Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(16)

Chapter Six




Viktor


Aleksio has me help him with the money-laundering surveillance and the plans for the heist. He thinks I need something to focus on other than Valhalla. Maybe he’s right.

Still I watch Tanechka and track the feeds. I sleep perhaps a little more, but I have to watch her. Sometimes Yuri helps, sometimes Mischa. These brothers of mine understand.

When two weeks are up, I win the virginity auction on the street urchin named Nikki for a mere $2,678, which means it’s time for us to focus there.

The men who run the brothel told me what to expect: that I’ll be put in the back of a van and blindfolded for the trip, which will last two hours. I’ll be checked for transmitting devices, weapons, and anything else suspicious. I’ll have a maximum of two unobserved hours with this Nikki, during which time I may do anything aside from striking, choking, maiming, or killing her.

I put in my request for her to be tied and gagged, and I meet the Valhalla van at the bus station downtown as instructed. I’m posing as a German businessman with very little English. I wear a fat suit, a blond wig, and a fake tattoo on my neck. Aleksio teased me that disguises such as this are so KGB, so Russian spy. In fact they are. Some of the old men in the Russian mafiya got their start in the KGB. We learned much from them.

I’m instructed to hold out my arms. They bring out the wand. Relief flows through my heart when I see the wand is the type we predicted they would use. The tools I’ve brought are hidden in my fat suit, encased in a pouch with a device designed to manipulate the waves and send them back in a format that tells the men that I carry no hardware or no transmitting devices of any kind.

I promised Aleksio that I would abort the mission if they tried with any other type of wand. It was a difficult promise to make.

I ride alone in the back of a windowless van. I take my blindfold off, tracking turns, listening to the route, forming a map in my mind. The trip takes two hours, though I’m quite sure we haven’t left the metro area.

I’m even more sure of this after they blindfold me again and lead me out; the feel of the air alone tells me we’re near Lake Michigan.

I’m led into a structure that smells of new lumber and taken downstairs, as I knew I would be.

We stop, and they remove my blindfold. I’m in a hall in a finished basement flanked by two men, both armed. Guards are stationed on each end of the hall, also armed. Gray carpet underfoot, fluorescent lights above. Tanechka could make a bomb of such lights.

I remind myself she doesn’t need my help.

A manager of some kind with a thick white beard comes up and explains the rules to me. He, too, is armed. I nod, keeping my posture humble as I make my assessments: a corridor, exits at either end, five doors on either side. I merge this with the map I created in my head from watching the girls, noting where they are relative to the sun.

Tanechka is up and over.

I can feel her—that’s the worst part. My soul orients to her as a flower strains toward the sun.

The manager tells me the rules in slow, careful English. He wants to make sure I understand. I assure him that I understand, I repeat everything back to him, working to get the full sense of the place before I’m sequestered away. Carpet all around is good. Everything muffled.

I remind myself of the promise I made to Aleksio—unless Tanechka is in danger and needs me, I will not leave the parameters of my mission. I’ll plant the surveillance and get out. I will not go to her.

The burly guard shows me his watch. “Knock when you’re finished. If you use the full two hours, you’ll have a ten-minute warning.”

He opens the door. Nikki is inside, tied to a chair as I’d requested, glaring up at me. She grunts and protests from behind her gag.

The door shuts and I lock it, though I’m sure they can come in at any time. The room is frilly. Part of the fantasy. It disgusts me. The soundproofing looks good, though. This will work in my favor.

I turn my attention to Nikki in her white dress, rage in her eyes. Even muffled by the gag, her insults come through. She calls me a disgusting pervert with a small dick and so forth. An American.

“This is the last time I touch you,” I say to her. “Got it? But you must stay still.”

She doesn’t believe me. No surprise, but she’ll see. I take the ear plugs from my pocket and stick them into her ears, no easy feat with her head moving so wildly. Then I take the pillowcase and put it over her head. She writhes around, screams muffled.

I ignore her and check the room for cameras, running my fingers along the molding and the fixtures. They promise no cameras as a part of the terms of the auction, but one never knows.

I pull my tools from the pouch in my suit. The first thing I do is to I turn on the beacon so Aleksio and the others can get the location. Next, I use heat imaging equipment to plumb the walls in search of a mass of electronic equipment. If the server area doesn’t adjoin this room, my job is all the more difficult.

Ten feet down the wall to the west I pick up the telltale heat signs of servers. Good. I pull out my tiny circular saw, which runs from a battery pack. Very quiet. I move a dresser and cut a hole in the wall behind it. I run a cable through. I have only a rigid cable with which to maneuver a thumb drive into the port, something I practiced with our tech guy. Using these tools on the ends of rigid cables is like writing a message with a ten-foot-long pen—difficult, to say the least, and there is always the risk of toppling the stack. It takes me the better part of an hour to get the thing in.