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’s true, the story Ronson told. Donald Knutson and the boys went up to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, but the story always felt a bit off to me, in terms of how deep they went. They went so deep in—you don’t bring kids that deep in for that length of trip.” She pauses.

  My interview skills kick in. Long hours with scared people. “So the story sounded odd to you. Something not right,” I coax.

  “Don Knutson always did say Keith belonged with the animals. Keith liked to wander off, you see. He was smart, curious, and constantly wandering off. And Donald Knutson, he’d had it with Keith.”

  I look at Aleksio. This is sounding bad.

  “The place they camped that year, they went far up into a remote area. This area, it’s wilderness as vast as the Sahara. Do you know it?”

  “No.”

  “There are places inside that wilderness area nobody goes. It’s not easy to search.”

  “Very remote,” I say.

  “I always wondered about the drowning story. Could Keith have wandered off? Or been left? There was so much trouble with him. And because they believed him drowned, they didn’t search for him as thoroughly as they would have, had he been lost.”

  Aleksio looks like he wants to kill somebody. I put my finger to my lips as she goes on.

  “I put my questions out of my mind, having nothing but speculation, but then two years ago, a private investigator came to visit the Knutsons. The Knutsons were on a cruise at the time, so he came to our house to ask about Keith. Keith had been gone ten years by then. He told me that a wild boy had been found by campers—”

  “Wait. What?” I widen my eyes at Aleksio.

  “A savage boy, maybe eighteen years old, a boy who seemed to have grown up in the woods. Found by campers, half-dead from a wounded leg. The years lined up. If Keith was lost at eight, and this was ten years later, he would be eighteen. It could’ve been Keith.”

  “Found by campers…after ten years in the woods?”

  “Maybe. This wild boy, he was big news up north. He made a stir on the social media. They had a name for him. I don’t remember. The investigator described him, asked if it could be Keith.” Her voice reduces to a whisper. “But I lied and I told him no. I made up a story about a birthmark. It was wrong of me to lie, but no good could have come from reuniting Don Knutson and Keith. It seemed the most harmful thing in the world for them both. God help me, that is the decision that I made. But blood brothers, that’s different. I could see how your friends grieved for their brother. Ronson was against me getting involved, you see.”

  “I’m so glad you called. So glad, so grateful. Do you remember the name of the investigator?”

  “He gave me a card. Quickly. Do you have a pen?”

  “Yes.” I motion to Aleksio. He grabs a pen and looks around for a piece of paper. My eyes fall to the folders he’d shoved off the desk. I’m thinking he could write on one of those. That’s when I catch sight of a familiar name on one of the tabs. Vanessa Nikolla.

  I stiffen.

  What’s he doing with a file on my mother? He moved it when we came in…and it seemed strange. What is he hiding from me?

  “Okay,” he says, pen poised over a notepad.

  I study the file discreetly while Aleksio takes down the information Lila gives. The folder looks old. Official. There’s a routing grid on the outside of it with initials.

  Lila is going on about what she knows. “The investigator was older. Very sickly,” she says. She tells us all she knows. “I hope that those boys find their brother. That they can heal. I could see the resemblance.”

  I thank her and click off. Aleksio kisses me. “Thank you!” Then he yells for Viktor.

  “You should thank Lila.”

  Viktor bounds in with two of his guys. “What’s wrong?”

  Aleksio goes to him, full of emotion. “Kiro might be alive.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Aleksio

  I leave Mira at the house with Tito watching her. She seems willing to stay, at least long enough to see this Kiro lead through—I think she’s as interested in seeing him alive as I am. Still, I tell Tito he can’t let her leave.

  Viktor and Yuri and I drive through the night, racing to reach the investigator. Karl Hawthorne. He’s in some sort of nursing facility in northern Wisconsin.

  I drive. Viktor is unusually silent in the passenger seat, consumed by whatever is on his phone. He’s not doing anything on it, just staring at it. Not even scrolling. His lip where I hit him seems to have gotten fatter overnight, but his eye looks better.

