That's my chance-I take off running, tearing for the trees and the main road.

I get maybe ten feet before guys seem to materialize around me, taking me by the shoulders. I twist and fight. They lift me right off the ground, carrying me back.

The strangely familiar intruder is still on the phone, eyeing me with that intensity, watching me struggle. A model between photo shoots if you didn't know any better.

They put me back in front of him. He lowers the phone and addresses me quietly. "Do it. Go ahead, Mimi, do it again. See what happens."

Mimi.

He blinks, waiting. "Do it, go for it."

Mimi. Only one person ever called me Mimi-Aleksio Dragusha. My childhood friend. But Aleksio and his family were slaughtered by a rival clan back when we were kids. I was wild with grief. They had to 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 remembers. She was a legend-the boogeyman and Elvis rolled into one, come down from the Pindus Mountains in her colorful head scarf. Evil Eye Miss Ipa's words had more power than bosses of bosses.

"Remember how she had that prophecy about you and your brothers? It was at that giant New Year's party, and she kept pointing to you and saying that. You boys. Together you rule...you boys, you three boys. Maybe that's why Dad wanted to get you out of there. You were a threat to all of the clans, not just the Valcheks."

I wait for him to look up, needing to see my old friend underneath this cold, dark man.

"Don't you see? If my dad sent you away, it was to protect you from the Valcheks and everyone else who worried it would come true! Because he knew people would believe her crazy shit. People always believed her crazy shit. Don't you remember?"

Aleksio gets another text.

"Look at me!"

He won't.

"You were like a brother to me..." With a thundering heart I picture the way he slid his finger into his mouth. The hot, dark things it put into my mind. Not like a brother.

A stray brown curl falls over his forehead as he does more phone stuff.

I swallow past the dryness in my mouth. "And now you're trashing your own family house? It's your house now that you're back. You're alive. You're fabulously wealthy. People will want to know you're back!"

He snorts with bitter amusement. "You think I should've just walked in here? You think that would've worked out for me? Maybe with a fruit basket?"

The ice in his heart chills me. Aleksio.

We had a secret fort in the yard that last summer. We'd sit in it and draw while our moms drank and our dads ran their crime empire together. Back then we didn't understand our wealth was built on a mountain of blood and violence-not consciously, anyway. But I think we felt the poison. Aleksio would draw robot cars. Such a stupid boy thing to draw. I would draw horses. Maybe we were both imagining escape.

Our link feels just as fierce now. It's no longer innocent, like something hot got charged up along the well-worn pathways of friendship. But it's still a link.

"You're not going to kill me, Aleksio."

A muscle in his jaw fires.

"I know who you really are. I know your beautiful heart."

"That's not a theory you want to test."

"Maybe it's not a theory you want to test."

He looks at me straight on. So cold. "People change, and sometimes they lose their fucking soul."

The honesty of his words hits me. Being around juvenile court means I've seen firsthand the way beautiful, innocent kids can be robbed of hope, their goodness erased. Made into monsters. Predators. But there's always some sliver of humanity in them left. I have to believe that to do what I do.

We were nine when I watched Aleksio's little casket get lowered into the ground. Not too late to turn a kid dark.

I can't believe he'll kill me-I refuse to believe it. But what about Dad? Whether he finds Kiro or not, he won't have a choice-not after the way he treated him today. You don't take shots at Aldo Nikolla and threaten his daughter in front of him unless you're willing to go all the way.

He eyes our mansion as he talks, like he hates the mansion itself. The muscle guys melt off to the sides, to the cars. He can't possibly think Dad had any involvement in what the Valcheks did. And what's up with Little Vik-Viktor? The Russian accent, the barbarian attitude.

His eyes look even larger when he's looking down. Large lids ending in a line of sooty lashes spearing sideways.

"If Dad had anything to do with sending your brothers away, it was to save their lives. Don't be dense, Aleksio-think about this. Everyone knows it was a Valchek hit."

He says nothing.

I suck in a breath. "Leksio D, Leksio D, slowest runner you'll ever see." I don't know why I say it. A stupid taunt from the cobwebs of my memory.

He spears me with a white-hot shock. Anger, maybe-I don't know. I can't read him anymore. "You need to concentrate on not pissing me off, and you definitely need to stop reacting like I'm the boy you remember." I shudder at the force of his words.

A familiar roar sounds from behind me. I spin around.

Viktor and some other scary guy pull up in Dad's pearl-green Maserati convertible.

From behind me, Aleksio says, "You especially need to be careful with Viktor. He wasn't raised right."

Somebody comes up and puts a duffel into Aleksio's hand.

Aleksio takes my shoulder and pushes me toward the car.

"Did you get my coffee mug?" I ask.

Aleksio turns to the guy. The guy nods.

"Thanks," I say.

"You think I got it to be nice, Kitten?" He yanks open the back door and shoves me in, then crowds in next to me. "You should never let your enemies know what you care about."

I buckle my seatbelt. "You're not my enemy."

His gaze shimmers with heat. He reaches out and sweeps a lock of hair from my forehead, tucking it behind my ear. His touch is electric. His voice is husky. "I'm the most dangerous enemy you'll ever have because every time you look at me, you see somebody who's not there anymore. Because every time you look at me, you fool yourself about what I really am."

My pulse races. My gaze strays up Aleksio's corded neck to the jewel of a black freckle on his cheekbone. The boy I knew never felt dangerous like this.

"What are you, then?"

Aleksio says nothing as Viktor pulls out. He turns to watch our house as we head down the long stately drive. Technically his house, now that he's back from the dead. There's something strange about the way he keeps his eyes fixed there. Then he takes out his phone and pulls up some kind of app. "You ready?" he asks.

"For what?" I ask.

He nods at the house. "Watch."

I twist around. "What am I watching?"

He pushes a button on his phone. There's a loud pop from inside of the house, and then two more, and then a roar and a flash. Instinctively I duck as the place goes up in a flaming fireball-several of them. Heat blasts my face even as far away as we are. I touch my hair to make sure it's not ablaze as flames rage through. Nearby treetops catch fire, too.

"What have you done?" I whisper, horrified. Our beautiful mansion. Destroyed.

"Is that a rhetorical question?"

"Our home."

"Not anymore." There's a note of warning in the way he says it. Not anymore. Don't push him.

I'm too stunned to answer.

He holds out his hand. "Purse." I hand it over, and he goes through it. He throws out my phone and my mace, then hands the purse back to me.

Life as I know it burns behind us.

Aleksio puts on a pair of aviator shades, cutting himself off from me there in the windy back seat, dark freckle on his right cheekbone like a tiny dark jewel. He's right next to me, but a million miles away, his curls like dusky flags, slapping in the wind and sun.

I shouldn't want him to look at me again. I shouldn't want to see his eyes, to feel that intensity. He's no longer that boy I knew, seeing impossible things in the clouds-I understand that, now.

We head south on the highway, and I press him about my father. He'll tell me only that he's alive, and that they're planning on keeping him that way.

For now. He doesn't have to add that part. We both know it's there.

Dad.

Dad promised me that he'd gone legit over the past decade, but I'm not stupid. If he's legit, it's only as part of a symbiotic relationship with guys like Bloody Lazarus, who runs the bad stuff now. Less stress for Dad's heart.

Without thinking I turn to Aleksio with the impulse to tell him how worried I am about my father, like we're two against the world the way we used to be. It's so stupid-Aleksio is the whole problem here. He wants to scare my father-that's the mindfuck game he is playing right now.

The wind presses his dark suit to his chest, outlining his muscles, seeming almost to caress them. Now and then he texts.