Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(7)

“More or less? Talk to me.” I join him at the window and touch the curtain—every room is beautifully decorated. You’d think somebody obsessed with home décor magazines lived in the place. Well, aside from the insane shelf of monitors flashing captive girl vids. “Is this about Valhalla? We have what we need now. We don’t need to get crazy here.”

Yuri says something in Russian that sounds like swearing, just from the tone of it. He loves Viktor as much as I do.

I gaze around. The kitchen is seriously stocked. Nice, too. The kind of shit I’d buy. “He doesn’t need to monitor them like he’s the f*cking Secret Service,” I say. “He needs to win the auction and get in. You all have the tech ready to go?”

“Yeah, everything is ready to go with Valhalla.” Yuri opens a cupboard and then another. There’s a ton of food. Lots of sweet stuff. This is not the type of shit Viktor eats.

“What’s up with all the food?” I ask.

“Checking a theory,” Yuri grumbles. “Follow me, Aleksio.” He leads me out of the kitchen and up the wooden staircase to the bedroom.

The bedroom is also done up like a home décor mag. Like a f*cking woman’s bedroom. Yuri flings open the closet. And lets out of streak of Russian that’s probably more swearing.

He pulls out a hanger with a white leather miniskirt, puts it back, and paws through the rest of the stuff. All women’s clothes.

“Whose shit is this?” I ask. Viktor doesn’t have a woman.

Yuri pulls more women’s clothes from the closet—boots, skinny black jeans, a blood-red vintage-looking cowboy shirt with black embroidery, a floppy white hat, a faded jean jacket with flowers. A Ramones T-shirt. This last he tears off the hanger and tosses across the room. “Blyad!”

Okay, that word I know. It’s their version of “Fuck!” “Talk to me, Yuri.”

He turns to me. “Tanechka clothes.”

“Tanechka.” I narrow my eyes. “His girlfriend who died. The woman he…”

“Killed, yes.”

“I don’t understand.”

Yuri picks up the skirt. “These clothes, these are the sorts of things Tanechka would wear. She loved black boots. She loved cowboy shirts. This red shirt—she had this very shirt. I don’t know how Viktor found these things. Perhaps online. He did not bring them to America with him, I know. He has been busy. And if I look in that chest of drawers, Aleksio, we will see ripped tights. Faded T-shirts. A white knit hat with a puffball on top. Tanechka’s famous hat.” He picks up a red T-shirt that says “Gone Fishin.’” “Tanechka loved stupid American sayings like this.”

He puts it down, and I see here that Viktor’s not the only one who grieves for Tanechka.

“What has he told you about Tanechka?” Yuri asks.

“She was the love of his life. He killed her in some kind of gang honor thing, and it turned out—”

“That she was innocent,” Yuri says.

“Yeah. And it destroyed him. He can barely even talk about her.”

“Mmm, yes. It hurts him very much.” He runs his palm over a scarf. “Tanechka was part of our gang as much as I was. She came from the same world we did. She was trained as well as any of us. She was so—scrappy, I think you would say. Fierce and wrong. Very f*cking dangerous, like a white tiger. We all loved her, but what was between Viktor and her…is was so huge.”

He goes to the dresser and picks up a necklace.

“They would send her of on jobs with Viktor very often. So many jobs, those two. Tanechka and Viktor would pose as tourists. The wealthy young married couple, so much in love. Very believable, because they were in love. They could get into any hotel, any installation.” He picks up one of the boots, black with a shiny buckle. “Tanechka could make herself look like an American businesswoman or French movie star. But these clothes that Viktor has been collecting, these were her regular clothes. Very much a hoodlum, our Tanechka. Hair like starlight, Viktor would say. She loved white leather. He is collecting her clothes, Aleksio.”

I pick up the cowboy shirt, not liking this.

“He almost didn’t survive her death,” Yuri continues. “I never saw him like that—so devastated. What her death unleashed inside him was wild and dark. We were frightened for him. He lived at the bottom of a bottle. I think if it were not for his ability to become so drunk that he’d pass out, I think he would have jumped into the gorge himself. We were helping a Georgian gang at the time. We traveled back to Moscow after that, and I thought he would feel better, but he felt worse.”

My heart pounds. “He told me about it. I thought he was…improving.”

“I thought so too,” Yuri says.

Fuck. Here I’ve been chasing after Kiro and the empire we lost—and neglecting the one brother who is here.

“Some nights he would shake in my arms. His grief was so powerful he would vibrate.” Yuri looks up. “They were perfect for each other. You think your brother is extreme? It’s only because you never met Tanechka. The way she loved him and clung to him was mad and obsessive. She clung to him at the end. She clung to him even as he threw her to her death. He would talk about it. Dream about it. I’m sure he dreams about it still. It was so good when you found him. It is a good thing, a family. But now this—this is not a home, Aleksio. This is a nest he makes for a ghost.”