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She stopped and looked at him. “What are you doing, Alek? We have to go.”
“He…” Alek took a deep breath. “He doesn’t want to see you. Not yet.”
She froze. “What do you mean?”
“He needs a doctor. He wants to go to the Lake Forest house and wait for Anatoly, clean up a little,” Alek said.
Anatoly was their doctor, the one they called when they didn’t want to involve police or hospitals, which was most of the time.
“Then we’ll go to the Lake Forest house,” she said, her voice turned to ice. She wouldn’t think about the other thing Alek said.
He doesn’t want to see you…
She saw the rare moment of hesitation cross Alek’s features before he spoke again.
“Rurik said Lyon’s fucked up,” Alek said. “He doesn’t want you to see him this way.”
And then she understood. Her husband was the Lion. No man had ever beaten him.
At anything.
Even during the years when he’d been forced to be brigadier on the streets, a station far beneath him. Even during the years when he’d been assigned to Yakov Vitsin’s security detail, a station even further beneath him.
Back then, it had looked like he’d been beaten, but he’d been biding his time, moving the pieces into place to take over the entire organization. She’d been one of those pieces, but now she was his wife in every sense of the word.
“We’ll give them a few hours,” she said. “Then we’re going to Lake Forest.”
She understood that he wouldn’t want her to see him weak and beaten. She would honor his request.
To a point.
Then she would go to him and prove that she loved every part of him, that he didn’t have to be the Lion for her. She would remind him that no other man would have survived what he’d surely been through at the hands of Vadim Ivanov.
That he was a king because he had.
“Why don’t we wait until he calls for you,” Alek suggested.
“Because,” she snapped, “for a month I’ve wondered if my husband is alive or dead.” She drew in a shuddering breath, forcing herself to be calm. “And because I want him to know he doesn’t have to hide any part of himself from me.”
She was embarrassed by the intimacy of the confession. She and Alek were friends brought closer by Lyon’s abduction, but she’d never spoken of anything deeply personal to her husband’s best friend and right-hand man.
He nodded slowly. “All right. What do you want to do until then?”
“Get the men back here. Order a feast, drinks, whatever they want. Give them all bonuses. Big ones.” She started for the car. “I’m going to the penthouse so I can gather some things for my husband.”
12
Lyon stayed in the shower until the water ran cold. When they’d first arrived at the Lake Forest house, his mind had been a jumble of noise and memory: the gunfire echoing off the concrete inside the tunnels, the look on Sergei Ivanov’s face when he’d cut into Lyon’s skin with his knife, the sound of screams that were his own.
He’d thought he was going mad.
So he’d shut it all down, tucked it away in a dark corner of his mind with a very tight-fitting lid. By the time he hit the shower, his mind was blissfully numb. As long as he stayed here, under the spray, he wouldn’t have to think about what had happened to him, wouldn’t have to explain it to Rurik or Alek or anyone else.
Wouldn’t have to explain it to Kira.
His heart ached at the thought of her, but he hadn’t thought twice about ordering Rurik to bring him to the Lake House first. He’d vowed to protect Kira and their baby. Instead, he’d let Vadim’s men take him on their wedding day, forcing her to run and cower like the guests who’d come to watch them reaffirm their vows.
Then he’d left her alone for more than a month.