  “What the fuck are you watching? Are you finding something new?”

  “Nothing new,” he says.

  We found the story about the wild boy Lila was talking about pretty easily. He did make a stir on social media around two years ago. Nobody ever got a photo of him, but crews were camped out. They even gave him a name—Savage Adonis. There was a lot of media hunger for a handsome wild boy until it was determined to be a hoax. But what if it wasn’t?

  Nobody got a picture, but this investigator—this Karl Hawthorne—maybe he saw him.

  “Then what’s so interesting on there?”

  “Nothing,” he says. It’s what he said the last time I asked.

  “It’s obviously something,” I say.

  “Valhalla feed,” he says.

  “Is something happening at Valhalla?”

  “Nah,” he says.

  I frown. I don’t know why he should be so interested in that feed. It’s just cameras trained on captive girls in rooms. Men bid on them. Basically, they sit there for long stretches of time looking unhappy. We checked it out at Konstantin’s place.

  “Is the bidding heating up? Is somebody trying to outbid you?”

  “No.”

  It’s weird. He resisted this Valhalla gig. He didn’t want anything to do with it. Now he can’t tear himself away from it. “Are they revealing the secrets of the universe through interpretive dance?”

  He just grunts. Fine. I suppose it’s good that he’s invested.

  We pull up to the senior complex at around ten in the morning. It’s beige-and-white concrete block. It smells of coffee, sausage, and Lysol, and the nurse at the desk tells us that Hawthorne’s daughter needs to okay all visits.

  I lean on the desk and smile. “His daughter okays this one, trust me.”

  “I sincerely doubt it. She hasn’t okayed a visit in over a year,” the nurse says.

  I look over at Viktor, and Viktor looks at Yuri, and Yuri pulls aside his jacket, revealing his .357. “She okays it,” I say softly.

  A look of fear comes over her, but she still doesn’t do anything.

  An orderly appears now, sensing a problem. He’s young and thick and pale, and when he sees Yuri’s gun he goes for his phone, but I pull out my own piece, letting it hang down by my side. “We just have a few questions.” Gently I take the orderly’s phone. “Nobody gets hurt. Let’s get a room number.”

  The nurse straightens. She doesn’t want to give it. Looking to be a hero.

  Viktor goes around the desk and picks up a photo of the nurse with two dogs. “Nice dogs,” he says. “Are they at your house right now—” He reads off her nametag. “—Donna Fleishcher?”

  Threatening dogs. Only Viktor.

  “We just have questions,” I say. “We need information he has on a missing-person case, and then we’ll leave. We’d go through the daughter if we had time, but this is an urgent matter.”

  “Are you the cops?” she asks.

  I get where this is going. Afterwards, if something goes wrong or if we actually kill Hawthorne, she can say that we told her we were police officers. “We’re law enforcement,” I tell her. Because in a way, we are.

  Yuri stays up there with her, and we go with the orderly down the long hallway, through the dining room, and into a large sunroom. He points at an old man in a wheelchair. A rack above the chair holds bags of fluids that trail down to him. “That’s Karl.”


  “What’s wrong with him?” I ask.

  “A lot,” the orderly says.

  I nod my head at a chair next to the door. “You’re going to sit there and not talk to anybody while we have a private conversation.”

  Karl has a bald head and bushy eyebrows; he’s dressed in a black sweatsuit, and he’s watching us, or specifically, watching my gun. Viktor and I leave the orderly sitting there and go over.

  “Sig P229R,” he says, nodding down at my side. I’m surprised he can see it, no less get the make. But then, he was a P.I. “If I’da known it was that kind of party, huh?”

  I look at Viktor. Is this guy not sane?

  “Joke,” Karl says. “Coming in here loaded for bear like that? Suits and ties? What hornet’s nest did I hit?” He sends a mischievous glance toward the orderly.

  “We have questions,” Viktor says.

  Karl smiles. “You’re Russian. This the Russian mob?”

  “It’s not your concern,” Viktor says.

