Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(34)

Fucking Valerie. She’s the shit.

Already her moves have been helping me. She’s become my secret weapon. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little infatuated with her. She’s hot in her picture, too. But I need to concentrate on the task at hand.

Valerie says that a leader who uses fear has a limited shelf life. Fear is effective at first, but the team will begin to chafe under the yoke of fear. I need to show them strength and understanding.

I sat there patiently as she delivered this particular message over our Skype connection, complete with a mixed metaphor that puts me on a shelf driving an oxen team. I’ve learned not to point out Valerie’s mixed metaphors.

She’s wrong about fear not being effective. Still, I can use this.

Cue the anger. I put my hand on Charles’s shoulder, there in his messy office. “He will hurt,” I say. We’re in agreement there—the guard does need to hurt.

Charles seems to like this. So I start riffing. “We’re going to find him,” I say calmly. “And he is going to f*cking beg to die. He is going to scream for me to end his life for what he did to you.”

Charles nods. Valerie would be proud that I’m getting Charles’s buy-in like this.

“And then I’m going to bring your nun back. Together we’ll make Valhalla better and stronger.”

“I need her unharmed,” he says. “If she’s harmed…”

“That’s our goal,” I say.

Heaven forbid she should be harmed before Charles can exercise his psychotic desires on her.

It’s all so f*cking exhausting.

It would be so much easier to squeeze the life out of Charles, what with his ridiculous nun fetish, which manages to be both pedestrian and absurd at the same time.

Valerie’s website says that part of her job is being an executive confidante. She tells me she’s there as my sounding board for confidences large and small, but Charles with his nun-killing fetish probably isn’t the type of thing she has in mind.

I simply described Charles as a manager whose personality I’m not crazy about. Sometimes I think Valerie would get it, how really ridiculous and unimaginative the nun thing is, but she would fixate on the moral aspect of it to the exclusion of everything else. That would be so Valerie.

Anyway, the team is watching me for signs of how I’ll champion them, so I’m making this thing about supporting Charles and the Valhalla team. Right there I can f*cking see it working. Charles looks at me like I’m a warrior on his side instead of a vicious thug who shouldn’t be running the massive criminal empire that is the Black Lion clan.

Lazarus 2.0 is a warrior for his people, Valerie once said. I like that. The 2.0 is cheesy, yeah, but when Valerie says it, it’s not cheesy. When I complain about my antisocial image within the organization, she encourages me to invent a story for myself. Maybe you were antisocial because that’s what the role needed. Now you’re not. You’re a man who rises to the occasion.

Valerie’s excitement is infectious at times.

I sometimes wonder what will happen if the nun turns up dead. It was special for Charles that this woman actually was a nun, even though she wasn’t an American nun. Can I find another nun? Will Charles accept another nun in her place? Is a hot nun like a puppy to a serial killer like Charles, where you can’t just substitute them? Or is a hot nun more like a cookie, where one is as good as another? What’s the more “champion of Charles” move?

More stuff that I can’t ask Valerie.

First things first. Find the nun.

I want the nun back, and not just for Charles’s sake. The nun’s combination of blonde hair poking teasingly from her ridiculous head scarf and the way she never seemed to stop praying stoked the fervor and the bidding like I never saw. The rising price on her made her an excellent price anchor to the other girls, meaning she made them look cheap by comparison and raised the bidding all over. She also greatly raised the site’s notoriety.

“You questioned the customer yourself?” I ask Charles. “The German who was here when the guard took her?”

Charles nods.

Charles would’ve been emotional, though, focused on his nun. He might not have been able to detect a lie. I may not have a very high emotional IQ—this per Valerie—but I can cut through a lie like nobody else. I see clues nobody else sees.

Emotion makes people stupid. That’s why I’m smart.

I need my hands on that German. “I’d like his contact information,” I say. “Just in case.”

Charles goes to his laptop and pulls up the spreadsheet.

Nuns—please. Right?

That was his deal with Aldo Nikolla, though—he got to run his nun mania through Valhalla in lieu of payment. It makes him cheap, effective, and invested. Valerie would be proud.

He scribbles on a slip of paper and hands it over. “We don’t think he has it in him,” Charles says.

“People surprise you. But don’t worry. This is our f*cking town.” I was about to say “my f*cking town,” but I changed it at the last second. “Our f*cking town.”

He’s grateful.

Valerie. I’m getting addicted to her. So often I wish I could bring her into the mix, but I have to remind myself she’s an executive coach, not a consigliore. Bringing Valerie in would be like wearing my shoe as a hat. Or would it?