Ivan: A Dark Mafia Romance (Underworld Book 1)

When Ivan and I are finished ruining his sheets, I hop into his sinfully luxurious shower once more.

Once I’m all clean, he lends me some clothes from Maks, who’s shorter and slimmer than Ivan, closer to my own build. I still have to roll up the sleeves of the pullover, but I won’t be tripping over the pants at least.

Nodding toward the rumpled sheets with their streaks of soot and dirt I say, “Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine,” Ivan says. “I’ll wash them later.”

“You wash your own sheets?” I ask him.

It’s hard to imagine this stern-looking beast of a man sorting socks and throwing a Tide Pod into the machine.

“Of course I wash my sheets,” Ivan says indignantly. “I’m not some pampered prince.”

“You have a chef though,” I remind him.

“That’s just my cousin Ori. He’s Bratva too, but he’s no use for anything criminal. Too timid. So he cooks for us.”

I can’t help laughing at that.

“So in the Petrov family, if you want to be a doctor or an accountant, you’re a total disappointment to your parents.”

Ivan knows I’m teasing him, but he answers my question seriously.

“Doctor or accountant would be useful. You could sew up bullet wounds. Balance the books.” He pulls a sweatshirt over his head, hiding that gorgeous body of his behind dark gray cotton. “Now, if you wanted to be an astronaut…” he gives me a small smile. “We haven’t expanded quite that far.”

Ivan doesn’t smile much, but when he does, it has quite the effect on me.

It makes my legs go wobbly and my thoughts drift off in a dozen different directions.

I feel like I need to give myself a good slap so I can focus on the task at hand.

“I need to use your computer,” I tell Ivan. “To get Zima’s IP address.”

“I thought you already had it?” Ivan says.

“I did,” I explain patiently. “But it burned up in my apartment, along with most everything else I own. It doesn’t matter though—I store copies of my files remotely. I can get the address again.”

“Hmm,” Ivan says.

I can tell he’s mildly nervous to let me touch his computer.

And he should be. In ten minutes, I could probably find everything he has stored on there and copy it too.

But I don’t want to steal from Ivan.

Except maybe a few nudes . . .

“Come on,” I assure him. “You can watch me the whole time.”

Ivan takes me down the hall to his office, which is directly across from the library. I remember passing it on my way to Ivan’s suite, the night I snuck into the monastery.

The office is a gorgeous old room, octagonal in shape, with dark wood paneling on the walls and a ceiling painted to look like a map of the world, circa 1780 or so. Australia is still New Holland. Large swathes of Africa are blank.

I see several more walls of books—even more than in Ivan’s suite. I’m beginning to think Ivan is a little more scholar, a little less brute than I imagined.

“Have you read all these?” I ask him.

“No,” he says honestly. “Only half.”

Half is still a shit-ton of books.

I’m supposed to be going over to the computer on his desk, but I’m distracted by all these beautiful, orderly spines, neatly arranged by topic and type.

“What are your favorites?” I ask him.

“Biographies,” Ivan says promptly. “Churchill. Roosevelt. Even Steve Jobs. I like to read about extraordinary people.”

“My dad liked Churchill,” I tell him. “He used to say ‘It’s hard to fail—‘“

“‘But it’s worse never to have tried to succeed’,” Ivan finishes.

“Right,” I grin at him.

“My father didn’t try at much. It was my mother who had the brains and the ambition.”

He’s looking at me in that way he has, that makes me feel stripped down, opened up, examined to my core.

“Unequal marriages lead to unhappiness,” Ivan says.

“It seems like a lot of marriages lead to unhappiness,” I reply, keeping my eyes on the books on the shelf.

That was certainly true of my parents. Ivan’s as well, it sounds like.

“Do you think it has to be that way?” Ivan asks.

I glance back over at him.

His arms look harder than steel, folded across his broad chest. His expression is so determined, that I can’t imagine Ivan failing at anything, ever.

“No,” I say at last. “I guess I’m on team ‘it’s better to try.’”

I want to kiss him again. That’s all I want to do, whenever we’re in a room alone together.

“What’s it like growing up in a mafia family?” I ask him.

“Strange,” Ivan says. “I went to a normal school, with the children of teachers and lawyers and bankers, and a few other Bratva. As soon as anyone hears your name, they think they already know everything about you. And in some ways, they’re right. I’ve always fulfilled what was expected of me.”

“Did you ever want to do anything else?” I say.

