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

  “I can keep looking, of course,” he says. “I can keep trying new things, but I’m not going to lie to you. We’re looking at months, probably years. We may never find this guy.”

  “Keep looking,” I say. “He exists. He’s out there. Whatever it takes.”

  Viktor and Yuri are in the pine-and-waterfall lobby when I get back. Viktor puts away his phone and his strange obsession for Valhalla for once, which I take as a good sign until I realize it’s probably because of the torment on my face.

  I take a seat and tell them the news about Kiro.

  The trail is pretty much dead—that’s what the investigator said in so many words.

  “No,” Viktor says. “He needs to look again.”

  “Viktor…” I stare up at the shining blue sky beyond the glass ceiling, imagining Mira’s plane up there in the clouds. And Kiro…who knows where he could be?

  A waitress comes over, and Yuri orders vodka—no, not three glasses; a bottle and three glasses.

  “He gives up too easily on our brother. He needs incentive, I think.”

  “It’s a computer search of image databases,” I say. “You can’t just make the computer give better results. And nobody’s giving up, it’s just…” I’m about to say “more impossible,” but I amend it to “harder.”

  “We will never give up,” Viktor says, in a tone like he wants to kill somebody.

  “Never,” I agree.

  “And we will destroy Lazarus without Kiro. I will squeeze his skull until his eyes pop out, and then when we find Kiro, he’ll have a place in the world. We take it back for Kiro.”

  Our vodka arrives. Yuri pours.

  Viktor lifts a glass. “We get bloody. Nobody’s stopping us now.” With Mira gone, he means. “When we’re done with them, they’ll pray for death.” He drinks. Yuri drinks.

  I stare into the clear liquid.

  “What is it, brat?”

  “I can’t drink to that. Getting bloody just to get bloody. Violence and vengeance.”

  Viktor looks at me like I just announced I hate vodka and hundred-dollar bills.

  “Don’t worry, I’m good for my word,” I say. “I’m committed to taking back what’s ours and destroying the vile parts of it. I’ll do what it takes to get Kiro back if we ever—when we get a lead. But violence and vengeance…”

  I meet Viktor’s scowl.

  “She thought I was worth saving,” I continue. “It did something. It changed something in me…” I’m just as surprised as Viktor appears to be. But it’s true. Things feel different.

  “Changed something in you?” Viktor spits out. “More like ruined you.”

  I think back to that moment in the hotel, staring into Lazarus’s eyes. I could’ve executed him right on the spot. My greatest enemy. “Ruined me for some things.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Fine. To her, then.”

  I eye him suspiciously. He shrugs.

  “To her.” I drain the glass.

  He pours another.

  “To Kiro,” I say. “We’ll never give up. And Yuri. To brothers of all kinds.”

  “Brothers with beat-up faces. The best kind. Skol.” We throw back the cool-burning alcohol. I hold my glass out for more. He pours.

  “Back to taking the empire the smart way,” Yuri says. “More boring. Still effective.” Again we drink.

  Viktor catches my eye. He looks concerned.

  “I’m fine,” I say. A lie.

  That’s when I catch sight of dark hair across the lobby. Mira. She’s heading to the elevator banks.

  She turns to me as if she feels the weight of my gaze. And then she smiles. Her smile is like the sun.

  I think it’s a dream. A mirage, maybe.

  I stand, glass cool in my fingertips, as she turns and starts toward me, past the grand stone waterfall, dark hair catching the light from above.

  She looks so beautiful, I think it can’t be real. I feel something cool dribbling over my fingers.

  “You are spilling it, brat.” Viktor takes my glass from my hand. “I would not like you to waste good vodka. Even on a spoiled mafia princess.” A joke, I suppose. I’m barely comprehending. I’m already gone, moving across the gleaming marble floor. I stop in front of her, speechless.

  She just grins. She’s happy. The haunted look is gone.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks. “I got a bluebird on my shoulder?”

  I go to her and yank her in for a kiss. She’s warm and real and everything I love.

