Roma Queen (Roma Royals Duet Book 2) Read online

  ROMA QUEEN

  BOOK 2 IN THE ROMA ROYALS DUET

  Callie Hart

  ROMA QUEEN

  Copyright © 2019 by CALLIE HART

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  GLOSSARY

  FIRST

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  SECOND

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  THIRD

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  FOURTH

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  WHO ARE THE WIDOW MAKERS MC, NEW MEXICO?

  ALSO BY CALLIE HART

  FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM!

  About the Author

  GLOSSARY

  Gadje (gad-jeh): An outsider. A non Roma person.

  Marime (mah-ree-mey): Spiritually unclean.

  Prikaza (pree-KOH-zah): Bad luck.

  Vitsa (vit-sah): A Roma clan, formed of numerous extended families.

  Vardo (vardo): A painted Gypsy wagon.

  Kris (kris): A Roma legal court

  Ves ’tacha (Ves tatcha): Beloved

  Rom Baro (Rom Bahrow): ‘Big Man’ or King.

  Rom (rom): a Roma man

  FIRST

  The room has no windows.

  Inside the room, there is one small cot.

  One blanket.

  One pillow.

  One bucket.

  One door.

  And one boy.

  Naked, he shivers, crouched in a corner, staring at the door, knowing it will open at any moment and the nightmare will begin again. It’s impossible to mark the passage of time in here. It’s easy enough to read the sky: if it’s bright outside, it’s daytime. Dark, and it’s nighttime. Inside the windowless box, though, a permanent state of limbo exists.

  Sleep is ill-advised. If he closes his eyes, even for a moment, then exhaustion will claim him, and he won’t be prepared. He won’t be ready and waiting to fight when the time comes. Because it will come. He will come, and the pain will start all over again, and even though fighting is futile, and he always overpowers the boy, it’s important to fight because, for a few more precious seconds, the boy remains untouched, unharmed, unsullied, and those extra seconds count for something.

  Inside the box, the boy wonders when his parents will come. They left him at home and promised to be back soon, but they didn’t return. How long has it been since he’s seen them? Days? Weeks? Months? It’s hard to tell, but they must be wondering where he is by now. They must be looking for him.

  In his mind, the little boy fantasizes of his father hurting the man. His father is so strong. So powerful. His hands are like shovels—big, scooped palms, and thick, meaty fingers. The boy saw his father hit someone once, and the other man fell down to the ground, bleeding from his nose. If his father can do that with just one punch, then he can probably do a lot worse if he keeps on hitting. That’s what the boy wants—for his father to hit the man and not stop hitting him until he’s on the ground, bleeding and crying and begging to go home.

  It wouldn’t do him any good, though. The boy had cried, and begged, and pleaded to be taken home, but the man had just sneered at him. Slapped him so hard his ears had rung. If the boy’s father came and hurt the man, it would be the same for him in the end. His father would be merciless. And the boy would stand and watch, and it would make him feel better to see the man bleeding for once.

  The boy chews on stale bread, but it hurts his mouth. His teeth feel loose. When he probes with the tip of his tongue, the cracked, jagged surface of his molars feels alien and wrong. His front teeth had felt the same way, before the man finally knocked them clean out of the boy’s head.

  Absently, the boy remembers birthday cake. The smooth, silky texture of icing, and the ache of something sweet delighting his taste buds. Birthday cake is the boy’s favorite. Not chocolate, or red velvet, but carrot cake. His mother always calls him her little bunny rabbit, because he loves carrot cake so much. The boy used to love being his mother’s little bunny rabbit, but now he wishes he had been her big bad wolf. Maybe if he’d learned to be tougher sooner, then he might be able defend himself now.

  As it always does, the door to the room finally opens without warning. The man is a faceless black silhouette in the yellow rectangle of light that burns at the boy’s sensitive eyes, and for a moment the boy allows himself to believe. Could it be? Could it be his father, come to take him home?

  And then the man speaks. The boy can tell from the fevered, excited hitch in his voice that today is going to be particularly bad. “You know the drill, you little shit. Turn and face the wall. Get those legs apart.”

  All hope flees the little boy.

  Any maybe that’s a good thing.

  There’s nothing crueler than hope.

  One

  ZARA

  Fear.

  It will either galvanize or break you.

  People fold under the pressure of fear all the time, crumpling in on themselves, making themselves small, hiding from the dark, cold fist that wraps itself around their hearts. There are also those who rise up to face fear, straightening their shoulders, bracing themselves to face the object of their terror head-on.

  I’ve always been a rise-up-and-meet-fear kind of person. I’ve never allowed another person or a situation to claim power over me before, and as such…I suppose I’ve felt impervious to the notion of truly being afraid. If you can look your greatest fears in the eye, stand tall, refuse to back down, to quit, or wilt, then you will overcome the roiling emotion that would otherwise destroy your hope and eat your dreams alive. It’s liberating, realizing how far a little courage can take you.

