Russian Mafia Boss's Heir (15 page)

“Yes.”

“But you’re going to be a jerk about the baby?” Yes. She’d said it out loud, and it felt good to do so. “I don’t understand what’s wrong.”

“I don’t know.” He rubbed his head, looking almost sick. “I’m having a hard enough time protecting you. How am I supposed to protect a helpless little child?”

It hit her then. Mikhail had felt like a failure when he couldn’t save his mother and sister. The worst had happened. He had watched the people he loved die in front of him while he was helpless to do anything about it. He’d already said it made him feel like a coward. It probably hurt on a much deeper level than that too.

“Nothing is going to happen to me,” Tori told him quietly. “I promise. The baby and I are going to be just fine.”

“That’s an impossible promise.” His throat moved as he swallowed. “You can’t know what’s going to happen.”

“You can’t either. So stop being a jerk about something that might never occur. It just hurts me.”

***

MIKHAIL GAZED AT Tori, feeling like she’d just grown a second head. Hurt her? He was trying to protect her by keeping his distance. The people around him got hurt. That was almost the only consistent thing in his life. He didn’t want Tori to be another casualty of that curse. In fact, he’d never wanted so badly to protect someone.

He gently reached out and cupped her cheek. “If something happens to you, I will level the city to get revenge on whoever did it.”

“I don’t doubt your ability to do that.” Tori was actually smiling. Was this somehow
funny
? Then she put her hand over his on her cheek and leaned forward. She brushed her nose against his. The gesture was so tender he felt a strange knot form in his midsection. She pursed her lips. “I think you feel something for me. I think that all this time we’ve spent together, even though so much of it was physical, has made you care for me in a way you didn’t expect.”

“I wanted you to love me.” The words slipped out before Mikhail could really decide if he wanted to share this or not. “I’m not the sort of man that gives in to love.”

“You don’t give in to love, Mikhail,” Tori told him. “It’s a sneak attack kind of thing. It happens when you don’t expect it. And when it does, it knocks you on your ass.”

“How do you know?”

“Because even though you’re a complete bonehead and an emotional cripple, I love you.” She brushed her lips over his. “I love the way you’re gruff and forbidding and bossy even though you have a soft center that most people never ever see.”

“I’ll deny that.” In fact, he would deny it from the rooftops if she ever told anyone. Still, for some inexplicable and probably foolish reason, he trusted her.

“Oh, I know you would!” she teased. “Which is why that’s a secret that I’m going to hold right here in my heart.” She took his hand in hers and lifted it to her chest. “Because it doesn’t matter than you don’t say the words. It doesn’t matter that you’re not even ready to acknowledge it. I feel your love. That’s the reason it hurts so much to be treated like a call girl. I want so badly to experience a real sense of intimacy with you.”

“Intimacy?” He tasted the word. It was strange and foreign on his tongue.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Intimacy. That thing that ties two people together because they know each other better than anyone else ever could.”

Chapter Nineteen

 Mikhail laid awake long into the night. Or rather he laid awake until the first light of dawn streaked the sky in shades of pink and purple. He lay on his side facing Tori. She was sleeping on her side facing him with her hands tucked beneath her cheek. As the room grew lighter, he was struck by the innocence of her face. There was something so very artless about her, and yet she could be one of the most brilliant strategists he’d come across so far. The woman was brave. She never backed away from a challenge, and from what he had known of her so far, she was so much more than Stanislas had ever given her credit for.

Rolling to his back, Mikhail tried to force himself to rest. It didn’t work. His mind focused on things he would have rather forgotten. Things like his mother and his sister and the night they had been slaughtered. His father had been away on business for Stanislas. It had just been Mikhail and Ivana with their mother. Mikhail could vividly recall the scent of the stew cooking in the kitchen. The smell had drifted throughout the small apartment. He and Ivana had been playing a game—cards perhaps. The two of them had liked to play Go Fish and pretend they were playing poker like their father often did with the other men of the Vasiliev syndicate.

