Panic washes over me like a haze. He’s going to wipe that finger on my face or lips. Punch me at best. Most likely kill me.
What have I done? Made it easy.
He turns his hand and simply looks at his finger.
My pulse is an ocean in my ears.
He looks back up, invades my eyes with his stare.
And then he does something I never in a million years would’ve predicted: Looking deep into my eyes, pinning me with his gaze like that, he sucks on his own finger. He sucks my spit off it.
My belly tightens over the dangerous sexuality of the gesture.
But he doesn’t stop there. No, he keeps going, pushing his finger in through his thick lips, shoving it in—slowly, inexorably. Eyes pinning me.
The haze intensifies. The moment goes on forever. I stand helpless in the face of all the things he’s shoving into my mind with that move.
It’s domination, and it’s danger. Invisible fingers sliding into me.
Then he starts to pull it out, just a glint of a smile in the depths of his dark eyes. He pulls it out slowly. This guy, he wants to make me feel every second. Every inch of it.
And I do feel it.
I can’t look away from this dangerous stranger with just a glint of a smile in the chocolate pools of his eyes.
I understand something in this moment: Nobody gets out of here unscathed.
“Take me,” my father says. “Kill me. It’s what you came here for.”
I’ve never heard him so frightened. Everything’s spinning off its axis.
The barbarian doesn’t take his eyes from mine. “Take you? On what planet are you more fun than Kitten is?” Those evil lips form into a diabolical smile. That, too, is a weapon. “But there is one thing,” he says.
“What?” my father asks.
“Our brother,” he says. “You give us the location of our brother, and we’ll be in a slightly better mood.”
My father looks confused. “And do I know your brother?”
I stiffen as Viktor nears my father. I’m thinking he’ll hurt him again, but he just hands my father a paper photo. The old kind.
My father takes it. Even from feet away, I can see the small white rectangle tremble in my father’s hands. He looks from Viktor to my captor. I know him well enough to see the gears turning in recognition…and horror.
“Seems I’m not dead after all.” My captor nods his head at Viktor. “This one sent a world away. I found him last year.”
“What’s going on?” I say. “Daddy—”
My father’s lost in this. Whatever it is, it’s big.
Viktor speaks up. “We cannot seem to find our baby brother. Our bratik.” He pronounces it in an ultra-Russian way, rolling the r. Brlod-dy. He snatches the photo from him, and I catch a glimpse. Three little boys. Two of them infants.
Brothers. Something about the picture tugs at the edges of my memory.
The Russian one says, “We get our brother back alive, or we kill your kitten, you understand?”
I suck in a breath. I’ve been around this life long enough to know there’s nothing empty about that threat.
“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.