  She pulls back with a mischievous expression. I think she’s going to give me shit for drinking vodka at two in the afternoon.

  She doesn’t.

  “You and your fucking English toffee and selfless gestures and you expect me to get on a plane? I love you, Aleksio.”

  My heart twists. “You said love wasn’t enough. The whole thing with the sandcastles?”

  “Yeah, you’re still kicking down sandcastles, but some of them need kicking down. I want to kick them down with you—like that Valhalla, for starters.” She gets a serious look here. “But then let’s make our own life, our own rules. Build something better than what our families built. Together. What do you think?”

  “Yes. Fuck yes.” I brush the hair from her forehead. I love her like this. A rebel and a warrior. I grab her hair and kiss her.

  And somewhere out there baby animals are laughing, and it doesn’t have to mean everything is doomed. It can just mean something stupidly normal.

  Like happiness.

  Like forever.

  * * *

  Thank you for reading! I hope you love Aleksio and Mira as much as I do.

  Q: What’s up with Viktor and the nun who never shows her face?

  She’s trapped in a strange brothel, stuck behind a webcam…or is she?

  “My brothers think I’m obsessed. Imagining ghosts. But I’ll always know her.”

  ~ Viktor

  ONE CLICK WICKED MAFIA PRINCE NOW >

  TAKEN

  NATASHA KNIGHT

  I’m one of four Willow daughters.

  He’s the first-born son of the Scafoni family. And we have history.

  For generations, the Scafoni family have demanded a sacrifice of us. A virgin daughter to atone for sins so old, we don’t even remember what they are anymore.

  But when you have as much money as they do, you don’t play by the rules. You make them.

  And Sebastian Scafoni makes all the rules.

  The moment I saw him, I knew he would choose me. Even though the mark on my sheath declared me unclean. Even though my beautiful sisters stood beside me, offered to him, he still chose me.

  He made me his.

  And then he set out to break me.

  Prologue

  Helena

  I’m the oldest of the Willow quadruplets. Four girls. Always girls. Every single quadruplet birth, generation after generation, it’s always girls.

  This generation’s crop yielded the usual, but instead of four perfect, beautiful dolls, there were three.

  And me.

  And today, our twenty-first birthday, is the day of harvesting.

  That’s the Scafoni family’s choice of words, not ours. At least not mine. My parents seem much more comfortable with it than my sisters and I do, though.

  Harvesting is always on the twenty-first birthday of the quads. I don’t know if it’s written in stone somewhere or what, but it’s what I know and what has been on the back of my mind since I learned our history five years ago.

  There’s an expression: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Well, that’s bullshit, because we Willows know well our past and look at us now.

  The same blocks that have been used for centuries standing in the old library, their surfaces softened by the feet of every other Willow Girl who stood on the same stumps of wood, and all I can think when I see them, the four lined up like they are, is how archaic this is, how fucking unreal. How they can’t do this to us.

  Yet, here
we are.

  And they are doing this to us.

  But it’s not us, really.

  My shift is marked.

  I’m unclean.

  So it’s really my sisters.

  Sometimes I’m not sure who I hate more, my own family for allowing this insanity generation after generation, or the Scafoni monsters for demanding the sacrifice.

  “It’s time,” my father says. His voice is grave.

  He’s aged these last few months. I wonder if that’s remorse because it certainly isn’t backbone.

  I heard he and my mother argue once, exactly once, and then it was over.

  He simply accepted it.

  Accepted that tonight, his daughters will be made to stand on those horrible blocks while a Scafoni bastard looks us over, prods and pokes us, maybe checks our teeth like you would a horse, before making his choice. Before taking one of my sisters as his for the next three years of her life.

  I’m not naive enough to be unsure what that will mean exactly. Maybe my sisters are, but not me.

  “Up on the block. Now, Helena.”

  I look at my sisters who already stand so meekly on their appointed stumps. They’re all paler than usual tonight and I swear I can hear their hearts pounding in fear of what’s to come.

