Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(48)

She picks the sugared lemon off the fluffy pastry. Only half comes up, but she puts it in her mouth and sucks with keen concentration. Then she breaks off a corner and eats it.

My f*cking heart soars. Tanechka loves food. Back when we were together, she had more meat on her bones than this nun. Better for fighting, better for f*cking. Still, she’s beautiful to me. When we were together I’d always be holding her hand, touching her arm. I loved the feel of her skin. Sometimes I couldn’t believe she was mine.

“Drink your champagne,” I say, taking a sip from my own glass, though it’s not my kind of drink.

“I really would rather have water. Or tea.”

“Maybe so, but you’ll drink champagne instead. Jesus lets you drink wine, doesn’t he?”

She stares at the fire. “It’s not about that.”

“You’ll drink it, Tanechka, or I’ll climb on top of you and press your hands above your head and dribble it into your mouth little by little.”

“I’ll close my lips.”

“You think I can’t get around that?”

In truth, I probably can’t, but she doesn’t know. There are some advantages to her lack of memory.

“I’ll stretch out warm on top of you and make you drink, little by little. Maybe I’ll tie your hands. You always loved that.” I take a sip. “It’s a slightly perverted way to drink champagne but very erotic.”

She eyes her glass. If only I could get her to take a sip, the battle is half-won. She won’t stop. It’s how she is.

“You’ll enjoy the way I help you drink it,” I say. “I’ll move on top of you in a way that you’ll find very pleasurable.”

She takes up her glass, finally—and sips.

Yes.

She holds it in front of her face, regarding it with just a tinge of wonder. Staring at the bubbles. Pink champagne. An old friend. Does she remember the taste?

“See? It’s hardly strong at all.” I take a lemon wedge and break off part. “You first had this champagne in Hotel National off Red Square. I wore my best suit—not like this one, but a fine one, the sort to fool people who see such things. We knew how to blend, you and I. You wore a pink skirt suit—you called it your Taylor Swift outfit. You had a picture of her, and you’d style your hair like hers when we would go out pretending to be American newlyweds, our favorite cover.”

I stare at the bubbles in my own glass, remembering.

“The time you first tasted this, we were in the hotel bar hoping to pick up a trail on somebody. We had rings. We had the look right, but we didn’t know what to order for drinks.” I fight to keep my face neutral as she sips again. “We knew that vodka would give us away as Russians. ‘What would Taylor Swift drink?’ you whispered to me. You ordered pink champagne to go with your outfit. I had a Manhattan.”

She’s silent for a while. Then, “Did you pick Manhattan for its name?”

“Of course,” I say. “But it was wrong. Too sweet. A cherry in it. Not right.”

Again she sips. Faraway eyes. Marveling over the taste, perhaps.

“You’re a million times more beautiful than Taylor Swift.”

She frowns. “Were we there to kill somebody?”

“Just scare,” I say. “We followed them to their room and did a push-in.”

“We hurt them?”

I pause, but I won’t lie to her. “There were four others in the room we didn’t expect.”

“What happened?”

“We handled them.”

“Six against two?”

“Numbers like that were never a problem for us.” I keep my eyes on the fire as she sips again. “Remember that colorful cube I gave you at the picnic yesterday?”

She says nothing, but I can see she remembers. She itched to finish it. She probably still does.

I swirl the liquid in the glass. “We used to love the Rubik’s Cube. We each had one. We’d do them side by side, up on the Borodinsky Bridge. We’d race. We came to see scenarios as Rubik’s Cubes—planes of action moving this way and that. Our thinking was very aligned in this way. We could hold even a large group when we went to it as a Rubik’s Cube. Five men and a woman in a hotel room. That was nothing to us.”

“Did we hurt them?”

“Just one. But not so badly.”

She hurt one, actually. A man. She dislocated his shoulder while I held the others at gunpoint. That was always a bit of icing on the Tanechka cake, to have her do the hurting, delivering both pain and emasculation. “They were very bad people,” I say. “Worse than us. They needed a message from our superiors.”

The story troubles her. She drinks some more.

“Just a message,” I say.

“Great.”

“Afterwards we walked through the square, window-shopping, pretending to be these newlyweds still.”

“You can’t keep me chained up.”

“Maybe I like you chained up.”

She looks at me wistfully.

I take the volume of Vartov from the table. “I understand you have requested the Bible to read.”

She takes another lemon wedge.

“Too bad.” I open to “Cages.” “This poem, you loved it so much.”