Russian Mafia Boss's Heir (14 page)

“Like a whore.” His tone was so bitter.

“Please don’t—” Tori stopped talking. She couldn’t even figure out what she wanted to say. “—I just want more in life. That’s all. Don’t you?”

“Yes.” He reached over and took her hand. He lifted it to his lips and gently brushed a kiss over her knuckles. “I want more. I want you. And I never meant to make you feel such a thing.”

There was silence. It was heavy and bleak, and Tori wondered if there was an answer somewhere that would help the two of them to connect. Then Mikhail glanced over at her and smiled. The sight of his very real, very genuine smile did amazing things to her belly. She felt a shot of hope that sizzled through her veins and lifted her heart.

***

MIKHAIL DID NOT know how he would do it, but he absolutely intended to win Tori’s trust. He had held the arrogant belief that somehow just being married would be enough to make her fall in love with him. He knew now that was a losing battle. In fact, he didn’t know if he could ever make her give him her love. But he did know that if she didn’t trust him, he would never gain anything.

“Where are we going?” she asked, watching the scenery pass outside the car window.

“To Alexei’s apartment.”

Her head whipped around, a suspicious expression on her face. “Why? How do you even know where he lives?”

Mikhail cocked his head, waiting for her to really think that one through.

“Oh, I suppose my stepfather has kept tabs on Alexei pretty much ever since he left?” She sounded sad about that.

“Stanislas considers his son an enemy and has ever since Alexei decided to leave the syndicate. It was part of my job to keep an eye on anyone Stanislas thinks of as a threat.”

“Ha!” Tori scoffed. “That’s like a full time job in and of itself!”

Mikhail didn’t respond. There really wasn’t anything to say. She was absolutely right. Stanislas had been paranoid ever since Mikhail had known him. At one point, Mikhail would have considered it “being careful.” Then the behaviors had slowly inched into the overzealous territory. Lately, he was just full on paranoid.

Mikhail pulled the car up to the curb right in front of an old brownstone building that had been separated into several units. The trendy Cambridge neighborhood was packed with college students and people like Alexei who worked in the area. It was nothing like the portion of Allston packed with Russian immigrants and
mafiya
families. Mikhail could easily understand why Alexei had chosen to live here. It was as far away from his roots as the man could get.

Tori got out of the car without waiting for Mikhail to open her door. He noticed that she didn’t need any direction to find her stepbrother’s apartment. Apparently Stanislas’s stepdaughter had also been keeping tabs on her stepbrother over the years. Mikhail wasn’t really surprised by this. Tori was nothing if not resourceful.

She was already knocking on Alexei’s door by the time Mikhail navigated the four flights of stairs to the apartments on the top floor of the building. Alexei threw open the door, looking grim.

“Papa most definitely took the bait.” Tori didn’t wait for an invitation. She strolled into her stepbrother’s apartment as if she did this every day.

Alexei gestured that Mikhail should enter also and then shut and locked the door. “How angry was he?”

“Spitting mad.” Tori bit her lip. “I think honestly, if I wasn’t married to Mikhail he’d have me killed.”

Alexei chuckled. “You might be surprised. Mikhail will get a phone call from Stanislas in a few hours, and the old man will make a request that Mikhail execute his wife.”

Mikhail didn’t like to imagine how badly that would go. “He’s already made the request that I execute you,” he reminded Alexei. “I’m rather surprised I haven’t been called in and sanctioned for failing to follow that order.”

“Except Stanislas might still be savvy enough to realize that his men are more loyal to Mikhail than they are to him,” Alexei mused.

“Until someone decides to get on his good side and go for a promotion,” Mikhail said grimly.

***

TORI WAS GETTING impatient. She wanted to know why they had come to Alexei’s apartment. What did this possibly gain? She looked from Mikhail to her stepbrother. Then she raised an eyebrow at Mikhail. “Why are we here?”

Mikhail didn’t respond. Instead he looked at Alexei. “Your father told Tori that her mother committed suicide. Then five seconds later he changed his story and claimed the Orlovs had her killed because she loved him more than her loyalty to her family.” Mikhail paused, letting all of that sink in. Then he spread his hands and gazed at Alexei. “Do you remember anything that might help us figure this out?”