  When I don’t move right away, my father painfully takes my arm and lifts me up onto my block and all I can think, the one thing that gives me the slightest hope, is that if Sebastian Scafoni chooses me, I will find some way to end this. I won’t condemn my daughters to this fate. My nieces. My granddaughters.

  But he won’t choose me, and I think that’s why my parents are angrier than usual with me.

  See, I’m the ugly duckling. At least I’d be considered ugly standing next to my sisters.

  And the fact that I’m unclean—not a virgin—means I won’t be taken.

  The Scafoni bastard will choose one of their precious golden daughters instead.

  Golden, to my dark. Golden—quite literally. Sparkling almost, my sisters.

  I glance at them as my father attaches the iron shackle to my ankle. He doesn’t do this to any of them. They’ll do as they’re told, even as their gazes bounce from the closed twelve-foot doors to me and back again and again and again.

  But I have no protection to offer. Not tonight. Not on this one.

  The backs of my eyes burn with tears I refuse to shed.

  “How can you do this? How can you allow it?” I ask for the hundredth time. I’m talking to my mother while my father clasps the restraints on my wrists, making sure I won’t attack the monsters.

  “Better gag her, too.”

  It’s my mother’s response to my question and, a moment later, my father does as he’s told and ensures my silence.

  I hate my mother more, I think. She’s a Willow quadruplet. She witnessed a harvesting herself. Witnessed the result of this cruel tradition.

  Tradition.

  A tradition of kidnapping.

  Of breaking.

  Of destroying.

  I look to my sisters again. Three almost carbon copies of each other, with long blonde hair curling around their shoulders, flowing down their backs, their blue eyes wide with fear.

  Well, except in Julia’s case.

  She’s different than the others. She’s more…eager. But I don’t think she has a clue what they’ll do to her.

  Me, no one would guess I came from the same batch.

  Opposite their gold, my hair is so dark a black, it appears almost blue, with one single, wide streak of silver to relieve the stark shade, a flaw I was born with. And contrasting their cornflower-blue eyes, mine are a midnight sky; there too, the only relief the silver specks that dot them.

  They look like my mother. Like perfect dolls.

  I look like my great-aunt, also named Helena, down to the silver streak I refuse to dye. She’s in her nineties now. I wonder if they had to lock her in her room and steal her wheelchair, so she wouldn’t interfere in the ceremony.

  Aunt Helena was the chosen girl of her generation. She knows what’s in store for us better than anyone.

  “They’re coming,” my mother says.

  She has super hearing, I swear, but then, a moment later, I hear them too.

  A door slams beyond the library, and the draft blows out a dozen of the thousand candles that light the huge room.

  A maid rushes to relight them. No electricity. Tradition, I guess.

  If I were Sebastian Scafoni, I’d want to get a good look at the prize I’d be fucking for the next year. And I have no doubt there will be fucking, because what else can break a girl so completely but taking that of all things?

  And it’s not just the one year. No. We’re given for three years. One year for each brother. Oldest to youngest. It used to be four, but now, it’s three.

  I would pinch my arm to be sure I’m really standing here, that I’m not dreaming, but my hands are bound behind my back, and I can’t.

  This can’t be fucking real. It can’t be legal.

  And yet here we are, the four of us, naked beneath our translucent, rotting sheaths—I swear I smell the decay on them—standing on our designated blocks, teetering on them. I guess the Willows of the past had smaller feet. And I admit, as I hear their heavy, confident footfalls approaching the ancient wooden doors of the library, I am afraid.

  I’m fucking terrified.

  Chapter One

  Sebastian

  Ethan and Gregory flank me as we make our way through this godforsaken house in the middle of a fucking cornfield in the middle of fucking nowhere, USA. Why in hell anyone chooses to live here is beyond me. I just hope the girl isn’t a fucking dimwit. A year is a long time.

  Ethan is whispering something in Gregory’s ear. Gregory is even quieter than usual.

