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She allowed herself to be hauled to her feet and was dimly aware of a throbbing in her right knee, a stinging in her left elbow where she’d fallen to the ground.
The man who shoved her forward didn’t speak, but she knew it wasn’t Lyon. She’d been skin-to-skin with Lyon, had lain in his arms, had welcomed him inside her.
She knew what he felt like.
She heard a car door open, felt herself lifted into a plush, heated interior. The man holding her climbed in behind her, shoving her across the back seat.
She thought the car would move, but there was only silence. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the bag was pulled off her head. She blinked at the sudden light and gazed frantically around the SUV’s interior as she tried to get her bearings.
But when she looked to the front seat, it wasn’t Lyon behind the wheel, but Alek.
If she’d had time to think about it, she might have expected him to be angry. What she saw in his eyes instead chilled her to the bone.
It was pity.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She lifted her chin, determined not to show her fear, not even to Alek. “For what?”
He hesitated. “For what’s to come.”
He nodded at the man beside her, a man Kira hadn’t had time to inventory. The bag came back down over her head. She felt the sting of a needle in her arm, followed by a strange buzzing in her head.
And then, nothing.
2
Lyon Antonov stood in the wood-paneled room and forced himself not to pace. Pacing would be a sign of weakness, and weakness was something he wouldn’t allow.
Especially now.
Markus Garin leaned against a wall on the other side of the room. Lyon would have preferred to have Alek with him, but his best friend and right-hand man had been deployed to a more important task than watching Lyon’s back, a task that provided limited value under the circumstances.
Garin shot Lyon a glance, and Lyon nodded reassuringly. He was a new recruit to Lyon’s cause, one for which Lyon had high hopes. In his early thirties, Garin was almost as tall as Lyon, with the solid muscle of a linebacker in his prime.
He had the street experience lacking in a soldier like Stefan, who although loyal, was greener than green. Garin was also single, which made him more focused than someone like Rupert, who could be distracted by his focus on increasing his earnings to support his large family.
One of the things Lyon liked most about Garin was his ability to mask his emotions, his features as watchful as a hawk’s while his dark eyes remained largely unreadable. It was a testament to the tenuousness of Lyon’s situation that he thought he saw concern lurking behind the blankness of Garin’s expression.
The concern wasn’t unwarranted. The office in which they stood was an anteroom of sorts, a holding area for the large room on the other side of the wall where the Spies would deliver their verdict on Lyon’s fate. By all counts it should have been delivered a month earlier, but Musa’s execution of Viktor Baranov had thrown the bratva into turmoil and provided Lyon with a one month grace period.
It was a grace he’d been allowed only because Viktor Baranov, former boss of the Chicago bratva, was his father-in-law.
Kira’s father.
Her name rolled through him like a tidal wave. It was an improvement. When she’d left him a month earlier, the thought of her had been more like an earthquake, one that had shaken everything he’d believed about himself, one that created fissures in his body, his bones, his heart.
It had felt like dying. Like he was being ground to dust.
This new feeling was manageable. He knew the danger zones now. Knew he must not think of the expression on her face when she laughed, when she slept, when she came for him, her body tightening around his own like a silken glove.
He knew not to think about the way she felt in his arms, her voice in the dark, her green eyes, lit with fire, when she spoke about their plans for their future ruling the bratva.
Most of all, he knew better than to remember that he had loved her.
No. He’d only thought he’d loved her. Had thought she loved him back.
That had been a lie. To be free, he had to call it what it was.