Tori held her breath. She’d known that at fifteen Alexei would have very different memories of that time than she had at five. But she hadn’t truly considered that her stepbrother might have the answers she wanted about how her mother had actually died.

“Your mother was always kind to me,” Alexei told her. “I had never known my own mother. She died when I was born. And living with my father did not make for much in the way of softness or love when I was little. So for five years after my father married her, your mother was my mother. I loved her, Tori. I did.”

“So what happened?” Tori reached out and gently touched his arm. “I don’t believe she would kill herself. I just don’t.”

“I don’t either. But I don’t remember what happened.” Alexei sighed. “I’m sorry. But I do have something that might help.”

“What?”

“When she died, you were inconsolable. Papa was busy trying to keep you under wraps. Mrs. Tobolovsky wasn’t much help, as you can imagine. So I was the one who packed up your mother’s personal items. My father told me to throw them away, but I kept them. I thought that someday you might want your mother’s things.”

Tori sucked in a quick breath. Her heart was pounding against her ribs. She watched Alexei walk to a cupboard in his living room. On the highest shelf she saw a box. Not a big box, just a small white cardboard box with a lid. He gently pulled it down and turned to face Tori.

“This should have been yours a long time ago.” He grimaced. “Forgive me for keeping it just because I wanted something to remind me of her.”

“Thank you,” Tori breathed. “You have no idea how much this means to me. Maybe you held onto it because really, this is the right time for me to have it.” She hugged the box to her chest and gazed at Mikhail. “I want to go home.”

Chapter Eighteen

Tori sat in the middle of her bed. Or really it was the middle of Mikhail’s bed. Or maybe she should have just called the thing
their
bed, even though it didn’t really feel like it yet. But that didn’t matter right now. The only thing that mattered was the box sitting in front of her.

She reverently removed the lid. The scent that floated out of the box brought instant tears to her eyes. Roses.

Closing her eyes, Tori allowed herself to visualize her mother as Tori remembered her. The laughing blue eyes, shiny dark hair that curled around her shoulders, and the warm, secure feeling that Tori had always felt in her mother’s arms were things that Stanislas could never take away from her. This scent always reminded Tori of curling up beside her mother while they read from a book of fairytales in Russian.

“No way,” Tori breathed.

She carefully set aside several items: small leather bound books, a hairbrush, and a tiny, enameled jewelry box. Finally, Tori lifted out a very familiar book with gold leaf on the cover and pages worn thin and yellowed with time.

It was her book of fairytales written in Russian. Tori opened the book and gently flipped through the pages. She remembered lying with her head in her mother’s lap as she read each story while using different voices for the characters and never being afraid to act silly into the bargain.

Tori lifted the book to her nose and sniffed. The scent could have been called “bedtime.” It stirred so many memories and made Tori even more certain that her mother had not committed suicide. She wouldn’t have left Tori alone. She just wouldn’t have done that.

“What happened to you, Mama?” Tori whispered.

She pulled out a set of silk evening gloves and fingered the fine fabric. Her mother had been a fashionable woman who had enjoyed going to cocktail parties and rubbing elbows with the powerful people of the syndicate. She hadn’t been the type of woman to simply sit at home. That wasn’t her, and it would never be Tori, either.

Mikhail appeared in the doorway, resting his shoulder against the doorjamb and offering her a smile. “Have you found anything?”

“Not yet.” She glanced up, feeling almost sheepish. “I think I got distracted by the memories.”

“I think that’s understandable.” His voice was low and soothing. He walked a little farther into the room. “What do you remember?”

“Bedtime.” Tori brushed her fingers over the book. “She used to read from this book every single night. It was a ritual. I remember after she died that was the hardest thing to let go of. I don’t think I slept for weeks.”

“You had to learn to be tough at a very tender age,” he agreed.