  Right now, though, I am sapped of courage.

  Right now, for the first time in my life, I am really scared.

  Beside me, a man with raven’s wing hair and glittering green eyes takes my hand and squeezes it tightly, as if he can sense just how scared I am. The smile he sends me looks a little worn around the edges, but it bolsters my confidence a little.

  “Won’t be so bad,” he rumbles. His voice has haunted my dreams, breathless and lust-filled for years, and hearing it now, out loud, as we stand together in the rain on the corner of Delongpre and Cross Street in one of the most disreputable neighborhoods in Spokane, the sound of it sends a shiver racing down my back. Pins and needles bite at the tips of my fingers and my toes, and my breath catches at the back of my throat, because it’s real. His voice is real. Pasha is real, and he managed to find me.

  Before us, a dark stairwell descends underground, below the worn sidewalks of Rochester Park. Pasha’s eyes are feverish as he looks down into the darkness and he rocks his head to the left, cracking his neck. He doesn’t look excited by the prospect o
f going down the stairs and into the blackness beyond—I really don’t want to fucking do it, either—but there’s a determined, steely energy pouring from him, and I can feel it prickling at my skin like an electrical current.

  “Probably best if we don’t speak to anyone until we’ve had chance to find my mother,” Pasha says, setting his jaw. “Things are bound to get out of hand otherwise.”

  Out of hand?

  I don’t like the sound of out of hand, but I don’t ask him what he means. The oily knot of panic that keeps twisting and turning in on itself in the pit of my stomach won’t let me ask questions, just in case the answers are even more worrying than the not knowing. Pretty damn pathetic, really.

  Pasha takes the first step, leading the way down the stairs, and a high-pitched sound begins to screech in my head like nails down a chalkboard. Less than an hour ago, on the street outside my apartment, I was angry with him for preventing me from picking up a public payphone.

  He’d answered the call that had rung out for a solid five minutes beneath my bedroom window. He was the one who’d spoken to the man on the other end of the line. It had therefore been his job to tell me the news that Corey Petrov was dead. Murdered by a man named Lazlo, who is now apparently going to kill my friend Sarah next. And then…

  …and then God only knows what.

  My anger toward Pasha now faded, the news of Corey’s death is still sinking in, and instead of being annoyed that he wouldn’t let me answer the phone, I’m extraordinarily grateful that he saved me from having to hear those vile words drip from Lazlo’s tongue. They would have haunted me, tormented and tortured me.

  Pasha, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be falling apart. Not in the slightest. There’s pain in his eyes, yes, and something like green-tinged fury—it burns bright enough to spot a mile away—but he’s also solid and immoveable, like a weathered pillar of rock amidst a raging storm.

  “I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into all of this,” I whisper. These words are useless, I already know that, but I need to fill the silence; the air in the narrow staircase feels close, stifling and stripped of all oxygen, and the thickness of it is cramming its way down my throat, inside my ears, and up my nose. I can’t fucking bear it.

  Pasha’s huge hand, locked around mine, squeezes again. “None of this is your fault. None of this is my fault. Lazlo is…” I stare at the buzzed, tiny strands of hair at the base of his skull as Pasha shakes his head, sighing heavily. “Lazlo was an outsider. Not born into the clan. He showed up years before I was born, from another clan. Always trouble. Never fit in. Never fucking tried. People loved the bastard for it. Everyone thought he walked on water. When I tried to tell them what I’d found him doing, they didn’t believe me. Or they just didn’t want to hear it. Sometimes it’s like that. People don’t want to feel like they were fooled into trusting someone who didn’t deserve it. Easier if someone else is lying than their own judgement be so off.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, my heart makes its way up into my throat and refuses to sink back down into its rightful place. When I came here the first time, only a week ago, a young boy wearing an orange jacket had sat here, guarding the door to the fair. His name was Leo. I didn’t know when I met him, of course, that the very same boy had been attacked by Lazlo three years ago. Had nearly been raped by the bastard, and Pasha had killed him for it.

  Had thought he’d killed him for it.

  It turns out Lazlo is very much alive, and his interest in little boys has far from waned. I nearly double over and vomit onto my shoes at that dark, disgusting thought. Corey. Poor fucking Corey. What went wrong? Yuri Petrov had been so confident he was getting his son back; he hadn’t seemed even close to worried when he approached me in the parking lot the other night. He showed me that video of the little boy—living, breathing, in one piece—and I’d allowed the head of Spokane’s Russian mob boss to convince me the situation was under control. I’d jumped at the chance to believe there was an end to the nightmare in sight, because my worry over the little boy had been eating me alive.

