Dark Mafia Prince: A Dangerous Royals romance Read Online Free PDF Page B

sedate me.
    Five caskets lowered into the ground. Three small, two large.
    I focus on the familiar freckle on his cheekbone. This man is so much bigger. So much harder and meaner. But his freckle…his eyes… “Aleksio?” I say in a small voice.
    “Ding ding ding, we have a winner.” He says it off-handedly, as though our friendship meant nothing. He simply keeps his eyes fixed on the mansion with its majestic stone wings stretching out on either side. The place where he once lived. Prince of a mafia empire.
    “Oh my God. Aleksio!”
    Mimi is what his baby brother Little Vik called me. Little Vik couldn’t say the r . Aleksio would tease Little Vik about it, and the name stuck. A nickname. His brother. Viktor Dragusha.
    “We thought you were dead. We buried you!”
    “You buried a few rocks. Maybe some boiled cabbages, who knows.”
    I can’t believe he’s being so…flip. “Aleksio! We buried you.” I’m repeating myself. “I thought they killed you…” If my life were postcards on a bulletin board, the image of Aleksio Dragusha’s casket being covered up with dirt would be central, affecting everything around it. He was my best friend. I doubt I was his. Aleksio had lots of friends. Everybody loved Aleksio.
    “And Viktor. Little Vik! Oh my God. You’re both alive…”
    He focuses on his phone, running his guys.
    “We went to your funeral. It was so, so…”
    “Sad” isn’t the word. “Sad” barely touches it. He was my best friend in the world. We were adventurers together, bonded together, carving out a sunny niche inside a world of darkness and secrets we sensed but didn’t understand. I think that’s what made us friends—the feeling of being refugees at the edges of something evil.
    “Aleksio,” I whisper. I think about his remote control car, Rangermaster. I took it after he died, and I kept it in my room. I didn’t have the controller, just the car. I used to talk to it like I could still talk to Aleksio. “I kept Rangermaster. You remember Rangermaster?”
    He looks at me like I’m a little bit crazy, but he doesn’t fool me. He remembers. “You need to stop thinking you know me,” he says. “You knew me once, but I promise, you don’t know me anymore. Got it?”
    “Why are you so angry at my dad? You were like a son to him. He loved you. He grieved over your death! Aleksio, come on!”
    “Did your father look like a man overjoyed to see me?”
    My head spins as I replay the horrified look of recognition on my father’s face. Dad was holding back. I can always tell. “Well, you weren’t exactly being civil,” I say. But Aleksio has a point.
    “You need me to spell it out? He sent Kiro away. He needs to tell us where he is. And he’s going to.”
    Kiro. The baby.
    Why would Dad send baby Kiro away? Did he send all the boys away?
    “If he sent you guys away, Aleksio, it was to save your life. To protect you from the Valcheks, coming to finish the job.”
    “Your dear old dad, protector of defenseless boys. Like sending baby Moses down the river to save his life. You’re really going with that?”
    “My dad went completely crazy on the Valcheks after what they did to you. He and Lazarus took out half that family. They mourned you. Avenged you. He loved you.” We all did.
    “Uh-huh.”
    “He would’ve done anything for you.”
    “He would’ve done anything for what we had.”
    Heat rises to my face. “Excuse me?”
    “Your father got rid of the Valcheks, an enemy he’d always hated, while he took over the most powerful clan this side of New York. Worked out pretty well for him.”
    “What the hell, Aleksio? What are you implying here? He loved you. Your father was his mentor, his partner, his greatest friend. He owes him everything—he always says it.”
    “That’s ironic.” He looks at a text.
    “Wait—remember the old crone? The evil-eye crone, Miss Ipa? Everyone thought she had the evil eye and the sight and all that?”
    No answer. I know he