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She pressed her ear to the steel door and listened.
“Kira… It’s okay… It’s me.”
Lyon…
She reached for the keypad, her heart pounding, blood rushing in her ears. Lyon was here. He’d come to save them.
To save her father. Everything would be okay.
She punched the code into the keypad and the door groaned to life.
Lyon was through it before it was halfway open, pulling her into his arms, crushing her to him.
“My god… are you okay?” He pulled back to look at her, ran his face over her hair, her face, her shoulders. “Are you hurt?”
“My father…”
His face went pale. “Kira…”
She pushed past him, stumbled into the room where Alek stood, an expression of regret on his face.
The room looked the same. The books and the desk and all of her father’s things.
Except it wasn’t the same. Her father, her dear father, lay on the floor, his eyes open to the ceiling, a bullet hole marking his lined forehead.
“No…” She dropped next to him and pulled his head into her lap. “No, no, no. Wake up, Papa. Please… wake up.”
But she knew he wasn’t going to wake up. Knew not just by the hole in his forehead but by the way he stared past her, through her, the warmth in his eyes gone as if it had never been there at all.
A million moments flashed through her in a second.
Her father, holding her in his lap when she was little, his big laugh echoing through her chest when he hugged her.
Her father, explaining the business to her, patiently going through every holding, tracking the margins so that she would understand when everyone else in the bratva looked at her and saw only a spoiled girl.
And then, her father, holding her in his arms as they circled the dance floor on her wedding night, his face full of pride and love. More love than she’d ever been shown by anyone. More love than she’d deserved.
She saw it all in an instant, felt it slipping through her fingers like sand.
She bowed her head to his and wept.
