Read Online Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance by Annika Martin - Free Book Online Page B

has come loose, dark curls around her face, a face I would hate like the devil if Konstantin had his way. I snap a picture with my phone.
    When I show her the photo, she starts crying again.
    “Come on.” I wrap my arms around her. She’s trembling, turning into a total basket case. Finally I just pick her up and carry her to the couch. I sit down with her still on my lap.
    Suddenly she stops crying, seems to stiffen. “Did someone torture you?”
    “What?” I ask, startled.
    She touches my arm, the spot just to the side of the mottled pink burn scar. She turns up to me, eyes shining with tears. Even after a cry she’s beautiful. Really beautiful. “This is a cigarette burn.”
    God, I remember this about her—the one way to stop her from crying was always to show her that someone hurt worse. To give her something to care about outside of herself. But I can’t. It can’t be me. “It’s nothing.”
    “It’s not nothing,” she says. “It’s a cigarette burn. A really bad one. Somebody would’ve had to hold it very deliberately to your skin for a very long time.”
    “You want a gold star?”
    “Somebody hurt you.”
    “Somebody saved me.”
    “Whoever did this to you, Aleksio, that person didn’t save you. This is not what a savior does.”
    I push down my sleeve. I’d rather eat glass than be exhibit A for Mira’s sympathy. Even if it’s what she needs to calm down. “You say that because you don’t know.” I adjust her on my lap, let her sit more naturally. I put my gun and my phone aside, just out of her reach. “It was an accident,” I say.
    “Doesn’t look like an accident.”
    “He didn’t know. He was helping me hide. He was playing a part, and I had to stay invisible. Not move.” For a moment I’m back there letting my arm burn. Trying to be a soldier for mighty Konstantin, the only person I had left in the world. I’m glad she can’t see my face.
    “How old were you?”
    I don’t tell people stories from then—not ever. This isn’t even one of the dark stories, the lose-your-faith-in-humanity stories. But if it gets her mind calmed, things will go easier with the finger. I take a strand of hair between two fingers, remembering huddling there next to Konstantin, eyes and lips squeezed tight. “Nine.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Shit happens.”
    “Shit happens? That’s your astute commentary? Shit happens?”
    “You remember Konstantin? The old bodyguard?”
    “They said he helped the Valcheks.”
    Valcheks were just the scapegoats, but I don’t argue with her on that. She’s upset enough. “Konstantin saved my life. He got me out of there before they found me. They hunted the two of us everywhere. I mean, we could not stop running. We had no money—we ran with clothes on our backs. I was actually in PJs.”
    “God—”
    “Better than being in Spiderman underwear, right?” I pull her tight to me and put my chin on her head. I shouldn’t be doing this tenderness shit. Maybe just for a moment, I think. Just a moment of rest. Of something nice.
    I tell her the story. It’s like an out-of-body experience, watching myself tell her. Suddenly I don’t want to stop. The way she listens is a kind of nourishment.
    In those dark days I would sometimes think about her and me stretched out on the lawn under the badminton net, splitting apart blades of grass—it was a kind of happy place, I suppose. The boy I was back then needed the sympathy she’s giving me now. But here in this hotel room, her sympathy is hell on the man I have to be.
    I have to be that man. That monster. I owe it to my baby brother. To my dead parents.
    “You did it. You survived.”
    “Survival isn’t amazing, Mira. People are animals in the end, and you do what you have to do to stay alive. It’s built in. Like breathing. You want to believe the best, but it’s a fucking lie.”
    She pushes my sleeve back up and rests her fingers on the burn spot, as if to heal it with her fucking sympathy.
    I close my