Page 105 of Mob Princess

I pull his wallet out and thumb through it. I don’t expect to find photos of his family. I don’t need to. I already know he has a seven-year-old daughter and four-year-old son. He’s been married for nine years, and his wife works at one of the bratva’s casinos. I find what I want.

I pull out the tiny disc and turn it over in my hand, rubbing it against my palm.

“Was that loud, Sergei? I hope it didn’t hurt your ears.”

I lean over and put the bug in front of Mikhail’s mouth, so his labored breathing surely comes close to blowing their eardrums if they’re wearing headphones.

“Too bad you can’t see with this thing. Your man’s on the way to looking like Swiss cheese. How many bullets have I put in him? I’m certain you’re keeping count since you can hear me. But it’s time for a private conversation, so I’ll bid you adieu.”

I stomp on the listening device, crushing it. It’s in tiny pieces, but that’s not enough for me to believe it’s broken. It just reveals the inner workings. I grab a bottle of vodka—intentionally, so it’s not really ironic—and unscrew the lid. I drop the device in there and close it. I put the bottle in front of Mikhail, who’s still curled into a ball. The toe of my shoe nudges his left shoulder where the bullet wound is. I push him onto his back.

“They can’t hear you anymore. You’re going to die. You know I’ll have a team in here to clean up so well no one will know you’ve ever been here. Not today. Not ever. I can keep putting bullets into you until you bleed to death. I can use your knives to fillet you until you bleed to death. I can peel skin off you and pour this cheap arse vodka all over you. Or you can tell me what I want to know, and I put a bullet through your brain. Which sounds most appealing on the menu?”

He stares at me mutinously. That’s fine. I flip open the knife from his right pocket. The blade’s longer than either of the ones I carry. I cut the hem of his shirt along his right ribs. I tear the material apart, leaving his arm in the sleeve. It’s not in the way. I start the incision in his arm pit and draw the blade downward.

“This is sharp, but not as sharp as I expected. It’s your shite knife, not my unsteady hand that’s making my handiwork so jagged. Such a shame. I pride myself on my work.”

He can’t help the tears that stream down his face. I’m standing behind him because I’ve done this enough times to know. He pisses himself.

“I will keep going. You know that. I will crack your ribs and pull them apart using the crowbar I know Manny has. Then I will slice along your lungs and kidneys to butterfly them. Then I will cut that fillet like I said and send it to your wife with a nice bottle of wine. Hell, I’ll cut and section you, then send you one piece at a time, once a month, like those steak subscriptions. I’ll be sure to pick a different date, so it’s stays a surprise. What would she do? Run to Maks? Let him come. You’ll already be dead, and not even he can stop the U.S. Postal Service. Rain or shine, snow and sleet. However that goes.”

I’m working as I speak. I grabbed the crowbar from near the back door. I’m not worried about Mikhail getting to his gun. When I line up the crowbar with the wide cut I’ve made, he sobs. He knows I’m serious.

“All right. Don’t do that shit to my wife. She doesn’t deserve it.”

“She knows exactly who you are. If she didn’t deserve it, she wouldn’t have married into the bratva. She knew the man she was getting. I’ve known both of you since we were in second grade. She used to pick on Colleen.”

It was a good thing my cousin could defend herself. There was nothing any of us could do against Mikhail’s wife when we were kids. Hurting a girl would have been indefensible, no matter who she picked on. I’ll fuck with her mind now.

“That was twenty years ago.”

“And the Soviet Union fell more than thirty years ago. It doesn’t stop the bratva from using their old tricks. Who do you think I learned this from? Vlad the Impaler didn’t just teach the Elite Group. I learned plenty from watching. Your security was shite back then, and it’s shite now. I’ll send whatever the fuck I want to your wife, and no one will know how to stop me. Speak.”

There are things we learned from watching Vlad train Maks and his family. They were fucked-up and gruesome. But that wasn’t our only training. Dillan and Finn refuse to speak about the training our family gave us. They may use the skills, but they categorically will not say aloud what we were forced to do. Speaking of it makes it too real, even if we do exactly as our grandfather and uncle taught.

Declan was as fucked in the head as Vlad. My mother’s and aunts’ iron wills are unbendable. There were things they could control because they could control Donovan when it came to their children’s early training. But they didn’t know—don’t know—the shit Declan put us through. Our grandfather sanctioned it. My brothers, cousins, and I swore we would never let our parents know. It would make them feel useless and like failures because they couldn’t protect us from it. Our dads know now because they’ve seen us. Our moms might have a clue, but they will never know the extent of our depravity. Or at least the extent we’re capable of.

“It was Bogdan. He ordered this. He wanted you drugged then left out there tonight. He wanted you to get jumped.”

I’m only half listening to Mikhail as I think back to our own training. Dillan turned some of that training on Declan when he leered at Colleen one too many times when we were teenagers. Declan got off on mistreating women. He wasn’t like my generation. We enjoy BDSM and the things we can do in a controlled environment with consenting partners. Declan wasn’t like that. The less consenting a woman was, the more he enjoyed it.

Colleen told Dillan how uncomfortable Declan made her when she was fifteen. He was livid. The rage we saw terrified all of us. No one threatened his baby sister. I believe there can be platonic and sibling soulmates, not just romantic ones. Colleen and Dillan were the former. They may as well have been identical twins, like Shane and me. Dillan’s not an empath. That would be laughable to suggest he was. Except for where Colleen—and now Mair—was concerned.

He felt her fear, and he made Declan pay. He got our moms’ cousin drunk off his arse at McGinty’s until he blacked out. He dragged him into the alley behind the bar and stripped him. Dillan didn’t fully castrate Declan, but he cut out one of his balls. He took his time and stitched it up. Not neat and tidy like our doc does. He made sure it never healed right. Declan could still get it up, but he never came again.

He carved a D and an O on the inside of Declan’s arse crack. Not for Declan, but for Dillan. He wanted Declan to know he was Dillan’s little bitch.

“What does Bogdan have against me right now? What’s worse than usual?”

I pay attention to this answer. “He knows you’re with Ewan’s sister. Ewan’s still useful to them, but they want him to understand that if they can manipulate your family into blaming him, then they can make Ewan do anything they want.”

“And if we retaliated and killed Ewan?”

“You won’t because of his sister.”

Ewan isn’t Dillan. He doesn’t love Lina the way Dillan and the rest of us loved Colleen. Dillan’s warning to Declan worked until Donovan got himself killed. Dillan was so pissed that Donovan didn’t listen and stay away from Laura Kutsenko, he took the only vacation of his life that our parents didn’t organize. He came back to discover Declan seized power and put hits on our moms. Our dads made sure he was at the warehouse when the bratva struck back.

But not before we had a go at him. He went to our Staten Island house. He’s the only one ever to leave alive and not go directly to the station. Hours before Declan died, I slashed two vertical slits down his eye lids. Shane cut deep grooves from each side of his mouth to his chin. Cormac connected his collarbones with his own slice. Seamus cut from hipbone to hipbone as close to his junk as he could get on the fucker’s manscaped groin. Finn cut from ear to ear along his hairline and would have scalped him if there’d been time.

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