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If he was still alive.
No, she wouldn’t think about that.
“Any updates on the locations?” she asked Alek. She had to focus on saving Lyon. He was alive. She would have felt it if he was dead, because then a part of her would be dead too.
Besides, his body had yet to be discovered, and anyone who killed the Lion would make sure the bratva knew about it. How else to step into Lyon’s shoes?
“We’ve eliminated the old theater,” Alek said.
She chewed her lip. She should have been happy — eliminating one of the locations where Vadim might be keeping Lyon meant they were narrowing the field, but it also meant one less chance of finding him. What if they eliminated them all?
What if they never found him?
“You’re sure?” she asked.
He nodded. “We saw Javier Rodriguez coming and going yesterday. Turns out he was running a little business through the theater.”
"This isn’t cartel territory.” Kira was stating the obvious. Thanks to her father’s tutelage and her own determination to be more than a mafia trophy wife, she knew every player in Chicago’s criminal underworld.
But so did Alek, and they both knew Javier Rodriguez was an up and coming leader in the Sandoval cartel.
“Yeah, he knew that, and he knows it even more now,” Alek said, his voice ominous.
In any other situation, Kira might have been worried. There were rules governing their actions with and against the other criminal organizations in Chicago: the Syndicate, the cartels, the Irish. It was the only way they were all able to operate without turning the city into a bloodbath. It was rare for anyone to break protocol.
No one made money in a turf war.
Alek knew the rules, and Rodriguez had been breaking them. Whatever message Alek sent would have been appropriate for the infraction of doing business on bratva territory.
“Good,” Kira said, moving around the pool table and toward the door where Alek stood.
He stepped aside as she approached, understanding that she was ready to leave. It was one of many things she loved about Alek — the way he anticipated her every move, his ability to besilent during long stretches, his knowledge of every facet of the bratva and their business interests, which allowed them to speak in a kind of shorthand even though they’d interacted very little before Lyon’s kidnapping.
She understood now why he was Lyon’s closest friend, the one person Lyon had trusted when he was planning his takeover of the bratva.
She moved past Alek into the hall and stopped in Lyon’s office to get her coat. Her husband’s scent lingered in the air — the musk of his cologne and the scent of his skin that she would have known blindfolded — and she had to suck in a breath at the wave of longing that filled her body.
She started to pull on her coat. “Eliminating the theater puts us down to two possibilities.”
Alek stepped into the room and held the coat while she slid her arms into it. She was small for being six months pregnant, but her movements already felt awkward and clumsy. Her center of gravity was shifting, and she would sometimes have to catch herself in a stumble when she stepped off a curb.
“Yes,” he said, waiting while she grabbed her bag.
It had taken them nearly a month to narrow their possibilities to three. They’d known Vadim was holding Lyon somewhere in West Town. Holding the Lion captive would require allies — Russian allies — and West Town was teeming with Russian immigrants, some of whom would be eager to do the bidding of one of Mother Russia’s own.
“Any change on the hospital or the tunnels?” she asked, turning out the lights and heading for the walkway that was suspended over the floor of the factory below.
With the theater out of the running, the only possibilities they had left were a defunct psychiatric hospital and the abandoned freight tunnels that ran under the city.
“A little more activity around the hospital,” Alek said.
She stopped walking. “Why didn’t you say something?”
She tried to keep the note of accusation out of her voice. No one wanted to find Lyon as much as her and Alek.
“I’m not sure it means anything yet,” he said.
He didn’t want to get her hopes up. That’s what he wasn’t saying.
