Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(45)

Something wicked inside me comes to attention. I can feel the shiver of that snap, the weight of it. The sharp power of it. My mouth goes dry.

“You feel it, don’t you? It’s just like yours.”

I look away.

“You could do a lot of damage with one of these things.” He cuts into the pear. I watch it drip, so juicy, this pear. He passes me a slice.

I shake my head.

“Eat it or I’ll sit on top of you and shove it into your mouth.”

I sigh and take it, not wanting to give him any more opportunities for contact. It’s powerful enough to have him near me, to have this electricity dancing between us. I take the pear slice. It’s delicious, like all of the food he feeds me.

He slices another, then looks up at me and smiles his charming smile.





Chapter Sixteen




Viktor


She recognized it instantly. Her favorite weapon, the R-37 with the silver barrel handle. It wasn’t so easy to acquire. She loved this blade, my Tanechka. So dangerous with the pika.

She has her hair pulled back in a ponytail, one strand curling around her face. She takes my breath away. She pushed away the rug, refusing comfort. So like her. I love her with everything.

I cut another slice—slowly—letting her feel it, then I pass it over. “You think you’re being unlike the old Tanechka by holding fast to the nun identity. What you don’t understand, Tanechka, is that you were just as fierce in your old beliefs. You had such a strong code of honor. We all did, but you were different. The most fierce. The most loyal.”

“You won’t change my mind,” she says.

I hand her another slice. She loved a sweet pear.

“I wanted to kill your father for the trouble he caused you growing up. So many times I wanted to kill him. But you wouldn’t condemn him for what he was. ‘He is my father,’ you’d say. ‘He does the best he can.’” I snort. “I wanted to gut him like the junk fish he was.”

She regards her pear slice thoughtfully. Does she remember anything at all from then?

I take a slice for myself. “We had the opposite childhoods in many ways. You had a bad father who hung onto you as if his life depended on it. You’d have been better off in an orphanage. I was in the orphanage, and I wanted a family. I’d be sent to these beautiful homes for a test, but they’d always send me back. Defective.”

I say it casually, hating that it hurts still. I slice off another, hand it to her. She takes it without a word, seeming to listen intently. It feels like old times, sitting side by side in front of a fire. She chews thoughtfully. Does she remember at all?

“I was desperate to be wanted by a family. You were desperate to get out. Opposites.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s nothing. When you’re an orphan, a family is a blank screen where you project your dreams. It wouldn’t have worked out with me and a family.” I study her pale freckles in the firelight. She can’t choose to remember, I know this, and the internet says so. But she seems so much like the woman she once was. Like a hand, reaching across to me.

“It must’ve hurt, to be sent back.”

I shrug. “I’d get a few nice meals out of it, at least. Sleep in a nice bed. But the family puts their dreams on the child, too, and I could never measure up. They’d see that I wasn’t the kind of boy they hoped for.” Why am I telling her this? The conversation makes me remember the shame of it. Going to the family so full of hope, only to be thrown away.

That rejection was the worst kind of ache.

I find her watching me. I wipe the blade and retract it. Then I flick it out. Does she remember the sound? The pika was second nature to us. The best thing about a nice sharp blade is that you don’t have to cut with it; you merely have to touch the person with it. The blade does the cutting for you.

“Yuri was adopted out for almost three years. I couldn’t fault him for leaving. I was sad to see him go, though. Wild to lose him. He got nearly three years with a family.”

“And you stayed.”

“Yuri has more impulse control.” I smile as though it’s amusing. “I’d get things into my head, and I’d burn with them. I’d forget everything, and I’d burn to correct this slight or prove something. Like a matchstick, with my head on fire, burning with anger. With injustice.” I lower my voice to a whisper. “If I thought somebody betrayed me, I would feel as if my head was on fire.”

“Do you think it’s because you were in the room when your parents were killed?”

My heart pounds. “That has nothing to do with anything.”

She contemplates the fire with sad, faraway eyes. Then, “You shouldn’t be ashamed to feel deeply. You call it impulse control, but maybe you simply feel things more.”

“You shouldn’t make excuses for me.”

“Many people let you down, abandoned you,” she says. “You were a boy desperate to be loved.”

I concentrate on cutting the next slice, but my heart is cracking. So Tanechka. “Savior of puppies. Children. The unloved. That was you.”

“And then I came along, and I loved you. But then I left you, didn’t I?”

I look at her, heart thundering.

“You thought I was dead. That’s like leaving you.”