  So, I’d gone home. I’d re-gifted the hideous fur coat Yuri had sent to me, and I’d promptly decided the matter was better off dealt with by people far more educated in matters of kidnapping, bribery and organized crime in general. It hadn’t been all right, though. The situation was not under control, and Corey had paid the ultimate price.

  Pasha lets go of me and pulls a large jumble of keys out of his leather jacket pocket. The metal flashes copper and silver in his hands as his fingers quickly fly through the individual pieces of metal until he finds the one he’s looking for. A second later, the large, heavy, steel door that leads into the fair swings open, and…

  Pasha curses.

  Behind the door, there is nothing but darkness.

  The Midnight Fair is gone.

  PASHA

  The cavernous space that housed the clan only days ago smells like stale sugar and the ghost of smoke. Twenty-five stalls were set up down here, along with numerous tents and other attractions, but now there’s nothing but the silence, the light from my phone bouncing off the foiled stars tiled into the ceiling overhead, and the torn-up ground under our feet. There isn’t a scrap of paper left behind. Not a single piece of trash, a forgotten book, or a mislaid handkerchief.

  This is the way it’s always been; an hour after we leave town, the only sign that we were ever there is our boot prints. A week after the Rivin family disappears, even the boot prints are gone, and the entire clan is in the wind.

  Zara walks past me, eyes wide with confusion as she spins around, taking in the absolute…emptiness. She stops, facing me, her hands upturned toward the ceiling. “How can they have packed everything up so quickly? This place feels like it’s been abandoned for years, but I saw it. I saw all of the candles. The food. The people.”

  “The Rivins are experts at bailing on very short notice.” I clench my jaw, breathing heavily down my nose. This is perfect. Just fucking perfect.

  “Where the hell did they go?”

  “I haven’t been with them for the last three years. They could have changed their route while I’ve been living in Spokane. There are a million places they could have moved to.” Even as I’m saying this, though, I already know where my mother, Patrin, Leo, and the others have gone. I just don’t want to admit it to myself, because admitting it will mean that we have to go there. And I really do not want to go there.

  I finally met the girl of my dreams. I finally held her in my fucking arms, and I made her my own. I kissed her. I claimed her. I set her soul on fire, just as she struck a match and caused the tattered rags of my own soul to go up in flames. Right now, I’m supposed to be stroking Zara’s wild red hair while she sleeps peacefully on my chest. We’re supposed to lock ourselves away in her apartment for the next three days while we explore each other’s bodies as well as each other’s limits, forgetting to feed ourselves or take showers, or to step outside as we learn everything there is to know about each other.

  But instead, a little boy is dead, an aunt I never knew I had is being held captive, and a devil has risen from the dead.

  And now we’re going to have to go to the glen?

  Fuck my life.

  Once this is all over, I’m going to destroy that pay phone.

  I’m going to rip it clean from the ground, and I’m going to dump the fucking thing into the deepest, fastest flowing part of the Spokane River.

  I’m going to make sure that pay phone never fucking rings again.

  Two

  ZARA

  “You’re gonna need to pack a bag.” Pasha’s boiling over with frustration as he makes a beeline for the Mustang that’s parked on the street outside a dingy twenty-four-hour convenience store. My heart’s still thumping from having to run up the stairs after him just now, and it doesn’t look like he’s planning on slowing down; I jog a couple of steps, trying to keep up with him. “We can’t leave town, Pasha. Lazlo…fuck. This guy’s got Sarah holed
-up in the city somewhere. We need to stay and find her.”

  Smoke billows on the cold night air as Pasha replies. “He said the only way to save her was to accept the crown. He’s probably been watching the clan if he knows I haven’t accepted the role yet. He knows we’re gonna have to leave to go find them if we’re gonna be able to give him what he wants.” He unlocks the passenger side door and opens it for me. Standing in front of him, the car door pinned between our chests, I look up at him, trying to mimic his even composure.

  I can’t suppress the questions that burn in my mind, though. They spew out of me, frantic, one after the other. “What if he just wants us out of the way? What if he wants us out of town so he can kill Sarah and get the hell out of Spokane himself? Why would he even want you to be their king, to be in a position of power, if he hates you so much?”

  Pasha’s mouth tightens into a line as he lifts his hand to my cheek and strokes his fingers along the line of my cheekbone. His dark hair is curling at the ends, tumbling into his face. The smell of him envelops me, reassuring and strong, and I find myself wanting to wrap my entire being up in him, to sink myself into him and lose myself forever. There would be no worries over Sarah. Corey wouldn’t be dead. It wouldn’t matter that I was suspended from work, because my job wouldn’t matter anymore. Only he would matter. The dark-haired prince of the Roma.