“You were like a brother to me…” With a thundering heart I picture the way he slid his finger into his mouth. The hot, dark things it put into my mind.
Not like a brother.
A lock of hair falls over his forehead as he does more phone stuff.
I swallow past the dryness in my mouth. “And now you’re trashing your own family’s house? It’s your house now that you’re back. You’re alive. You’re fabulously wealthy. People will want to know you’re back!”
He snorts with bitter amusement. “You think I should’ve just walked in here? Maybe with a fruit basket?”
The ice in his heart chills me. Aleksio.
We had a secret fort in the yard that last summer. We’d sit in it and draw while our moms drank and our dads ran their crime empire together. Back then we didn’t understand our wealth was built on a mountain of blood and violence—not consciously, anyway. But I think we felt the poison. Aleksio would draw robot cars. I would draw horses. Maybe we were both imagining escape.
Our link is still there. It has to be. “You’re not going to kill me, Aleksio.”
A muscle in his jaw fires.
“I know who you really are. I know your beautiful heart.”
“Not a theory you wanna test.”
“Maybe it’s not a theory you want to test.”
He looks at me straight on. So cold. “People change, Mira, and sometimes they lose their fucking soul.”
The honesty of his words hits me. Being around juvenile court means I’ve seen firsthand the way innocent kids can be robbed of hope, made into monsters. Predators. But there’s always some sliver of humanity in them left. I have to believe that to do what I do.
We were nine when I watched Aleksio’s little casket get lowered into the ground. Not too late to turn a kid dark.
I can’t believe he’ll kill me—I refuse to believe it. But what about Dad? Whether he finds Kiro or not, he won’t have a choice—not after the way he treated him today. You don’t take shots at Aldo Nikolla and his daughter unless you’re willing to go all the way.
I examine his sooty lashes. His dark brows. So familiar.
He eyes our mansion, like he hates the mansion itself. The muscle guys melt off to the sides, to the cars. He can’t possibly think Dad had any involvement in what the Valcheks did. And what’s up with Little Vik—Viktor? The Russian accent, the barbarian attitude.
“If Dad had anything to do with sending your brothers away, it was to save their lives. Don’t be dense, Aleksio—think about this. Everyone knows it was a Valchek hit.”
He says nothing.
I suck in a breath. “Leksio D, Leksio D, slowest runner you’ll ever see.” I don’t know why I say it. A stupid taunt from the cobwebs of my memory.
His glare is cold as steel. “You need to concentrate on not pissing me off, and you definitely need to stop acting like I’m the boy you remember.”
A familiar roar sounds from behind me. I spin around.
Viktor and some other scary guy pull up in Dad’s pearl-green Maserati convertible.
From behind me, Aleksio says, “You especially need to be careful with Viktor. He wasn’t raised right.”
Somebody comes up and puts a duffel into Aleksio’s hand.
Aleksio takes my shoulder and pushes me toward the car.
“Did you get my coffee mug?” I ask.
Aleksio turns to the guy. The guy nods.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You think I got it to be nice, Kitten?” He yanks open the back door and shoves me in, then crowds in next to me. “You should never let your enemies know what you care about.”
I buckle my seatbelt. “You’re not my enemy.”
He reaches out and pushes my hair off my forehead, tucking it behind my ear. “I’m the most dangerous enemy you’ll ever have because every time you look at me, you see somebody good. Every time you look at me, you fool yourself about what I really am.”
My pulse races. The boy I knew never felt dangerous like this.
“What are you, then?”
Aleksio says nothing as Viktor pulls out. He turns to watch our house as we head down the long, stately drive.
Technically his house, now that he’s back from the dead. There’s something strange about the way he keeps his eyes fixed there. Then he takes out his phone and pulls up some kind of app. “You ready?” he asks.
“For what?” I ask.
He nods at the house. “Watch.”
I twist around. “What am I watching?”
He pushes a button on his phone. There’s a loud pop from inside of the house, and then two more, and then a roar and a flash. Instinctively I duck as the place goes up in a flaming fireball—several of them. Heat blasts my face even as far away as we are. I touch my hair to make sure it’s not ablaze as flames rage through. Nearby treetops catch fire, too.
“What have you done?” I whisper, horrified. Our beautiful mansion. Destroyed.
“Is that a rhetorical question?” he asks.
“Our home.”
“Not anymore.” There’s a note of warning in the way he says it. Not anymore. Don’t push him.
I’m too stunned to answer.
He holds out his hand. “Purse.” I hand it over, and he goes through it. He throws out my phone and my mace, then hands the purse back to me.
Life as I know it burns behind us.
Aleksio puts on a pair of aviator shades, cutting himself off from me there in the windy back seat, dark freckle on his right cheekbone like a tiny dark jewel. He’s right next to me, but a million miles away, his curls like dusky flags, slapping in the wind and sun.
I shouldn’t want him to look at me again. I shouldn’t want to see his eyes, to feel that intensity. He’s no longer that boy I knew, seeing impossible things in the clouds—I understand that, now.
We head south on the highway, and I press him about my father. He’ll tell me only that he’s alive, and that they’re planning on keeping him that way.
For now. He doesn’t have to add that part. We both know it’s there.
Dad.
Dad promised me that he’d gone legit over the past decade, but I’m not stupid. If he’s legit, it’s only as part of a relationship with guys like Bloody Lazarus, who runs the bad stuff now. Less stress for Dad’s heart.
The wind presses his dark suit to his chest, outlining his muscles, seeming almost to caress them. Now and then he texts.
We’re heading for Chicago, right into the center of Dad’s operations. Right where Lazarus probably is.
The miles fly by.
Just over the Illinois line we pull off at a gas station attached to a trucker store, a lone outpost at the center of weedy fields. I think about my chances of making a break for it. No way would Aleksio have muscle in this area, ready to step out of the weeds.
Or would he? He’s twenty-eight now. He’s been off building his army—that’s what you do when you’re readying to go up against a man like my father.
They all get out. I get out, too, just checking how far my leash extends. Viktor starts filling up the car. Aleksio gives the other guy money and writes a list of things he wants from the market inside.
Tito, they call him. Tito wears a winter-type hat over his hair, which would be jet black if it weren’t bleached at the tips.