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.
“Don’t you see? If my dad sent you away, it was to protect you! People always believed her crazy predictions.”
Aleksio gets another text.
“Look at me!”
He won’t.