Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(6)

Kiro is still out there somewhere. He probably doesn’t know we exist. Every second that goes by that we can’t find him, he’s in more danger.

Bloody Lazarus wants to kill him. Must kill him.

I text Viktor again. Nothing back.

Of course it’s good he got his own place. Good for Mira and me to have some privacy. And he’s making important bonds with the American Russian gang. That connection is part of how we’ll take down Bloody Lazarus, the man who helped slaughter our parents and send us brothers to the ends of the earth all those years ago.

Bloody Lazarus, who controls the empire that is rightfully ours.

Bloody Lazarus, who is hunting our baby brother Kiro as obsessively as we are.

Mira calls me from the back porch. I go out and find her in the hammock we put up. We’re living this secret suburban life, and it’s f*cking amazing and weirdly wholesome.

“Anything?” she asks.

“Still waiting. Sooooo….”

She screams as I climb into the hammock. I don’t tip us, though. I fit right in. I’m getting some specifically not-wholesome ideas, but she’s trying to read. I’m fine with that. I just lie there.

My phone pings. A text. I read it. A lead on the guy who might have Kiro. My whole mood lifts. “Fuck yes.”

Mira studies my face. “Is it what I think it is?”

“Could be.”

“Aleksio!”

I smile. “It’s not for sure—just a lead—but…”

She kisses me.

I call the P.I.

I haven’t seen Kiro since the night our parents were slaughtered in the nursery where my brothers and I once played. An old hit man hid me in a dark cubby while it happened. He held me there, hand over my mouth, arms like iron.

Baby Kiro cried while it happened, waving his fat arms as the blood spurted from our parent’s necks. Viktor was there, too, a screaming toddler. Bloody Lazarus and his boss took them both away. I was just nine.

Viktor and I learned just last month Kiro was adopted after that. When his piece-of-shit adoptive father couldn’t handle him, he dumped him in the wilderness. Eight years old. And not just any wilderness—the f*cking Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a vast expanse of uninhabited territory stretching through northern Minnesota and Canada.

From the story we could put together, our baby brother lived wild until he was 18, when he was found half-dead and brought to a hospital with a wound in his leg. Completely wild. The bottoms of his feet so leathery they were like shoes.

It didn’t take long for rumors to start—a handsome young man, completely wild. The media flocked to the area, salivating for photos. Getting rabid, aggressive. “Savage Adonis,” they named him. Fuckers.

And then the whole thing was shut down and Kiro disappeared. The authorities up there told everyone it was a hoax.

We know different. We believe he was taken.

We got photos of the man who likely took him, and our investigator ran them through every database he could. It was a dead end. It had been our only lead.

We were disheartened.

But the man who took Kiro from the hospital posed as a professor—this made our investigator wonder whether the guy had been a professor in the past. He took the money I threw at him and hired a team of guys to personally visit every college and university in the Midwest, showing the picture around. It was a lot of man hours.

Over the phone, my investigator tells me it paid off. A name. A location. That’s what unlimited resources gets you.

I text a few guys to meet me at Viktor’s. I can’t wait to tell them the news.

We are going to find this fake professor. And with him, maybe Kiro.

It’s noon by the time my main man Tito and I get to Viktor’s northwest Chicago neighborhood, a hidden pocket that is pure Russian mafiya territory. We park a ways down, just a precaution. My ankle still hurts from an injury some weeks back, but I can walk. Run if I have to.

You’d think you were in Russia, to walk down the street, smell the food, hear the chatter. We find Mischa, one of Viktor’s guys, on his stoop a few houses down, and he’s greeting people all around in the mother tongue.

People are tight here, and there are eyes everywhere. If we were cops or muscle from Bloody Lazarus’s gang, the whole neighborhood would be alerted.

We get to Viktor’s condo, a brownstone row house, and knock. Yuri opens the door and puts his finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

He leads us to the living room where Viktor is sacked out on the couch, cradling a bottle. Instead of a coffee table in front of the couch, there’s a wall of monitors set up on a bookcase.

“What the f*ck is this?”

Again Yuri puts his finger to his lips.

“Be quiet? It’s noon.” I frown. This isn’t like my brother. Viktor may be an impulsive hothead, but he doesn’t drink and pass out in the middle of the day. I go to him, but Yuri pulls me back.

“Let him sleep,” he whispers.

“What the f*ck?” I whisper back, thoroughly alarmed. I saw Viktor not five days ago, and he seemed…distracted. But okay.

Yuri stations Tito in front of the monitors and gives him instructions on what to watch for on the strange array of nine screens, then he pulls me into the kitchen.

“What’s going on? Is Viktor drunk?”

“Sleep deprived.” Yuri looks out the kitchen window. “More or less.”