  Karl glances again at the orderly. “I only ask because, you got any booze?”

  Viktor pulls his flask from his pocket and hands it over.

  “Got any cigars?”

  “Just questions,” I say. “We’re here about the savage boy. The wild boy. You went asking around about him two years back.”

  “Savage Adonis? Yup.” He takes a swig from the flask. The orderly sits up with a jerk. Karl sniggers and hands it back to Viktor.

  “Tell us about this boy and you can have it all,” Viktor says.

  “Don’t mind if I do.” Karl sucks down a bit more. “You probably saw what was online about him. That boy caused quite a stir up in Rhone Rapids. Campers found him half-dead and portaged him out of there. Dressed like the fucking Nanook of the North, this kid.”

  He wipes the back of his mouth. “They gave him something to cut the infection, the fever, bandaged him up. Cut his hair and fingernails. But once he came to, he went crazy and wrecked the place. I’m talking, a wild animal. Had to call the cops to subdue him. Lotta property damage. It was clear pretty fast that he wasn’t a normal teen. He was one of these kids they find existing in the wild every once in a while, bottom of their feet thick as leather. Killing with their bare hands. Eating raw meat and roots. Impervious to cold.”

  “You saw him. Could this be him?” Viktor hands over some of the photographs we took from Lila and Ronson.

  Karl studies them, one after another. “Yeah, that could be him. Probably. A lot older, but this is the look of him. He a relation of yours?”

  “Brother,” I say.

  “I could see it. He had the look of you two.”

  “Where’d he go?” I ask.

  “After the clinic, he was brought to the psychiatric unit in East Webster. Lockup in the psych ward. You had social services trying to find his origin, you had the media pounding down the door, because, let’s face it, a photogenic wild boy—and we’re talking raised by wolves here—that business sells papers. They gave him that ridiculous name.”

  “Wolves?” Viktor says.

  “That’s what the professor believed,” Karl says. “He’s the one who hired me. Louis Jourdan, PhD. He was petitioning hard to get custody of the boy. Professor Louis Jourdan, PhD, wanted me to exhaust all possible leads. He wanted custody pretty bad.”

  I kneel down. “Did he get it?”

  Karl fixes me with a sharp gaze. “Here’s the thing, I felt like Professor Jourdan… I didn’t like him toward the end, let’s just say.”

  A sense of alarm rises up through me.

  “Didn’t trust him. Instincts, you know? I felt like he was having me on the case to make sure nobody would ask after the boy once he took him or maybe he was involved in something off-color.” He wipes his mouth with his sleeve.

  I glance over at Viktor. He’s not loving this, either.

  “I don’t know what his PhD was in—psychology, maybe,” Karl continues. “Behaviorism. Some such shit. He always struck me as one of those fellows who might raise a kid in a wooden box just to test out a theory. So I didn’t like him having that kid, though I didn’t like the media or the system having at him any more. And there were fights over his age. He could understand English perfectly, but he couldn’t much speak it. Or he didn’t want to speak. And then one day he was gone from his room, and that was the last anyone heard of him.”

  “Gone?”

  He nods. “An attendant was knocked unconscious. Boy was gone.”

  Viktor swears.

  “They said it was a hoax. Covering their asses. In truth, the wild kid disappeared.” Karl sighs. “If you were to accept that he was eighteen, could take care of himself, and wasn’t a danger to himself or others, he had every right to take off, so they dropped it. A lot of people covering their asses at the end is what it was.”

  “They said it was a scam to get the media off their ass.”

  “Yeah.” He looks us over, back and forth. “Definite family resemblance,” he says.

  My heart swells.

  “The question in my mind was always, how did he get out to knock out that attendant? The attendant said he was knocked from behind outside in the hallway, so who unlocked the kid’s padded cell?”

  “You think he had help?”

  Karl takes another drink. “Kid was a real looker, once he was cleaned up. The nurses were fascinated with him. He could get them to give him things. He had that kind of charisma. But in my gut, it’s the professor. The professor was obsessed with this kid. How he had lived, how he’d gotten through the winters. Wolf society shit.”

