Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(39)

“They’re saying Lazarus is a decent leader. Everybody’s surprised.” He fills me in on the rumors that the rabid killer thing was only an act; now that he’s taken over the family, he’s clever, thoughtful.

Apparently one of the Russian guys heard Lazarus was giving bonuses to all young American Russian warriors who would defect to him. He tells me the American Russians are getting jumpy about it. And jumpy about the fighting that seems ready to erupt. There was peace until we came.

“We came into this neighborhood to get more solid with them. Blyad—what if we’re alienating them?”

Pityr shakes his head. “Dunno, brat.”

“If the wrong person defects, we’re f*cked.”

He nods.

Aleksio won’t like this. I point to the roof, the path Tanechka would take. “She’s going to try going high. You remember how well she could do that?”

“So fast and light,” he says. “The nun skirt’ll hinder.”

“She changed out of it.”

He raises his eyebrows.

“Keep a watch,” I say. “Don’t underestimate her. And call me if anything happens. Even insignificant.”

I call Yuri and Tito and tell them what’s happening. They need to be ready—especially with Lazarus’s people crawling around.

Aleksio is waiting at the Tiptop Diner some ten blocks away. I slide into the booth across from him and tell him what Pityr said about Bloody Lazarus. All the bratki rallying around him.

“I don’t get it. They’re just cool with the whole psycho thing?”

“They’re saying the psycho thing was an act,” I tell him. “They’re saying Bloody Lazarus became what he needed to when he was enforcer and now that he’s leader, he’s no longer this psycho.”

“So he’s gone from John Wayne Gacy to King Solomon?”

I shrug. I don’t know these names. I order orange juice.

“Fuck. The American Russians start losing guys to Bloody Lazarus?” he says once the waitress leaves.

“Back home, the only way out of the gang is feet first.”

Aleksio snorts. “We need to start bonding with them more. We need to start spreading more money around. And I missed that f*cking sit-down with Dmitri yesterday.”

“Blyad! You can’t miss meetings with him.” Dmitri is the leader of them.

“It was an emergency. I had to.”

“It’ll be seen as disrespectful.”

“We’ll do better,” he says.

I nod and look out the diner window. We are both anxious to hear about Kiro, but we don’t want to jinx it by discussing it. I ask about Konstantin. “I want him to meet Tanechka,” I say. “I never got to bring a girl home to my family. Konstantin, he’s the grumpy grandfather I never had. The grumpy Albanian grandpa with his shit Turkish coffee.”

“Shows you don’t know dick about coffee.” He checks his phone. The P.I. is late. A bad sign. “He’ll be here. Lazarus couldn’t know about him. He couldn’t.”

But anybody can know anything.

If Bloody Lazarus knows about our P.I., it means the P.I. is dead and they probably have the information he sought. And a way to Kiro.

I get my juice. I sip. “We could find Kiro today. That’s the other side of it.”

He looks at me with interest.

“What?”

“Look at you, Susie Sunshine.”

It is unlike me, I suppose, to look at the bright side, as they say. But Tanechka’s back. Anything’s possible.

“But you’re right. We’ll find him, and if he’s in a supermax, then we’ll be the first motherf*ckers to break a man out of a supermax.” He eyes me. “How is Tanechka?”

“Adjusting.” I picture her walking down the stairs in her regular clothes, hair fanned out over her shoulders. Eyes shining with challenge. It was almost her. “She knows about some of the…things she did.”

“Things. Meaning hits?” I nod. “Shit. How’s she taking it?”

“Not so good. I didn’t mean for her to know yet. At least she’s wearing normal clothes now. T-shirt and jeans. So nice to see her in that.”

He straightens. “She changed out of her nun’s outfit? How’d you get her to do that?”

“It wasn’t so voluntary.”

“Viktor, what the f*ck are you doing? What happened to surrounding her with familiar things and letting her go at her own pace?”

I shrug.

He sits back and unwraps a straw. “I didn’t respect what Mira wanted, and I almost lost her.”

“Your Mira was not in the home you bought for her kissing the feet of another man.”

He furrows his brow. “Another man?”

“Jesus.”

He gives me a look. “Dude.”

“What? You say I should respect her, this is about respect—respect of who Tanechka truly is. She wouldn’t want this. Tanechka would expect me to fight for her. I’d die to have her back in the world.”

“What if that is Tanechka?”

“It’s not. You didn’t know her. She deserves at least to remember who she was, so she can make a choice. Tanechka hated to be ignorant. She deserves to know everything of her life.”