“You’re beautiful,” he says. The freezing air chills my skin except where he puts his hand.
“I need to be in you.” He slides his fingers between my legs, and the feeling rises with every stroke. I think to tell him to stop, because it’s too much, too good. I’m moving with his fingers, fucking his fingers.
“Spread,” he gasps.
I do what he says. A condom wrapper crinkles. His hands are inside my folds, and then the fat knob of his cock is there, penetrating me, filling me completely. He feels huge, and I cry out. He thrusts in again and again, keeping hold of my hair, my shoulder, and I never want him to stop.
And out there is war, but in here I’m lost with the man who consumes me utterly. He thrusts into me, owning me, using me, loving me.
“Aleksio,” I say. His name is a velvet glove on my cheek.
He fucks me hard and deep, pushing me over the edge until my mind explodes with color and light. He shoves into me and groans until he unravels inside me.
The van rumbles on. We have this space for ourselves. For now.
Eventually he pulls out.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“North. Keep an eye on the guy who might have the lead on Kiro. Make sure nobody else is on him.”
“Get to him before Lazarus can get to him.”
“Lazarus knows nothing about him. It’s a good head start that we have here.”
“Wait—” I pull away. “You didn’t kill Lazarus.”
He looks grim. “No, I didn’t.”
“Lazarus helped kill your parents.”
No reply.
“You left him alive. You could’ve killed him right there.”
“Yeah, I might come to regret that.”
“Be serious. You spared Bloody Lazarus himself.”
“I looked into his eyes, and I thought about killing him. I wanted to. But I didn’t.”
“Why?”
His face is shrouded in shadow, but I feel his eyes on me. “I couldn’t,” he says simply.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Aleksio
I send three of my best guys to guard Konstantin and his nurse. I doubt Lazarus could ever find him, but I’m not taking chances.
Our group waits for Viktor and his guys in a mall parking lot an hour north of Chicago. They roll up in three black Mercedes SUVs, like matched black stallions. Viktor steps out of the lead vehicle.
“What the fuck?” I say.
“I’m done hotwiring cars, brat.” He tells me he paid cash for them. As if they were an impulse item, like chocolate mints at a grocery checkout. He’s getting into the role of returned prince, a crime royal with bank accounts to rival a small country. The role he was born to—the role we both were born to.
I can’t give him shit. Now that we’ve officially reappeared, we have access to millions of dollars our father hid away—offshore accounts Konstantin helped recover with the aid of our DNA and our fingerprints. It’s as if Dad hedged his bets against people who might betray us, only he certainly never suspected it would be Lazarus and Aldo Nikolla. Konstantin has a lawyer working on unearthing even more money.
Mira rolls her eyes at the flashiness. Mira. I love her in a way that feels too vast and huge to explain, and I know she loves me, too, but using the law to help create a more just society is her life. And I’m a mafia prince. Our paths run in opposite directions. I watch her standing there in the sunshine, loving her, trying not to think about that.
The group piles in and heads north to personally protect Noah, the social worker and our only link to Kiro. I have this sense that Kiro is up there somewhere, and I have this vision of riding back with him, three brothers together to finish this thing.
Eight hours later we arrive at the Sky Slope Hotel, a five-star resort outside of Duluth, Minnesota, the only luxury hotel for hundreds of miles. There’s a giant pine tree and a waterfall inside the ornate lobby. Light streams in from a sky-high glass ceiling.
We take over the top floor. I grab the best room for Mira and me—all white marble, green linen, and million-dollar views. China cups with fresh hot chocolate waiting for us on the table. She passes them up and goes to the window.
I close the door and walk up behind her, wrapping her tight. The Sky Slope is on a bluff, and you can see miles of endless wilderness with Lake Superior in the distance.
I’m guessing she’s focused on the scene out there, but my focus is on our reflection in the glass. There’s a haunted expression in Mira’s eyes that I’ve never seen before. Sure, I look like hell—my lip is puffy, and my eye is bruised—but my injuries will heal.
Mira’s injuries? I’m not so sure. It’s more than her dad dying or what he did to her mother. It’s what she did. Mira is a woman with a strong fucking code, and she broke it—she shot a guy. He’s not dead—we’ve been getting updates on him—but that doesn’t matter.
All those years of watching her, studying her, obsessing over her, I got to know all of her expressions. This haunted look is new. It chills me to the bone.
It comes to me, standing there, that protecting the woman I love isn’t about keeping her physically safe; it’s about protecting her soul. She can’t be in this war, not even on the sidelines. Protecting Mira means letting her go.
The realization is a cannonball in my gut.
It has to be done. I’m not going to execute Lazarus and his guys—I’m done with that old-world Albanian mountain vengeance, much to Konstantin’s dismay. But I still plan to destroy him and take back what’s ours. And I’ll break any law to rescue Kiro.
Mira can’t be anywhere near that. The look in her eyes tells me that.
She thinks it’s too dangerous to go, but I know it’s too dangerous for her to stay. I get that now, looking at her when she thinks nobody’s watching.
I rest my forehead on her shoulder, trying to get my shit together enough to figure out a plan, because I have the resources to keep her safe now—safe from me and my world.
I suck in a breath there at the window. Maybe this is what loving a person is. Loving them enough to rip your own heart out for them.
She turns in my arms. “Baby? What’s up?”
I kiss her. I don’t want her to see my face. I don’t want her to know I’m dying inside.
I leave her to settle in, and I head down the hall and tell Tito not to unpack. Ten minutes later we have a plan—he’s going to fly out to the Bronx, rent her a high-security place near her workplace, and put together a contingency of New York muscle to discreetly watch over her. He’ll get it all in place ASAP.
Once Tito’s on his way, Viktor and I settle in to plan. We put together teams to watch over Noah the social worker and monitor the area for signs of Lazarus or his guys. We work on our attack strategies. We’re like royalty in exile, there in that northern hotel, plotting our siege of the walled city.
The next day, Mira makes me go to a clinic and get a proper X-ray for my ankle. The doctor gives me a medical boot and tells me I’m lucky—I only have a hairline fracture.
We go out for a lavish lunch, and afterward we take a walk on a nearby nature trail, something I’m not supposed to do in my medical boot, but we don’t have much time left now. It’s strange—going on a date now, after we’ve been through a lifetime’s worth of shit together.