Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(57)

“You had to, then. He would’ve blown all that careful work.”

“Tanechka up?”

“Yes, and she asked for vodka.”

I suck in a breath. Only the old Tanechka would ask for vodka. “You gave her some?”

He looks worried. “I hope it’s okay.”

I clap a hand on his cheek. “Of course, Pityr. She can have all the vodka she wants. Anything she wants.”

“Except a Bible.”

“Right. Did she say anything else?”

“No. Just to bring her the bottle of vodka.”

“Not even a glass?”

Pityr shakes his head.

Tanechka. I take the stairs three by three.

I hear the weeping in the hall. I burst into the bedroom. “Tanechka?”

She’s curled up in front of the fire, cheeks streaked with tears, bottle in one hand, volume of poems in the other. “Is this how I would overcome the killing?”

I go to her and kneel. I try to take the book from her, but she won’t let me have it.

“It’s in the darkness and squalor of his cell that he most feels free,” she says. “The prisoner feels such beautiful freedom and goodness because it’s what he can never have again. So beautiful to him because it’s so far away. It’s how I feel now, drifting so far from the convent.”

I stroke her hair, heart breaking. I get a crazy thought—what if I took her back there?

For a moment, I imagine how good it would feel to grant her that wish, to make her happy. Just for a moment, though. I would never do it. I’m not a good man.

She clutches the book and the bottle to her breast. So like Tanechka. A pale, beautiful creature, feeling so wildly. So deeply.

I sit and draw her to me, holding her. Times like these, I would just be there. She would rage or cry and I would sit with her and kiss off her tears.

“It’s never an easy thing, killing.”

“Answer me, Viktor. Is this how I’d overcome it?” she asks between sobs.

“No, Tanechka. You can never overcome it. That was never the goal.”

“What then?” she asks.

I settle her against me and take the bottle from her fingers. I drink. “This poem of Vartov, it let you feel the wound, the darkness, but you knew there was something good, too. Something nice somewhere else.”

She listens, a silent, deadly flower.

“When you’re a killer, you have to find a way to stay human. That’s the thing.”

“How did you stay human?” she asks.

You, I want to say. I don’t. “Best I could.”

She sniffs. It sounds almost like a soft laugh.

I drink some more. I want to be drunk like her.

“Some men in our gang would grow hard with killing. A crust and a shell. The kind of people where, when they walk into a restaurant, nobody wants to be near them. Not because they’re scary, but because they’re… oni zhutkiy.” I can’t think of the American word for it. Maybe yucky.

I feel her smile.

“There were many in our gang we didn’t like. We didn’t like to have to work with them. We preferred to work together, you and I.”

“You think we were a superior class of killers?”

I twirl my finger in her hair. “I don’t know. I think it is always better to feel it than to be a shell against it.”

She snorts. Does she understand how like Tanechka she is being?

“I think if we didn’t stay human like that, we couldn’t have felt the love for each other that we did. We were hard to the world, but human to each other.”

“I feel sad,” she says. “I’m sorry you can’t have your old Tanechka back.”

It breaks my heart that she says it. “You’re not so different from her,” I say. “As the old Tanechka, you believed in things so fiercely. When a plan went wrong or when one of our gang was wounded, you’d hang on to hope after everybody else lost their faith. You’d hang onto grudges, too…” I pause.

The old Tanechka was not so forgiving, but this one is.

What if I did tell her? What if I confessed?

I hand her the bottle, and she takes another drink. Is this the nun drinking, or is it Tanechka?

“I want an update on Valhalla. Have you rescued my sisters there yet?”

“We’re close,” I say.

“It’s taking too long. I can’t stop thinking about them.”

“I’ve told you why it can’t be instantaneous.”

“It’s making me mad.”

“I know.”

A long silence. It’s a good silence. We always could be silent together.

“You know what else is the same, lisichka?”

“What?”

“You always saw the sky. You were always looking up. You’d point things out to me. ‘Look at that cloud, Viktor. Look at the sunset. Look at the sky, how blue, how pale it becomes at the edges.’ You’re still looking up. As a nun.”

“Almost a nun,” she says.

“As almost a nun.”

I think, suddenly, that she’s beautiful in her doomed desire to be a nun. She’s like a fish, swimming and swimming in a tiny dark bowl with us other fish, imagining a beautiful ocean beyond. And then one day she leaps out, escapes the confines of that little bowl, finds a new land.