers together, bonded together, carving out a sunny niche inside a world of darkness and secrets we sensed but didn’t understand. I think that’s what made us friends—the feeling of being refugees at the edges of something evil.
“Aleksio,” I whisper. I think about his remote-controlled car, Rangermaster. I took it after he died, and I kept it in my room. I didn’t have the controller, just the car. I used to talk to it like I could still talk to Aleksio. “I kept Rangermaster. You remember Rangermaster?”
He looks at me like I’m a little bit crazy.
I shrink back.
Doesn’t he remember? How can he not
remember?
“You need to stop thinking you know me,” he says finally. “You knew me once, but you don’t know me anymore. Got it?”
“Why are you so angry at my dad? He loved you.”
“Did he look overjoyed to see me?”
My head spins as I replay the horrified look of recognition on my father’s face. “Well, you weren’t exactly being civil,” I say.
“Because he won’t tell us where Kiro is. And he’s the one who sent him away.”
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.”
“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 avenged your deaths. 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 took what my father built and got rid of the Valcheks, an enemy he’d always hated. I know you’re a fashion princess, but surely you can do the math.”
“What the hell, Aleksio? Your father was his mentor, his partner, his greatest friend.”
“Then why did he not raise us boys?”
In a flash it comes to me. “Maybe to protect you. Remember that 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. Miss Ipa was 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 from his phone, needing to see my old friend underneath this cold, beautiful man.
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