“Sure,” Ivan nods. He lists them off on his fingers: “Rugby star. Actor. Astronaut. They were only childish fantasies, though. I was Bratva. And I never wanted anything else. Until . . . very recently.”

I can feel my skin burning.

I know exactly what it feels like to think you’re content, that you don’t need anything. And then to realize there’s something you need so badly that you can’t think how you ever lived without it . . .

I’m not ready to admit to that just yet, however.

So, I sit down at Ivan’s desk, sinking into his leather chair, smelling the intoxicating scent of his cologne that has permeated the material.

I open up his laptop and remote into my encrypted server, which is disguised as a website about birdwatching. I access my files and find Zima’s IP address, which, after a little more digging, I connect to an actual street address in Tsentralny.

Ivan is watching my fingers fly around on the keyboard with an expression of amazement.

“Where did you learn to do all that?” he asks.

“My father kept me in the house a lot,” I tell him. “He was paranoid about me going out anywhere. But there’s no limit to where you can go online.”

I write the address out on a scrap of paper from Ivan’s desk.

“You want to take my plumber’s van?” I ask him.

I’m mostly joking, but Ivan shrugs and says, “Might as well. It blends in.”

I let Ivan drive so I can plug the address into the van’s ancient GPS. I’m amazed how easily he handles the stubborn gear shift. When I was driving, the van jerked along like a go-cart. Ivan manages to pull smoothly through the gates, and down the long, shady drive back to the main road.

“You like living out of the city?” I ask him.

Ivan nods.

“I’d live all the way out in the country, if it wasn’t bad for business.”

This man is such a paradox to me. A scholar and a gangster. Retiring and ambitious.

I should have realized that from the start. What he’s supposed to do and what he actually wants to do are different. Or else Ivan would have just killed me the moment we met.

Before long, we’ve arrived at the street where Zima supposedly lives. However, the address I’ve tracked down isn’t a house at all—it’s a restaurant. Ivan and I take a quick walk around the exterior of the building to see if there’s an apartment attached, but it appears to simply be a normal cafe, closed for the night.

“You think he works out of this place?” Ivan asks, eyeing the turned-over chairs atop the tables, visible through the plate-glass windows of the cafe. “Or is the address just wrong?”

“I’m not sure . . .” I say.

I walk around the side of the building once more, and that’s when I spot it—an Ethernet cable hard-wired into the box on the side of the building. It’s hidden in the jumble of gas and electric meters, behind the large garbage bins overflowing with bags of trash.

The cable stretches across the alleyway, into the building next door.

“See.” I point it out to Ivan. “He’s tapping into their internet.”

“And look at this,” Ivan says. He’s followed the cable to the basement apartment of the building next door. “Somebody already broke the lock.”

I can see that the deadbolt has shattered through the wood. The door has been hastily repaired and a new lock added, but the damage to the doorframe remains.

“Should I knock?” I say to Ivan in a low voice.

“No, I think whoever was here before had the right idea,” Ivan says.

He turns his shoulder to the door and barrels toward it like a bull. There’s a sharp snap as the doorframe breaks again, and Ivan’s momentum carries him inside.

I follow after him into the dank little apartment.

It’s dingy and crowded, and it stinks of dirty laundry and unwashed dishes. Considering that Zima takes a fifteen percent commission for brokering hits, I’m surprised he can’t afford a nicer place. Or a maid.

Half-eaten fast-food containers are scattered everywhere. I can see his computer rig in the middle of the living room—there, at least, he’s spent some money. He’s got half a dozen monitors and all the fanciest accessories for gaming set up around a nicely padded chair that looks like the captain’s seat in a spacecraft.

But Zima himself is nowhere to be seen. I’m thinking he must have fled after Remizov’s men paid him a visit. Until I hear Ivan’s bemused voice saying, “Is this him?”

I follow Ivan into the bedroom. I see a towel tacked up over the window in place of curtains. A mattress on the floor, with no bed frame. And a teenage boy tangled up in a blanket.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I say.

Ivan pokes the kid with the toe of his boot.

The kid startles awake, his eyes red and bleary, his hair sticking up in all directions.

“What?” he says, and then when he sees us, “Oh, shit.”

“Oh, shit is right,” I tell him. “Are you Zima?”

“Uh, yeah,” he says, sheepishly. “I mean, it’s Afanasi, actually, but Zima is like my code name.”

Ivan makes a strangled noise that sounds suspiciously like a laugh.