  “Where does this professor teach?” Viktor asks.

  Karl shakes his head. “Here’s the problem. Jourdan is a real professor in Madison, a specialist, but this guy wasn’t him.”

  “You’re a P.I., and a man fooled you like that?” I ask.

  Karl fixes me with a hard stare. He would’ve been a badass in his day. “Man paid me big money to identify a savage kid. That’s who I was looking at. Not my employer. You like your private eyes looking into you?”

  I frown. “What else? We need to find him.”

  “I’d start with the man posing as Professor Jourdan. The psychiatric hospital up there has an image of the fake professor—I know they do, and you could try and get ahold of it and run facial recognition. They have logs of who visited, too. They’re going to be very cagey about letting that information out, considering there were some major fuckups made.”

  He points at my piece. “Going in like this—no. There’s a better way. There’s an LSW—a social worker—there who you could lean on. Noel Tucker. He would sell that information to you. It would take a bit for him to bird-dog it because he has to get into other people’s computers, but I used him a few times. He’s where I’d start.” He looks up, shaking the flask gently back and forth as if to evaluate how much might be left.

  “How did the wild kid seem to you? Your impressions. Was he…okay? Or…” I barely know what I’m asking. How does a kid spend ten years in the wild?

  Karl shifts in his chair. “He seemed powerful. Pretty fucking angry. Well, a straitjacket doesn’t make a man feel so cooperative, you know?”

  A straitjacket. I grit my teeth.

  “The kid made people nervous because he could get loose so easy and they’d have to be on him with five orderlies armed with needles full of tranquilizer. Smart, too. More than smart—brilliant, really, in how he’d get out of restraints, or get people into his thrall. Your brother was beautiful, brilliant, and completely violent.”

  “Bratik,” Viktor says softly.

  Karl eyes Viktor’s gun. He seems drunk. “Yeah, I imagine you’ll all get along just fine.”

  I pull out a card and write my private number on the back. “Don’t repeat this information to anybody else. If anybody else comes asking after him, call us.” I hand him the card. “We’ll make it worth your while.”

  “And it will be not worth your while,” Viktor says, “to repeat these things.”<
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  “I hear you.” Karl puts the card in his pocket.

  We get out of there and into the daylight, stunned.

  “Beautiful, brilliant, and completely violent,” Viktor says proudly.

  We get back in the car and head up north to find the social worker. We’re halfway there already, and this is the kind of thing you want to do in person. Nothing like dealing with a man in person for showing what good friends we can be…or what dangerous enemies.

  I make a call to Tito. Things are good at the house. He’s psyched to hear about Kiro. I ask him how Mira seems. He tells me she’s good.

  “Don’t crowd her,” I say. He gets my meaning—I want him watching her, but not obviously.

  Tito tells me she’s about to take a nap. I get him to put her on.

  “Aleksio,” she says.

  I feel like I left a part of myself back there with her unfinished. Like there are so many things still to say to her. I tell her what Karl said about the professor, and that it’s definitely Kiro out there. She laughs at his description of Kiro. “Not in cop school then,” she says.

  Something’s off.

  “Is everything okay?” I ask.

  “I just want you to find him.”

  “We need to get to this social worker snitch first.” It’ll take a little doing. He’s in northern Minnesota. More fucking driving.

  And the person driving will be me. I look over at Viktor, back on the Valhalla feed. What does he see there that has him so riveted?

  I hold the phone tight, feeling a rush of affection for her. And hope like I’ve never felt. It feels good to talk to her, like this strange surge of happiness in my heart. It’s stupid, because things are so twisted between us.

  “We’re going to make everything right,” I say.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mira

  Tito is trying to make it seem like we’re just hanging out, like he’s just around, but he doesn’t get who he’s dealing with.

  Men watching me and controlling me and keeping secrets from me is old news. And guys trying to not seem like they were watching me? I’ve slipped away from the best of them. And I’ll slip away from Tito.