Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(26)

“It starts with the stare. Ends in blood,” Mischa says. “Tanechka was never one to let a slight pass.”

“The girl could hold a grudge,” Yuri says. “And you always knew.”

I smile.

Mischa exchanges glances with Yuri.

“What?” I demand.

“Do you have a plan for when she remembers?” Yuri asks.

I shrug.

“She is not always so reasonable,” Yuri says. “She was a…how do you say…a ‘rip out your intestines, ask questions later’ sort of girl.”

“It’ll be fine,” I say.

“You don’t want her armed when she remembers,” Mischa says.

“You think I don’t know how to manage Tanechka?” I leave the table and go upstairs to get her.

Tanechka doesn’t stir when I knock at the door.

“Tanechka,” I say. “It is dinnertime.”

“Will you allow me to contact my sisters in Ukraine?”

I tell her no, but I will break the door open if she doesn’t unlock it.

She comes and flings it open. She still wears the severe black robe, buttoned up to the neck, and the black scarf tied around her chin.

Behind her I see that she has cleared off a bookshelf and placed the icon of Jesus on a cloth on one of the low shelves. I cringe to think of her praying to it. Kissing the feet of Jesus.

“Dinner,” I say.

She just stares at me with those deep blue eyes. Wary, but hungry, I think.

“With friends. Please.”

Reluctantly she comes down. Everybody stands when I lead her in. Tanechka is gorgeous in the candlelight, and the wisps of blond hair that sneak out from her scarf glow like white gold. She greets her old bratki politely but without recognition.

Tanechka. It feels dangerous to hope. Still I hope with every fiber of myself. I pour her a vodka.

“Thank you, no,” she says. “Water, please.”

Nikki rolls her eyes.

Water with dinner is not her way, but I pour her a water. My Tanechka does not like to be told what to do. She turns to questioning Nikki about contacting her family. She seems to know a lot about it. I gather Nikki’s a runaway.

“Yeah, I’m good as is,” Nikki says.

Back in Russia we loved to have wild dinner parties, but this Tanechka will not drink vodka, and she wears a nun’s robe and head scarf to dinner.

She’s here in body at least. And the place looks so much like our old place. We sit around the long table, and I serve. The men start to eat.

“Aren’t we going to give thanks?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “We don’t do that.”

I pass Mira’s plate, find her glaring at me. She thinks I should play along? Hell no.

Tanechka gives thanks on her own, silently, head bowed.

Her prayer grates on me. The article on amnesia I read said to surround her with familiarity, and prayer is not a familiar part of our old life.

We eat. I turn the conversation to Sky World, a run-down amusement park outside Moscow we used to go to as kids. Tanechka does not remember it.

Yuri has the party laughing with his descriptions of the wooden roller coaster, and then the swinging platform ride. The rides at Sky World, they were so dangerous. Our stories make for a jolly table. Even Tanechka smiles. Her smile fills me with so much happiness it nearly spills over into tears.

The rides are especially shocking to Aleksio, Mira, Nikki, and Tito—this is part of what makes it funny.

“You Americans,” Yuri snarls. “With your smooth plastic playgrounds like easy chairs.” We argue about this, but Tanechka doesn’t seem amused anymore, as if she tamped down her pleasure. She says almost nothing through the rest of the meal. The silent treatment, as Aleksio would call it. She wishes to go to the church, of course.

Mira asks her questions now and then about her life in the convent, and Tanechka answers politely. Always a short answer. Yes or no, if possible. She thinks we’re no better than the brothel, but I saw her laugh. The old Tanechka peeking through. I’ll have her back. I’ll make her come back.

The one time she speaks up, it’s to tell us to hurry up about the brothel—this she says at dinner, even though we have gone around on it very many times.

“You should have left me and taken them. I would’ve been fine.” She waves her hand, taking in the table. “All of this. I’m grateful, but I don’t need it like the other women. I would’ve endured what those women couldn’t. I was most fit of all of them to endure what was to come.”

I throw back a glass of vodka, welcoming the clean, hard burn. “We will rescue the women.”

Aleksio explains about the police being compromised. That it would be shut down only provisionally and likely moved if we don’t strike deep into the network. “Think of it as a ceiling,” he says to her. “Merely closing this brothel is like fixing a leak in the ceiling by painting over the stain.”

“You tell it to the virgin there awaiting the man who bought her. Frightened, alone, cut off from all she knows. What would she say about your ceiling?”

I bite back a smile. She is glorious. Yes, this is the nun speaking, this nun like an enemy in Tanechka’s body, murmuring her stupid prayers, fingering her ridiculous prayer rope, but more and more this nun feels familiar.