Mikhail pulled himself back to the present. A light breeze blew in through the bedroom window. It felt cool against Mikhail’s flushed skin. He tried to stay anchored in the now, but his mind kept returning to that moment when the men had barged in through the front door of their apartment. It had all happened so fast. Their mother had screamed. Ivana had shoved Mikhail into the closet and shut the door. She’d told him to be quiet. He had thought she would climb under the bed. That’s where she always hid, but that night she wasn’t quick enough. A man had come inside the bedroom. He’d raised a gun and shot Ivana point blank in the chest.

The coppery scent of blood still lingered in Mikhail’s nose. Each time he ran across that smell he had to forcefully put his past behind him and pray it stayed there. He had been so young, only seven. Perhaps that was why he empathized so strongly with Tori. She had been five when her mother died. Stanislas had been all she had left. In a way, he had been all that Mikhail had left as well. The
mafiya
boss had always been kind to Mikhail. Mikhail’s father had never been the same after his wife and daughter’s murder. Although, Mikhail had always wondered why his father hadn’t ever taken much effort to look for the killers. It had weighed on Mikhail over the years, but despite his efforts he still had no leads on the murderers. Somehow that lack of closure made him feel even more helpless. Not only had he failed to save his family. He had also failed to gain justice for their murders.

“You’re awake,” Tori whispered. “Why are you awake? You need your rest.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Mikhail admitted. “I keep thinking about my family and the day they were murdered.”

“You were a child, Mikhail.” Tori laid the palm of her hand on his bare chest. He savored the warmth of her touch as it soothed the ragged beast inside. She sighed, her mouth drawn into a little moue. “Even if my mother was murdered, I couldn’t have done anything about it. Even if someone had told me it was going to happen, I was still a child.”

“We never found out who killed them,” Mikhail whispered. “I never got justice for my mother or my sister.”

“Would you like to find out?”

The way she asked, she made it sound as though it were no big deal. He had to chuckle a bit, but she still didn’t smile. It was like she thought she was totally serious.

Mikhail finally said what he was thinking. “It’s harder than it seems, I’m sure.”

“Is it?” she mused. “Because I think it’s just a question of going back and looking at the reports.”

“There were no police reports,” Mikhail said bitterly. “Stanislas didn’t want to bring undue attention to a
mafiya
crime when catching the killer was a
mafiya
matter and not a police matter.”

“Except he never found out who, right?” From her tone of voice, Mikhail could tell she was thinking this through very thoroughly. “Do you think he
knew
who did it and didn’t want to divulge the information?”

“Why?” Mikhail felt himself getting louder. His blood pressure was rising, and his temper was beginning to boil. “Why would he condone such a senseless, brutal crime?”

“I don’t know,” Tori shot back. “What effect did that murder have?”

“Everyone was terrified for the families,” Mikhail recalled. “I remember how people spoke in hushed whispers. My father and his friends had their heads together, trying to come up with reasons or answers, but they never got anywhere.”

“So it basically got forgotten.” Tori had lowered her voice, the sound almost gentle now. “Kind of like the fact that nobody has ever truly given me answers or looked into the details of my mother’s death.”

Mikhail couldn’t argue with that. He opened his mouth to try, but there was too much logic in what she was saying.

Finally he sighed. “Let’s say Stanislas did have my mother and sister murdered. Why would my father just take it?”

“He didn’t want the two of you to be next?”

There were moments in life where Mikhail was utterly certain that his brain had been intentionally hiding certain things from his consciousness. Right now he was wondering why in all of his years as Stanislas’s right hand, he had never once looked into the unsolved murder of his mother and sister. Perhaps Tori was right in a way. Perhaps he was afraid of discovering the answer.

***

MIKHAIL HAD BEEN sullen ever since Tori had suggested Stanislas might have played a hand in his mother’s and sister’s deaths. Not that Tori really blamed him for being upset by the idea. It was just as insane for him to think that his boss—the man who had declared him the successor to the business—was capable of that cold hearted callousness.

