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Lyon sat on the porch and let his gaze wander out to the woods surrounding the house in Blackhawk.
Well,housewas a generous word to describe the place Alek had found for them to stage their attack on Musa. It was more of a shack, a small two-bedroom structure with low ceilings so water-stained Lyon wondered if the roof had ever worked at all.
But he wasn’t complaining. Alek had had less than twelve hours to find them a place to rent. Nestled in the trees up a potholed dirt drive less than twenty minutes from the cabin where Musa was staying, the shack fit the bill.
He’d already prepared one of the bedrooms for Musa, a nice clean kill room where Lyon could do his work.
The door opened behind him and he heard the squeak and slam of the screen.
“Fuck,” Alek said, dropping beside him on the porch. “It’s cold out here.”
“Careful,” Lyon said. “I’m not entirely sure this step will hold both of us.”
Alek shifted and the worn wooden step groaned under his weight. “These old places are stronger than they look. Place will probably still be standing when Chicago goes postapocalyptic.”
Lyon cut a glance at him. “That’s… dark.”
Alek shrugged and rubbed his hands together. He hadn’t put on a coat before stepping onto the porch. “Life is dark. We know that better than anybody.”
Lyon stared at the trees, dusted with snow. It hadn’t been snowing when they left the city early that morning, but flurries had started to dust the windshield as they got closer to Blackhawk and snow had been falling steadily ever since they arrived.
“What do you think?” Lyon asked. He didn’t have to elaborate on the question. After all their years as friends, he and Alek had a kind of shorthand.
“They’re perfectly capable,” Lyon said, referring to the Syndicate men staging inside the house. “Friendly but professional, know their way around the gear. It’s all good.”
The Syndicate had given them three men: a tall lean man with beady eyes named Sal, a bearded giant named Tony, and a guy named Leo that had bulging muscles and a viper tattoo on his neck.
They’d met at the warehouse in Chicago, exchanged pleasantries, and caravanned up to Blackhawk before the sun had cracked through the horizon.
“Any word from Luka and Markus?” Lyon asked.
“Everything’s good.” Alek blew into his hands. “They’ve moved closer to the house, but they’re still hidden in the trees. I have them sending up the drone every hour to make sure we don’t get any surprises.”
“Still only three of them?” Lyon asked. They hadn’t been able to identify the two men who arrived at the cabin after Musa, but Lyon had ordered Markus, who was running the drone, to take some stills.
Lyon knew a guy who had access to state-of-the-art facial recognition software. After this was all over, after Musa was dead, he would see if his contact could ID the people who’d been helping Musa, see if they could trace the men to someone in the Chicago organization or back to Moscow.
“As far as we know,” Alek said.
Lyon clenched his jaw. No mistakes. Not this time. “Not good enough.”
“Yes,” Alek said. “Only three.”
That put them five against three, with the element of surprise on their side, plus Markus and Luka, who he would leave stationed outside.
Lyon liked those odds. One way or another, Musa was dying today.
He saw Kira’s face the way she’d looked when he’d first seen her in the hospital, the way she’d looked when he’d left her the day before, tucked into bed and drifting on a sea of painkillers.
Lyon was going to have Musa moved to the shack so he could take his time, take him apart piece by piece.
“What time do you want to leave?” Alek asked.
“Let’s call it midnight,” Lyon said. It was late enough that Musa and his men would be settled in for the night. If they got lucky, they might even be asleep by the time Lyon and his men had moved on the house.
“I’ll tell the men.” Alek rose to his feet and Lyon heard the screen door slam behind him.
Lyon sat in the quiet, sank into it, let it calm the storm of his anger. He thought again of Kira. Their relationship, which began as a simple business arrangement, had morphed into something dangerous and complex. He didn’t hate her anymore, but he couldn’t love her again either, not the way he had in the fall when he’d been prepared to abandon his hard-earned reason, when he’d been prepared to give her everything.
