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Five weeks. That’s how long Rurik said Lyon had been kept prisoner.
More than once — when he’d been bored, when he’d been trying to stay awake with the screw in his hand — he’d tried to guess how long he’d been imprisoned.
His estimates were always different, but the most he’d ever guessed was three weeks.
It had been the worst kind of torture to think of Kira alone for that long. Worse than having his fingernails and toenails pulled. Worse than Psycho’s meaty fists cracking through his broken ribs. Worse even than Sergei’s knife slicing through his skin.
But it hadn’t been three weeks. It had been more than month.
More than a month that she’d been left unprotected. More than a month of her pregnancy and the growth of their baby.
It was too much to contemplate. He turned off the now-icy water and stepped from the shower, glad Kira had left towels at the new house when she’d been preparing for the wedding.
He dried off carefully, not wanting to reopen his wounds, especially the ones on his chest. He’d had Rurik call for Anatoly, the doctor the bratva kept on retainer for those occasions when discreet medical attention was required. Lyon would have him tape his ribs, set his broken nose, see to the rest of his injuries. Then he would figure out how he was going to make Vadim and his psychopath of a son pay for what they’d taken from him.
From Kira.
He looked at his clothes, filthy and rank, piled on the floor of the bathroom and realized he didn’t have anything else to wear. The thought of putting on the clothes he’d been tortured in was abhorrent.He would have one of the men run out and buy him something to wear until he felt strong enough to go to the penthouse, to face Kira after failing her so completely.
He wrapped the towel around his waist and opened the door to the adjoining bedroom. The ensuite was supposed to be hisand Kira’s primary bedroom when they moved into the Lake Forest house. It was where he’d kept her for three days to teach her a lesson after she’d run to Orcas Island.
The smile that teased the corners of his mouth felt strange. It had been over a month since he’d smiled with anything other than deranged malice, but it was impossible not to do so remembering his wife’s fury when he’d had her brought back to Chicago.
She’d been incensed, full of fire.
He’d never been so happy to see anyone in his life.
The primary bedroom was the last to undergo renovation, and the bed still sat against one wall, albeit without sheets and blankets. He didn’t care. He was tempted to lay on the bare mattress and sleep for a year.
But he needed clothes, and he needed to get a status update on the business.
He would set Rurik and Alek to work getting the things he needed. Then they would figure out how to find Vadim and his men.
How to make them pay.
He was heading for the door when it swung open. He stopped in his tracks when Kira entered the room, looking brisk and businesslike with a stack of clothing and bedding in her arms.
He thought he saw pain in her eyes when she looked at him, but it was gone a second later, either a figment of his imagination or tucked away behind the cool facade she wore for the world.
She set the clothes on the bed and walked to him without hesitation.
His arms opened of their own volition, his body calling out to her, his soul’s yearning finally realized.
“Lyon…” She breathed his name like a prayer, and he wrapped his arms around her, savored her softness. He inhaled her scent and closed his eyes.
When he opened them, she was still there. It was real.
He stroked her hair. “My god, I’ve missed you.”
She pulled away to look up at him, and this time he knew he wasn’t imagining the tears in her eyes. “Not as much as I’ve missed you.”
He tucked a piece of gold hair behind one ear, marveling at the changes in her face, softer than it had been a month earlier.
And harder too.
He pulled back even farther to take in the ripeness of her pregnant body. “Look at you,” he marveled, holding out his hands, resting them carefully on her swollen stomach. “Look at our baby.”
She smiled. “He or she takes after you. Always moving. We’ve been waiting for you to come home.” She inhaled a shuddering breath. “Praying for you to come home.”