But for Tori, there was a very fine line between paranoid lunatic and murderer. And she had a feeling her stepfather could just as easily be one as the other.

For now, she was still going through the box of her mother’s things.

Today she was being more thorough. She had the little leather journals out and was attempting to figure out what they were about. Two were diaries. The third was utter gibberish. Curling up in the window seat, Tori read her mother’s journal entries. They were strangely mundane. There were some anecdotes about herself and about Alexei. Apparently the two of them had very much enjoyed getting into trouble together despite their ten year difference in age. Alexei would come up with the pranks, and Tori would carry them out, using her cuteness factor as a smokescreen to hide her behavior from others.

“My little baby girl is so much like her father,” Tori read out loud. “My Nicolai was always the life of the party and the smartest man in the room everywhere he went.” Tori mulled that over. “My father’s name was Nicolai? How did I never know this?”

Tori got up, pacing from one end of the bedroom to the other. Finally, she picked up the third journal and tried once again to see if the words made any sense. They looked to be a jumble of numbers and letters. It wasn’t Russian or Ukrainian, and Tori didn’t believe her mother had known any other languages besides English, which meant the diary was something else.

“Maybe it’s a cipher,” she wondered out loud. Her words echoed a little in the big room.

Tori wondered if Mikhail had any thoughts on ciphers. She had almost no experience with code, but this was her own mother. Then Tori’s gaze fell on the fairytale book. She picked it up and absently thumbed through the thing. Glancing back at the leather bound journal, she realized that the gibberish was actually separated by semicolons into three columns. Each column had a set of numbers. There was usually just one number, but sometimes there were two.

Picking up a piece of paper and a pencil, Tori flipped through the book of fairytales and found the first number in the first column and turned to that page in the children’s book. It worked. She wrote it down and used the next number in the next column to find the line on the page. Then she counted over using the third number in the column and found the letter.

“It’s code,” she whispered. “My mother left us a code.”

Once Tori had the pattern down, it took almost no time at all to decode the rest of the little black book. She spent the morning copying down item after item only to discover the most disturbing trend she could have possibly imagined.

Every single line included a first name and a last name that seemed to correspond with an enforcer. There were no details about what family or syndicate these men worked for, but it was most definitely a list of names. After that there were dates. But the strangest part of all was the fact that there were dates included that fell after her mother’s death. It was as if she’d been predicting or speculating that something in particular was going to happen.

Tori stared down at the list she had written out and tried to figure out what it might all mean. When she came up blank, she reached for her laptop. When in doubt, Google it. That was pretty much her motto.

The very first name she Googled brought up a bunch of hits, but the first item was a news story by a national affiliate. The headline read WOMAN AND CHILDREN DIE IN FIERY CAR CRASH.

Tori blinked a few times, trying to reconcile what she was seeing. Thinking it had to be some kind of fluke, she Googled the next name on the list. This one simply said WOMAN DROWNS. Still, the pattern was holding true. These were all dates that the people involved had lost someone significant in their life. Why?

Could her mother have been compiling some kind of list of
mafiya
family members who had been killed by odd or suspicious circumstances? Was it just all about
mafiya
life expectancy and how being a
mafiya
family affected your life? Or was it all more sinister than that?

Finally, Tori came across an entry that said “Ivanov.” She blinked and paused in her work, trying to finish her project and figuring it couldn’t possibly be the same family. Except the only thing attached to that date and that name was a double homicide involving a little girl and her mother.

This was not good. Tori was staring at a news clipping from an old local story about a shooting in Allston, Massachusetts that had taken the lives of a little girl and her mother. In the story, it highlighted the fact that the little girl had protected her brother by shoving him into a closet. The little boy had been fine, but the authorities speculated that he would carry emotional scars for his whole life after being forced to watch his family die in front of him.

“They were certainly right about that,” Tori said softly. “But I think the gangland murder angle was just slightly off.”