Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(3)

I need to know everything.

I grab a barbell and do curls as I watch. Curls are good for keeping awake.

I cringe when I hear the knock at my door. Yuri. My best friend, one of the men I brought from Russia. I’ve been putting him off. Always too busy to see him. Now here he is. I cut the light on Tanechka’s screen. I can’t let him see. He’ll think I’m crazy, believing this is Tanechka.

Worse, he’ll tell my brother Aleksio. They would pull me from this mission. I would do the same if I were them.

“Come in,” I say.

He walks in, addresses me in Russian. “What are you doing?”

I nod at the barbell.

“Do you have your phone off or what? You’re not answering.”

I grab my phone and see that it’s dead. “Ah.” I plug it in.

“Chto eta…” He gestures at the monitors. He wants to know what’s up with the monitors.

“Preparing,” I say. “Getting ready. Confirming the relationship of rooms. I’m more convinced than ever that Nikki’s room is in the center of the basement.” I show him my diagram, the gap where I believe the server closet is.

“Well, you look like f*cking hell.” He switches to English with “f*cking hell.” More and more he speaks in English. He opens the curtains.

I squint.

“Aleksio wants to know why you missed the meeting.”

“I’m getting ready to be software engineer Peter.” I move Tanechka’s laptop down alongside the others so Yuri won’t think it’s special. “I’ve arranged the monitors according to where I believe they are, relative within the structure.”

“Mmm.” Yuri comes round and looks. In Russian, he says, “It’s a simple infiltration. Do you need such a thorough layout?”

He knows I don’t. My job is simple: get spyware on the server. If I can’t do that, I must get to one of the girls’ computers. I wave off the question. “I’m hoping for a clue to the location of this place…”

“We’ll know the location when you get there,” Yuri says.

“Best to know it ahead of time.”

He furrows his brow. “Does Aleksio think this is the best use of time?”

“What are you saying?” I sound belligerent. Unreasonable.

He comes near. “Chto eta?” he asks again.

Insolently, I grab a vodka bottle. Beluga, our favorite. “A Boy Scout is always prepared.” Yuri loves the American phrases. When I remember it’s morning, I put the bottle down.

“No, something’s wrong.” Yuri’s looking at the monitors. I know the instant he zeroes in on the laptop with the dark screen. He looks from me to the screen and back. He wants to know what he’ll see if he lights it. The question is, does he want to know enough to defy me?

When he makes his move, I pull him back. “Is this my operation or yours?”

“What’s on the dark screen?”

“Idi nahuy,” I say. “Go f*ck,” it means in Russian. “This isn’t your home.”

“Chto eta?”

“I don’t have to explain anything to you.”

Yuri is fast for such a large man, and he’s been getting a proper amount of sleep, unlike me. No surprise, then, that the second I release him, he’s able to get to the monitor and turn the screen on. I can’t stop him.

“A nun.” He eyes me suspiciously.

“Satisfied?” I sit back down. “It disgusts me. Auctioning off her virginity.”

“You don’t give a f*ck about nuns.”

“Anything else?” I demand.

“No…” He turns back to the screen. And then he sees it. “Wait,” he whispers. “Wait…”

“What now? Did you come here for a reason or…”

“Her hair…”

My heart pounds. Does he see it? “What?”

“Her hair. The cheekbone.” He turns to me in shock. “She reminds you of her. This is why you watch?”

“Look really close, brat,” I say. He is not my brat—my brother—by blood, but he is a brother in every way. We came up together in the orphanage in Moscow before the men of the Bratva took us and trained us.

Again he looks. How can he not recognize her? It makes me crazy. I loop an arm around his shoulder. “Don’t you see it? Look, Yuri. Look harder.”

He studies my eyes instead. “What?”

“Look at her!”

He looks at her.

“Do you see?” I demand.

“What?”

“It’s her.”

He turns to me.

“Look at her, not me!”

“It’s not possible, Viktor.”

“It’s her.”

“Do you have a shot of her? Her face?”

“No.” I let him go, and I kneel in front of the monitor. “She never turns.”

“You haven’t even seen her face?”

“I don’t have to. It’s her. It’s her body. Her style of movement. Look.”

He doesn’t look at her. He looks at me—sadly. “It cannot be her, staryy drug.” Staryy drug—old friend, he calls me. “You know that.”