  I glance back at them, and I know Greg’s quiet misleads people into thinking he’s the safe one, but he’s not. He’s the most sadistic, if you ask me. I mean, if there are degrees. Can sadism be measured in degrees?

  “We decide together,” Ethan says to me. He’s repeated this mantra for the last forty-eight hours.

  “I decide, little brother.” He’s twenty-five, three years my junior. Gregory is twenty-four.

  “She’s all of ours,” he says, sounding like a fucking toddler who doesn’t get his way.

  “No,” I clarify, and I’m trying to be patient because really, I can’t blame Ethan for being the way he is. “She’s mine.”

  “She’s only yours first.”

  “Give it a rest, Ethan,” I say.

  “Sebastian.” My stepmother’s heels click over the hardwood. “Don’t fight with your brother. You know I don’t like to see that.” She goes to Ethan, touches his cheek. “You’ll all have your turn with the Willow whore. They’re resilient.”

  Her loathing of the Willow women is so obvious, a part of me wishes the chosen girl luck because she’ll need it to walk out of the Scafoni home when her three years are up. It’ll take someone with a spine of steel to survive my stepmother, never mind my brothers and me.

  “Why do you hate them, Lucinda?” I ask, enjoying my power over her.

  Truth be told, she probably hates me as much as the Willows, but it doesn’t matter. I may not be her biological son, but I am master of the Scafoni family. My father is dead, I am the eldest, and I have no intention of letting anyone rule me or usurp my place, especially not Lucinda.

  “They’re whores, Sebastian. There to serve a purpose. Remember that instead of turning on your brothers. Family first. Never forget it.”

  “You don’t have to remind me of that, Lucinda. I just wish I understood your hatred of them. I mean, what are they to you? You’re not a Scafoni by blood, after all.”

  This irritates the fuck out of her, and that fact makes me grin.

  The library doors open, saving her from having to answer.

  A thousand candles burn inside, casting a warm glow over the large room. I’m not sure which scent is stronger, that of
old books, of melting wax or fear.

  I spy the first white sheath, and as much as I like to tell myself this is nothing more than a family obligation, a thrill runs through me.

  I’m excited to claim my Willow Girl.

  Lucinda falls back, as is her place.

  I step forward and turn to my right, where Mr. and Mrs. Willow, the proud parents of this generation’s crop, stand with ghostly faces. I nod my greeting. I am civil, at least.

  I take in the room, still avoiding the girls on their blocks, saving them for last, appreciating the ancient library—the only thing old about this house, the rest having been rebuilt ten years ago, and it was done cheaply too. I hate cheap. But I guess by then, the money from the previous reaping was running out.

  Based old sketches, this house was once a grand estate, before the fire that ravaged it years ago. But the library is the most important room, the one kept up to par, as per the contract. And it’s the only one I care about.

  Beautiful old wooden beams overhead keep the roof from collapsing on our heads, and arched windows reflect the scene within. I wonder how bright it is during the day. If you can see particles of dust a thousand years old disturbed when ghosts rummage through the old tomes, searching for a way out of this nightmare for their girls.

  I harden at the thought, and for a moment, I understand Lucinda’s hatred. The Willows aren’t the only ones cursed to repeat this ancient, insane tradition.

  A candle flickers.

  I wonder if the dead Willow Girls of generations past stand witness to tonight’s harvesting.

  It’s with this thought in mind that I let my gaze come to rest on the spectacle before me.

  Four girls.

  Four beauties, because the Willow’s only breed beauties.

  Three dolls, perfect with their golden hair and enormous blue eyes. One…well…I cock my head to the side at the sight of her. This one is bound, her arms stretched behind her. A gag covers her mouth.

  And on the belly of her shift, there’s a streak of red.

  Pig’s blood.

  I decide to save her for last.

  I move to the first, let my gaze slide over her. She drops hers to the floor, where it should have been all along. I sweep her from head to toe and back. The sheath doesn’t offer much cover, but that’s the point. They are to be laid out for my perusal. For me to take my pick.