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Kira sat on the bed and put her phone down, her father’s voice echoing in her mind.
He wasn’t well.
She knew it was true even though he’d denied it. He sounded out of breath, and he’d paused to cough every few minutes during their conversation. He sounded weary.
Now that she and Lyon were back in Chicago, the urge to go to her father was overwhelming. She wanted to see him for herself, see if she could convince him to go to a doctor. He hated doctors — always insisted if an illness didn’t kill him, a doctor would — but there was a time to be stubborn and a time to be wise, and she had the feeling that this time he was on the wrong side of the equation.
There was no help for it. Calling her father on a burner phone was one thing. Going to see him when the Spies might get wind of it was something else. She couldn’t put him in danger that way to soothe her own worry.
She looked around the dingy room and sighed. It felt like a prison, but Lyon had been right in securing the rental house in a quiet, rundown part of Brighton Park, far enough from West Town that they had a chance of staying under the radar until after Lyon killed Musa tomorrow night.
And after that? She didn’t know. It would depend on how Musa’s murder went over with the Spies, with the men on the street. They would either give him the title of pakhan or order his execution. What she and Lyon did next would depend entirely on which option the Spies chose.
She stood and exited the bedroom she’d been sharing with Lyon since they got to the house two days before. The house was small, and she followed the sound of bawdy laughter to the living room, where music played and several men cleaned and loaded weapons.
Lyon sat among them, looking almost unfamiliar in jeans and a white T-shirt. She’d grown used to seeing him in suits and slacks, and she had a flash of him during all the years he’d been a brigadier and the ones where he’d worked for Yakov, lurking in the entry of her father’s house, observing her with bottomless eyes.
She hadn’t thought twice about him except to remember him as a boy. To think of him as a brute.
Well, he was a brute, and now she was grateful for it. It would take force to take control of the bratva now. It would take violence. But it would also take brains, and her husband had plenty of all of those. He was a chameleon, becoming whatever someone expected of him, whatever they wanted to see.
Lyon looked up when she entered the room and his eyes darkened, something private and intimate moving between them.
“Should I order food?” she asked.
“I’d love some pizza,” a man named Daniel said. “Let’s see how it compares to pizza at home.”
Like the other men in the room — all except for Alek — Daniel had been sent by Roman. There were six of them, and they’d arrived the day before in a whirlwind of noise and dirty jokes.
Lyon had seemed horrified at the language that left their mouth around Kira, but she’d forced him to keep quiet. She didn’t want them to be careful around her. She wanted them to be comfortable, to talk freely. Men let all kinds of information loose when they were among friends.
“Pizza it is,” she said. It was a far cry from the formal dinners and black-tie events that had been de rigueur when she’d lived with her father, but she didn’t mind. It was all preparation for the future, for the time when she and Lyon would rule the bratva.
She went to the kitchen and sat at the dining table that had come with the fully furnished house, then used her phone to pull up some pizza places that delivered.
She looked up when Lyon’s phone rang, bit her lip when he looked at the screen and excused himself to go to the other room.
Was he still keeping secrets? Still working a plan he hadn’t shared?
She didn’t think so, and if she was going to stand at his side — truly at his side — she would have to trust him.
Alek came into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He took out a beer, then looked at Kira. “Want one?”
She smiled. “No, thank you.”
He surprised her by sitting at the table instead of returning to the living room where the men were still preparing their gear. She and Alek had been thrown together by circumstance during the past week, but he was cautious around her, avoiding being alone with her for too long, mostly silent when he was.
She had the feeling he didn’t like her, that maybe he didn’t trust her.
She might have said the same thing about him, except she’d already done her homework on Alek Evanoff. In the beginning, it had been because she wanted to know all she could about everyone in Lyon’s orbit. Later, she’d been relieved to know the man who claimed to have her husband’s back seemed to be genuine: born in America to Russian immigrants, Alek had gone to school with Lyon, had been his friend since they were boys and was later assigned to Lyon’s crew when Lyon was a brigadier.
He took a swig of the beer and studied her for a long moment. She was mesmerized by his eyes, as clear and blue as an iceberg.
“I might get myself in trouble here,” he finally said. “But there’s something I have to say.”
“You can speak freely with me, Alek. Any trouble won’t come from me.”
