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Angel’s expression grew serious. “I was sorry to hear about your father. I’d never met him, but I’d heard he was a good man.”
“He was,” Kira said. “Thank you.”
“You must miss him.”
Kira drew in a breath. She didn’t let herself think about it often. “I do. Very much. It’s been… difficult.”
“Made more difficult by the situation in the bratva, I’m sure.”
Kira looked at Angel with surprise. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t frank business talk from the wife of Nico Vitale, the man who’d brought down the Syndicate’s original leadership.
“Yes,” Kira said. “Things are in hand of course, but…”
“A change of leadership always brings with it a certain amount of turmoil,” Angel said.
Kira exhaled her relief. She much preferred Angel to come out with it rather than feel like they were both dancing around the obvious. “Yes, exactly.”
“I know a little something about that,” Angel said. Kira had heard the stories: the way Nico had kidnapped Angel as retaliation against her father for executing Nico’s parents, how he’d been exiled by Raneiro Donati for the crime of falling in love with her. She’d even heard rumors that Nico and Angel had been in hiding for a couple of years before Nico got his revenge against Donati. “The men like to keep up a front, but it’s just common sense. Change is challenging in any organization, and never more so than in organizations like ours.”
“It’s definitely been challenging,” Kira said.
“But Lyonya is pakhan now,” Angel said. “That’s important. It’s harder to depose a king than it is to prevent one from taking the crown in the first place.”
Kira lifted her eyebrows. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law?”
“Exactly,” Angel said. She hesitated. “And you and Lyonya are newlyweds, yes?”
“Yes.”’ Kira had to assume Angel understood that theirs was a marriage of convenience, of opportunity. It hadn’t been announced that way of course, but these things still happened with some frequency in their world, and the combining of the Antonov and Baranov names followed by the announcement of Lyon’s promotion said it all.
“That must be especially difficult,” Angel said.
Kira felt the urge to look away from Angel’s piercing green eyes. She forced herself to meet them. “It is. So tell me, is it worth it?”
Angel didn’t seem surprised by the question. “It was for me,” she said. “But that’s something you have to decide for yourself. I don’t know you. I don’t know Lyonya.”
No one knows him. Not even me.
But that wasn’t true was it? Back in the fall, Kira had felt the knowing of him in her belly, in her bones. She didn’t believe it had been a lie. Even then, she had known what Lyon was, had known he was savage and violent.
She hadn’t sought to deny that part of him, hadn’t sought to paper over it.
She’d accepted all of him, and she still believed — deep down, beyond their fighting and the brutal push and pull of their relationship — that he was all of those things.
Savage. Violent.
Tender. Loving.
The only question that remained was whether she would ever get to see those other parts of him again.
“I do know one thing,” Angel continued.
“What is that?” Kira asked.
“He cares about you,” Angel said. “Lyon. That’s what they call him, isn’t it? The Lion?”
Kira nodded, and Angel stood to go.
“How do you know?” Kira asked. “That he cares about me?”
