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Prologue
Lyonya Antonov followed the butler down the wide hall, their footsteps muffled on the patterned runners that lay across the gleaming wood floors. He felt an uncharacteristic burst of nervousness, then pushed it aside.
There was no reason for nerves.
This was the moment for which his entire adult life had been orchestrated — the waiting, the planning, the silent manipulation. It was all about to pay off.
Whether Viktor Baranov, current boss of the Chicago bratva, wanted to enter into the agreement Lyonya was about to present was irrelevant.
Viktor would enter into it. He didn’t have a choice.
The butler paused at a set of carved wood doors, but it wasn’t Viktor who entered Lyon’s mind in the moment before the butler opened them. Instead, an image of a woman flashed in his mind: flaxen hair cascading down an elegant spine and ending at the top of a lush ass, green eyes that looked at him with disdain, the imperious tilt of a regal chin under full lips.
Kira Baranov, Viktor’s daughter.
He shook the image from his mind as the butler opened the doors to Viktor’s study.
Lyon’s gaze went immediately to Viktor, standing behind his ornately carved desk. They might have been in the office of a banker or oil tycoon, the paneled mahogany walls richly oiled, the antique furniture worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, none of it hinting at the criminal underworld that funded it all.
The door closed with a quiet click behind Lyon, shutting him in the muffled cocoon.
“Lyon, please come in,” Viktor said.
It was both his name and a nickname.
Lyon, short for Lyonya.
The Lion, an endearment bestowed on him by Viktor himself. The bratva was an organization that valued violence, Lyon a man who wielded it without remorse.
The nickname had stuck.
He crossed the room, satisfied by Viktor’s appraisal of his appearance. Lyon had been in this room many times since he was a boy, most recently as a personal guard for Yakov Vitsin, a position well below the one to which Lyon was entitled. During those visits, Lyon wore clothing appropriate for a guard: jeans, a T-shirt under a jacket.
But today he didn’t come as a bodyguard for the undisciplined and unruly Yakov.
Today Lyon came as a future king, and he’d dressed appropriately in a custom suit, tailored to his large frame, cufflinks left to him by his father after his death by cancer in prison, shoes handmade in Italy, and a thirty-thousand dollar Patek Phillipe watch. As a show of respect for Viktor, he’d even forgone the weapon usually strapped at his side.
“You look well,” Viktor said simply. He wore a white button-down shirt with no jacket. A sparse patch of dark hair emerging from the open buttons at the top while the hair on his head had thinned to a prominent widow’s peak, his face, like the rest of him, turned fleshy.
Viktor’s dark eyes, however, remained as shrewd as ever.
“Thank you,” Lyon said.
“Sit,” Viktor instructed.
Lyon did, noting, if only to himself, that it would be one of the last times he took orders from Viktor Baranov.
“I assume you are here about Yakov,” Viktor said.
“I am here about the Baranov legacy, and my own,” Lyon said. “Yakov is simply an instrument of both.”
Viktor raised an eyebrow. “Bold words coming from one who could be killed for being here.”
Lyon wasn’t alarmed by the statement. It was true.
“And yet no less true for their boldness,” Lyon said. “Put simply, we both have a problem.”
“And what might that be?” Viktor asked.
