Claim

8

Lyon spent the rest of the day dropping in on his brigadiers, the men who ran crews in various parts of the city. He wanted them to know he was watching, that he wasn’t sitting in an ivory tower collecting his money.

But he also wanted them to know he valued them, that he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, to show up on the streets and ask them how they were doing, if they needed anything.

He thought about his meeting with Tolya, turning over the details in his mind. Tolya hadn’t been able to trace the origins of the money paid out to Lyon’s mother. Large deposits were made to her bank accounts, but nothing large enough to account for the purchase of houses and boats, which meant someone was paying her through offshore accounts.

But who? Who was paying his mother with such enormous sums of money? And what were they expecting in return?

Lyon had asked Tolya’s opinion, but the other man had been tight-lipped, suggesting that Lyon needed the kind of digital resources Tolya himself lacked.

By the time Lyon got back to the penthouse, all he wanted was a quiet meal with Kira followed by her naked body under and over his in every way possible. But when he got home, it wasn’t to his wife alone as he’d grown accustomed, but to his mother sitting icily at the kitchen table while Kira bustled around the kitchen.

“Mother,” he said, bending to leave a stiff kiss on her powdered cheek. “Did you have a nice day?”

“It’s so cold here,” she said in response.

“No colder than Russia, I imagine,” he said drily.

He walked to the kitchen where Kira was spooning her delicious plov into bowls. “It smells delicious.”

She seemed surprised when he squeezed her shoulders, and he felt the stain of shame. He hadn’t been very warm to his wife as of late. Not outside of the bedroom.

It had felt necessary in the wake of her flight from Chicago, a way to keep her at a distance. Now, with his mother sitting only feet away, in Chicago to do god-knew-what, Kira suddenly felt like a much safer ally.

“I wanted to make something more elaborate,” she said. “But I was busy all day choosing things for the house.”

He pulled her toward him and kissed her, remembered how she’d opened to him at Ludis that morning and felt his cock grow hard.

She was clearly surprised by the gesture, and her hand came up to rest on his chest in a show of familiarity that made his heart swell.

“It’s my favorite,” he said. “Borodinsky?”

Her smile was shy as she looked up at him. “Of course.”

Borodinsky was a kind of Russian bread that went perfectly with the stew, and he’d come to love the smell of it baking in the penthouse.

He clutched his chest. “I might not recover from the pleasure.”

A flush spread over her cheeks and she pushed him away playfully. “You’re being very silly tonight.”

He was being silly. Uncharacteristically silly, because he was happy to see his wife. Because with his mother nearby, he was remembering that when push came to shove, he and Kira were on the same side.

For now anyway.

“I must be faint with hunger,” he said.

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. But she was smiling, and she had a beautiful smile, a smile that flooded his body with an unfamiliar brand of pleasure, that made him want to do anything to see it again.

She carried the bowls of plov to the table and returned for the bread.

“May I freshen your drink?” she asked Aksana.

Anger filled Lyon’s chest as his mother pushed her glass toward Kira without a word, as if Kira was a servant.

“I’ll get the drink,” Lyon said. “Would you like something?” he asked Kira. “A cocktail or glass of wine?”

“No, thank you,” Kira said. “I’ll stick with water.”

Lyon freshened his mother’s drink and made a stiff one for himself. He would need it to get through dinner with Aksana, to say nothing of the next weeks — or god forbid, months — when she would be staying with them.

Dinner was a quiet affair, complete with the stilted conversion Lyon remembered between his parents before his father had gone to prison. He was glad Kira had chosen music as a backdrop. It played softly but helped to take the edge off the awkward silences that descended throughout the meal.

When they finished eating, his mother retired to her quarters while Zoya went to work cleaning up. Kira helped, as she almost always did. Zoya was ostensibly their housekeeper, but Lyon had learned she was more like a mother to Kira. She managed the household staff unless Lyon or Kira needed to intervene, but Kira rarely allowed her to clean up alone.

The two women seemed to relish their time alone in the kitchen, and he often found them laughing or even arguing good-naturedly if he returned to the living area for a nightcap, although Zoya rarely took her meals with them.

He said goodnight and went upstairs to the office that adjoined his suite of rooms, then spent the next two hours going over the revenue brought in by the brigadiers and their crews over the past two weeks.

Thanks to an increase in imports, the organization had almost recovered the revenue it had lost due to the rerouting of cargo ships that had been one of Musa’s holdings before his death. The lost revenue had been a point of contention with the Spies, one that had nearly cost Lyon the promotion to pakhan. It was a matter of principle that he should prove he could replace the revenue even though he’d since been appointed pakhan and could do whatever he wished.

He sat back with a sigh and stretched. It was late, the penthouse quiet behind the closed doors of his suite.