He clicks off.
“Merry Christmas. We go at it your way. At least until Daddy wakes up. Not that we have any choice.”
I turn and look out at the dark lake, wanting for him not to ever see my face again. Wanting to never give him any bit of truth ever again.
Chapter Seven
Aleksio
It’s just before dawn when we get out to the house we took off a stockbroker who owes us. It’s a place that was owned by one of our loan shark clients up until six months ago. A nice spread in the middle of a lot of trees maybe an hour out of the city.
A good place to lie low.
Best of all, nobody knows about it, which is good, considering the kind of firepower that’s out on the streets right about now.
Our investigator checks in soon after. He’s tracked down the retired Worland Agency director to a farm in western Illinois, and he’s going out there. He feels sure this person has the key. He’ll do what it takes. I send one of my guys to help him.
We give Mira the nicest bedroom—the master. It has a sliding door to a patio, and she’s allowed to go out there as long as she behaves.
I go out for a run to clear my head. I should be getting new ideas to find Kiro, but all I think about is the feel of her mouth on my cock, and the way her hair felt in my fist.
Never have I felt this kind of connection to a woman before. The way she stands up to me. The way she peels back my layers.
I fucked her face, but I’m the one who got invaded.
I head back into the kitchen afterwards. Viktor’s in there. He tells me Aldo Nikolla is still out cold, and the investigator is still in transit.
The sound of her laughter jolts through my chest.
I look out the kitchen window and see her sitting out on the patio with Yuri and a couple of the other Russians.
She’s in jeans that are a size too large and a T-shirt knotted at the waist, thick hair in a ponytail high up on her head, cheerleader style. She and Viktor’s Russian guys seem to be joking around. She smiles at one point.
“We should put a stop to that.”
“She’s under control,” Viktor says.
Control isn’t the issue.
But I don’t have a good explanation for what the hell the issue is, so I turn away. “Did you offer her coffee? In the mug we brought from the mansion? And food?”
“She took coffee—in her mug. She says she won’t eat.”
“She needs to eat.”
Viktor shrugs. “A person can go weeks without food and be just fine.”
Of course he would say that. Even now, he sees three meals a day as an extravagance. “Not somebody like Mira.”
“Yes, somebody like Mira.” Viktor turns to me. “What a person can’t go without is sleep. You need to sleep.” He walks out.
Right. Sleep. A peaceful sleep for me is never going to happen. Not in this life. Every time I close my eyes, I’m right back there with Konstantin’s cigar-smelling fingers sealing my mouth like my life depended on it, keeping me quiet. The way my mother screamed when Lazarus caught her. Her terrorized eyes, reflecting in the window. The flash of the blade in Aldo Nikolla’s hands.
More laughter. They’re teaching her Russian. She repeats a phrase, trying to get it right. Her eyes are so big—they sometimes remind me of those Egyptian drawings from those tombs, except not fucked up and wrong. Her eyes are perfect.
I decide to make a proper breakfast. I inspect the refrigerator and identify all the ingredients for frittatas.
I dump paprika into the bowl, turning my attention to the meal I’m making, but she’s still a ghost on my skin. The gouges she made in my thighs burned while I ran. A good burn. She almost seemed into it. An act, I know. The human animal will do anything to survive, to help its own kind.
I slice a lemon and squeeze it into the mix.
Viktor comes back in, and I know what he’s going to say the second he looks at the meal I’m cooking up. “Seriously, brat? When I see all this”—he waves his hand around the kitchen—“I do not think that this is a man who plans to show that video to a girl’s father as she cries.”
“Have I ever not done what I had to do?” I give him a hard stare. It’s simple to do the hard, bad things. You learn to turn something off. Make yourself dense, like cement, and just do it. This is knowledge we share.
One nod. “Okay, then.”
I go back to work. “And there’ll be frittatas for you, too.”
He watches me work. His silence doesn’t fool me.
“What?” I ask.
He nods in the direction of the patio. “You can never have her. She’s so far out of the game…”
I know he’s right, but all I can think of is how she looked up at me while she sucked my cock. The tightness of her lips, the slide of her tongue, the way all that derision cranked the temperature to nine hundred degrees. Pure hot flame.
And then I made it ugly.
“You can never have her,” he continues. “If you let yourself think it, it is only pain.”
“Are you questioning me here?”
“I am watching you make frittatas.”
I made them for him once when one of his top guys was killed. I told him it was my magic meal.
Viktor takes his gun and cleaner out. “Princess in the castle. Her father took our things and gave them to her. She does not deserve anything good. You should tell her what he did. What you saw.”
He saw it too, of course, but he was just two. “We’re taking enough away from her,” I say.
He starts taking apart the action.
“Not near the food,” I say, waving at Viktor’s gun oil. “I don’t want it picking up the smell.” I slice the cherry tomatoes into halves. They’re easier to eat that way.
“She is the enemy.”
“Your guys out there are chummy enough with her.”
He snorts. “They’re teaching her lines from Russian gangland movies. They think it is funny.”
I go near where he works. They’re all out there twirling their weapons now, teaching her how to do it. “What the hell are they giving her a weapon for?”
“Relax. They would not give her something loaded.”
Of course not.
“They’re teaching her to be Sergei Kazan. In the movies, he twirls his gun like that and says, ‘You go ahead and try it, baby, and I’ll fill you so full of lead it’ll be coming out of your ass.’ It’s funny if you know Sergei Kazan. Very brutish. Teaching her these lines. Like teaching a cat to talk.”
I glare.
He smirks. “What? They’re bored. You want to let them fuck her instead? I’m sure they would like to make a movie for her father, too.”
In a flash I have him out of his chair and against the wall.
“You see?” he says, panting. “You let yourself think you can have her.”
My blood races. I watch myself acting messed up, putting him against the wall, nose to nose with my brother.
His gaze is steady.
Damn. I lay off.
He stands, not bothering to straighten himself back up. “Konstantin did some things very wrong, I think. He should not have shown you so very many pictures of that girl. You watched her grow up.”