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“I’m glad we cleared that up,” he said formally. “Now if you don’t mind, please quiet your birds.”
He turned to go, leaving her naked and wanting, panting with her desire for him, with the fury that was just starting to freeze the lust in her veins.
She reached for the cut glass vase — a vase that once held flowers sent to her by Lyon almost daily — and threw it.
But she was too late. The door was closed by the time it traveled across the room. The glass shattered against it.
Lyon’s laughter echoed down the hall.
12
Lyon was still thinking of her on the way to the warehouse the next morning. He’d been up most of the night, replaying the altercation with Kira until his cock became so painfully engorged that he’d relieved himself, stroking his shaft to the image of her naked body, the feel of her satiny skin under his hands, the tempting plumpness of her erect nipple so very close to his lips.
He’d come violently and had immediately been filled with shame that she should still hold so much power over him. He’d managed to hide it in her presence, had tucked it safely behind the facade of control and cruelty he’d cultivated for his enemies.
But it hadn’t been easy.
He stifled a groan and turned his attention to business. As complicated as it was at the present, as volatile, it felt less dangerous than thoughts of Kira. He didn’t want to think about what that meant, what it said about his state of mind as it related to the woman who was his wife.
“Something on your mind?” Alek asked.
Rurik was seeing to additions to the security system at the penthouse, and Alek had happily stepped back into his role as Lyon’s driver and right-hand man.
“Yes, but I’m not sure what it is,” Lyon said. He looked out the window, watched as the industrial part of the city passed in a series of old warehouses and crumbling factory buildings, railroad tracks crisscrossing the cracked pavement.
Alek glanced over at him. “What does that mean?”
“I feel like we’re missing something,” Lyon said. It felt like a knot, something he’d been working in his mind almost without realizing it.
“What are we missing?” Alek asked.
“I don’t know,” Lyon said. “I think it may have something to do with Moscow.”
Alek stopped the car at a red light. “Because of what the kid at Vas’s said?”
“That, but not just that,” Lyon said. “It feels connected.”
“To what?”
“To everything that’s happened so far.” Lyon didn’t intend to be cryptic. He just hadn’t figured it out yet. It was like having a word on the tip of his tongue, like losing his train of thought a second after he’d known exactly what he’d intended to say. “I’m wondering if it’s time to reach out to Tolya Sakharov.”
Alek’s eyes showed surprise in the moment before he accelerated through the green light. “It’s an option,” he said cautiously.
His tone of voice said he didn’t think it was a good one. Lyon didn’t blame him.
Tolya Sakharov had been one of the KGB’s most feared interrogators. When he’d left their ranks, it hadn’t been to retire quietly but to join forces with the ambitious, dangerous men who’d started the gangs that had been incubators for the modern day bratva.
Men like Lyon’s father.
Lyon had only met Tolya twice. Both times Lyon had been a teenager. Both times he’d sensed the violence lurking under the man’s jovial facade.
It had been obvious that Lyon’s father revered him, and that had been enough for Lyon to put him on a pedestal. When he’d asked his father about Tolya after their second meeting — only a couple years before Lyon’s father would go to prison protecting the bratva — his father had only said, “If there’s anything you want to know about the bratva, anything that needs doing that no one else can do, Tolya is the man to have on your side.”
Tolya had since retired to Prague, but his name was still whispered about in their organization by soldiers and Spies alike. The whispers carried the same kind of awe and terror used by children when they spoke of thebabayka, the boogeyman.
If someone in Russia was working against Lyon, Tolya would know the person’s identity. But contacting him felt like opening the lid on a Pandora’s box full of dark and deadly things.
“I’ll give it some thought,” Lyon said. “It’s simply a feeling.”
