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What a fool she’d been.
While she’d been mourning what they’d had, he’d quickly and cleanly removed her from his life. He was a monster. A cold and calculating monster, exactly like she’d thought when she’d agreed to marry him, when she’d promised herself to keep her distance, to remember what he was.
She remembered now. She would not let herself forget again.
She turned from the room and hurried into the hall. She needed to find Zoya.
10
The city was shrouded in darkness as Rurik navigated the Rover toward West Town. He watched from the warmth of the car as his fellow Chicagoans hurried across the sidewalks, chins tucked into scarves against the cold, as they rushed home from work, and for a few brave souls, out into the evening.
Lyon was glad for Rurik’s silence. Kira had only been back in the house for three days but her presence had deeply unsettled him. It reminded him of the early days of their marriage. Then, he’d tossed and turned, knowing she was just down the hall, wondering what it would be like to take her.
Now, he tossed and turned because he knew.
He knew exactly how it would feel to slide his hands into the hair at the back of her neck, to force her to look at him, to be the object of her defiant glare. He knew what it would feel like to slide his tongue into her mouth, to press the downy peaks and valleys of her body against the hard planes of his own, to strip her bare until he felt the heat of her velvety skin against his own. Most of all he knew what it would feel like to drive into her hard and fast, to hear her moan as he moved inside her, to feel the tight heat of her pussy as she came for him.
His trousers tightened around his hard cock and he shifted in his seat. A surge of anger flooded his body. Damn Kira Baranov. He could not allow her to occupy his mind in such a way.
He was relieved when Rurik pulled up outside an old brick house in West Town. “You sure you don’t want me to go in with you?”
Lyon looked at the row house through the passenger side window. The siding’s white paint was peeling, the old windows on the first and second floors covered with curtains. A small porch fronted the place, its iron banister rusted, and there were a couple of mismatched chairs out front with a table between them, an overflowing ashtray on its surface.
“I’m sure,” Lyon said.
This was something he had to do alone.
“I’ll be here if you change your mind,” Rurik said.
Lyon reached for the door handle and exited the car. He walked up the cracked and buckled concrete pathway and climbed the stairs to the porch.
He rang the bell and waited, holding the screen door open in the meantime. A few seconds later someone cracked the door.
Lyon lifted his foot and gave it a sturdy kick. A cry of protest sounded from behind the door as whoever had been about to open it went flying.
Lyon shoved his way inside. He didn’t bother with the man — a low-level shestyorka — who had fallen against the narrow staircase leading to the second floor. Instead, Lyon continued into the living room, which opened into a dining room crowded with men rising from a dingy round dining table, an expression of surprise on their faces.
He registered their number — four men, including Vas Malkin, the man he’d come to see — and their positions in the room. Then he advanced on Vas, glad the other men receded to the edges of the room, not because he couldn’t deal with them too but because Lyon preferred to keep this between him and Vas.
He wanted Vas’s soldiers on his side, a goal that would only be made harder if he was forced to beat them bloody.
“What the fu — ”
It was all Vas managed to get out before Lyon swung his first punch.
Vas was short but meaty. His frame would have made it easy to assume he’d gone to fat, but the impact that rocked Lyon’s body as Vas stumbled backward made it clear that would be a mistaken assumption.
He advanced on Vas before the other man had time to regroup, but as he reached for the lapels of his leather jacket, Vas swung, clipping Lyon’s temple.
Lyon felt the sting of Vas’s ring slice through his skin. He grabbed Vas’s jacket and shoved him hard against the wall. The drywall behind him cracked, creating a hollow for Vas’s head.
“You dare come here alone?” Vas sputtered. Drywall dust sprinkled his hair like snow, and his eyes were wild, blood leaking from his nose.
Lyon leaned in until his face was only a couple of inches from Vas’s. When he spoke, his voice was low enough that the other men would have to strain to hear him. “Do you think I need help to put you in your place? To remind you who’s in charge?”
He didn’t wait for an answer before punching Vas in the stomach. The other man grunted and tried to escape Lyon’s hold.
Lyon delivered a head butt that had him seeing stars, and Vas blinked rapidly, the resistance leaving his body for a split second before he resumed his struggle to free himself from Lyon’s grip.
