Mafia Romance

by Aleatha Romig, Skye Warren, Annika Martin, Natasha Knight, Kaye Blue, Michelle St. James, Renee Rose, Parker S. Huntington, Alexis Abbott, Willow Winters

  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 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 sense trouble was 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, but 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.” Viktor’s 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 a quick 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. 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 backup plan. “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. “No good that you remembered her candy. I think it will not be so easy to cut off her finger.”

  I shrug. “I’ll cut off my own fingers if it saves Kiro’s life.”

  He grunts and grabs a box. But yes, 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 or why. People will be focusing on the house, wondering if Aldo was in there when it went up.

  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 bad. He was pulled from the orphanage at an early age and raised by criminals. 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, knowing her eyes are on me.

  She still looks at me like I’m that kid she knew. When she looks at me like that, I want to shake her. I don’t need her looking at me like that. I have to save Kiro.

  Tito, a few other guys, and I 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.

  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 with the files 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.

  She glares and something strange wells up in my chest. I love that she gives as good as she gets. “I could help,” she says.

  “No.” I don’t even look at her. I wish I still had the mirrored sunglasses on. My threats at the gas station definitely backfired. What was I thinking? Pressing her against that pillar.

  It was dangerous, that boyfriend act I put on. Pressing my hand to her cheek, I thought I might combust. She provokes inconvenient urges in me—Primal. Possessive.

  All wrong.

  Mira is everything I should never want.

  I imagined pressing my face there, feeling her skin with my lips. She would’ve let me, too. Not out of desire, but because she wouldn’t want innocent bystanders hurt.

  Unlike me, she’s still a decent person.

  I remember
Konstantin and me reading a lot of books in the run-down places we’d hide in. 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 some painting of him aged.

  That’s how it felt with Mira and me.

  She stayed safe and happy in that mansion, while I got hammered into something dark and deadly. She lived the life I should’ve had. I just got messed up.

  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 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 screwed.

  “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 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. “But 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 no enemy has ever sent 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 through.

  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 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.”

  “Like an armored car?” Tito asks. “Where you need the two keys?”

  “Exactly,” she says.

  I feel this rush of pride. Clever Mira. But when she turns to me, I frown. “Who would have the key to the code?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. Somebody who worked there when Kiro was brought in. 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.

  She twists her lips, lost in thought. In a flash I’m back with her in the shade of the fort, watching her draw her horses, lips twisting. 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. “A KGB code breaker, you say.” She tips her head. “Well…if that’s all you got…”

  I try not to smile.

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

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

  She glances at me, and I look away. Our connection 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 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 eit
her 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 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 can surprise you.

  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.

  She’s pale. Yeah, she knows. 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.” 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.