“What in the holy fuck are you doing brokering hits?” I demand. “What are you, twelve years old?”

“I’m eighteen,” Zima says, as if that’s any better.

I seize him by the hair and drag him out of bed. Zima is wearing only a pair of old and sagging underpants. He yelps and slaps at my hand, but I pull him easily over to his computer station.

I throw him down in the chair.

“Did you tell Remizov where I live?” I demand.

“Well,” Zima says, eyeing Ivan nervously, “yeah. Kinda. I told his goons.”

I want to pop him right in the mouth for that. But I refrain. For the moment.

“That’s fine,” I say, through gritted teeth. “Now you can return the favor and tell me where he lives.”

“Uh, I don’t know if I should,” Zima says.

“You definitely should,” Ivan says, his voice lower and rougher than ever. “Because if you don’t, I’m going to break your fingers one by one. Which will make it difficult to type.”

I glance over at Ivan, mildly annoyed.

“I can threaten him myself,” I say.

Ivan raises one eyebrow.

“Alright,” he says. “Go ahead, then.”

“Listen, you little shit,” I say, grabbing Zima by the throat, “I got a grenade through my window because of you. I know if you figured out where I live, you did the same to Remizov. So spill it.”

“Alright, alright!” Zima says, holding up his hands. “Here.”

He picks up his phone off the desk and types something.

“There,” he says. “I just texted it to you.”

“You have my phone number too?” I shriek.

Zima shrugs.

“Yeah,” he says.

I check my phone and confirm that Zima sent the address.

It’s there alright.

But there’s one thing bothering me.

I have a strong inclination to kill this kid, so he doesn’t give out my information to anybody else. I’m not going to do it, but the temptation is there.

Which makes me wonder why Remizov let him live once he’d gotten my address.

“Hey,” I say to Zima. “How come Remizov didn’t kill you?”

“Oh,” Zima says. “I mean, I totally thought he was going to. But I told him I’d get the flash drive back.”

“What flash drive?”

“Well, it was bullshit. I don’t actually know where it is. But you probably do?” Zima asks hopefully.

I’m staring at him in total confusion. Until I remember the flash drive I took off Yozhin at the Raketa strip club.

“Wait,” I say, “are you talking about that job with Yozhin?”

“Yeah,” Zima says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“How does Remizov know about the flash drive?”

“He knows about it,” Zima says, slowly and distinctly like I’m a total idiot, “because it’s his drive.”

A whole lot of things are flipping position in my head right now.

“Pull up Remizov’s file,” I say to Zima.

Zima types on his computer and Remizov’s file pops up, complete with a color headshot of a sickly-looking man with pale blue eyes and extraordinarily thin lips.

The man in the black suit.

The one from the club.

I’m shaking my head, agreeing with Zima that I am, indeed, an idiot. This whole time I assumed Remizov was after me because of the botched hit on Ivan. But that’s not it at all. He’s pissed that I stole his files.

“What’s this flash drive?” Ivan asks me.

“Hang on,” I say to him. “I’ll explain after.”

I turn back to Zima.

“Who hired me to kill Ivan?”

Zima searches through his files once more and pulls up a fresh dossier.

“This guy,” he says, pointing one long, skinny finger at the screen.

I see an old man with thinning hair and a suit that doesn’t fit on the shoulders.

“Who the fuck is Lyosha Egorov?” I say in bewilderment.

I’ve never seen this guy in my life. But Ivan seems to recognize him.

He’s almost . . . blushing?

“He’s the husband of a woman I used to . . . date,” Ivan admits.

I can’t help letting out a snort of laughter.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes,” Ivan says.

“That was a big contract,” I say. “That chick must have been really hot. Because her husband is pissed at you.”

“How much was the contract?” Ivan asks curiously.

“Five hundred K.”

He nods, eyebrows raised. “That probably cleared his whole bank account,” he says.

I want to point out the incredible irony that after all the things Ivan’s done, all the people’s he’s pissed off, the thing that almost got him killed was messing around with a married woman.

But I can tell he’s already embarrassed, so I keep a lid on it for the moment.

“What’s on that drive?” I ask Zima.

“I don’t know!” he says. And then, seeing the look of disbelief on Ivan’s face, “I really don’t!”

“Well,” I say, “you’re going to figure it out.”

Zima is ten times the hacker I am. I couldn’t crack the encryption on the drive, but I bet he can.

“Get your laptop,” I tell him. “You’re coming with us.”