Tori cocked her head to one side, realizing she didn’t know that much about him. Yes, his mother had been a distant cousin to Stanislas. But that didn’t tell Tori a single thing about how Mikhail had grown up.

“What was it like for you as a kid?” she asked softly.

***

MIKHAIL FROZE AS he tried to decide whether or not to answer her question. It wasn’t as if she was trying to get the upper hand with him. There was nothing in her demeanor to suggest she was looking for ammunition, but Mikhail was used to playing things very close to the vest. It went against the grain to divulge anything that might be construed as a weakness.

“I lived with my mother, my father, and my older sister,” Mikhail began softly. He walked into the room and perched on the edge of the bed. Gazing into Tori’s warm eyes, he tried not to let the story take him back to the feelings he’d had in that moment. “One night when I was about seven or eight, someone broke into our little apartment. My father was out doing work for Stanislas. I don’t know what.”

Mikhail paused. Despite his efforts, he could feel every single emotion just as raw and painful as they had been on that day so long ago. He wished he could stand back from the pain and pretend that it didn’t affect him.

“You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” Tori said softly.

He watched her hand, feeling almost detached as she gently stroked his hand and threaded her fingers with his in a gesture of solidarity. “No. I can talk about it.”

“All right.”

Mikhail tried to breathe. It felt like his lungs were working double time. Why couldn’t he get a full breath? “Someone broke into our apartment. My sister and I were playing in the bedroom. She shoved me into a closet and told me to be quiet. I watched some men murder my mother and my sister right on the floor in front of that closet, and I never made a sound.”

“That was very brave,” Tori told him.

“Brave?” Mikhail’s tone rose, becoming higher pitched with each word until he felt like a boy once again. “I let them die because I was too much of a coward to leave my hiding place and fight.”

“You were a child,” Tori reminded him quietly. “I can hardly imagine your mother would have appreciated you getting yourself killed too. At least this way you lived to grow up and make something of yourself. That’s all a mother really wants for her child.”

“And how would you know anything about that?” Mikhail wasn’t trying to be rude. He was sort of teasing her.

Then he saw her slender throat move as she swallowed. She looked uncomfortable. Why?

Tori finally cleared her throat and faced him. “Probably because I’m pregnant.”

***

TORI HAD THE thought that she might have done her husband irreparable mental harm with her little announcement. Of course, it probably didn’t help that he’d just shared something that was obviously a defining moment in his life. In fact, she could absolutely see how much that event had affected everything that had happened since. No wonder Mikhail was so
reserved
. He was probably terrified to admit that he loved someone. Everyone he loved had been murdered right before his eyes.

“You’re pregnant?” Instead of looking pleased, Mikhail looked suspicious. “That’s awfully convenient.”

Convenient? What an odd thought. Although it probably would have been wise for Tori to tell him back when she’d first discovered it,
before
the plan. But she hadn’t actually realized that she’d missed a cycle until she started thinking about this ruse to push Stanislas over the edge. Once she’d charted her cycles on a calendar, she’d noticed that her last period had been three weeks before her wedding. A simple test from the grocery store had confirmed it, and voila! Tori had discovered she wasn’t going to be lying to Stanislas.

“I didn’t know until I started thinking about this whole plan and the logistics and stuff.” Tori tried not to be hurt by the fact that he didn’t seem thrilled about this development in the least. “Listen, I wasn’t lying to you. Okay? I didn’t know I was pregnant. And then I just didn’t know how to tell you that I was. With everything going on, it seems like bad timing.”

“You could say that,” he muttered.

There Tori was, sitting in the middle of her bed with her mother’s things spread out around her and now contemplating what it was going to be like to
be
a mother. “Why are you so upset? I thought you wanted me to be pregnant.”

“What made you think that?”

She shrugged. How
had
she come to that conclusion? “You never said anything overt, but we had sex all the time, and there was a sort of feeling to the encounters sometimes. You would say things, I guess. Sometimes it made me think you felt pressure to have a child.”

“Stanislas has been making hints,” Mikhail admitted.

There was something very closed about his posture. She didn’t understand. “Are you still going to help me find out about my mother?”