Claim

The old grain silos, rusted and decrepit, towered over a lonely section of the lake that had once been home to a famous decommissioned ship Chicagoans called the Ghost Ship.

The ship had sat there for decades, a source of fascination, disgust, and curiosity in equal measure for the city’s residents, before finally being hauled away for scrap.

Now the silos looked even more abandoned, standing tall and lonely in a section of the Port that was no longer operational.

“Either Murphy has a flair for the dramatic or he’s a fucking asshole,” Alek said as they stepped into the shadow of the silos.

Lyon laughed. “It’s not a bad meeting spot actually.”

It was forgotten, without a single guard or security camera in sight.

Alek looked skeptical. “If you say so.”

Lyon chuckled and looked more closely at his friend. They hadn’t had time to talk much lately, and when they did, it was always about business. “How are you?”

Alek looked surprised, then wary. “I’m fine.”

Lyon grinned. “Don’t look so nervous. I’m just checking on you. How are things with that girl you were seeing? What was her name?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Alek said. “That was over two women ago.”

“Ah. Am I sorry to hear that?” It wasn’t an accident that Lyon formulated the statement as a question.

Alek laughed. “No.”

Alek’s track record with women was as spotty as Lyon’s had been before Kira. Their business didn’t lend itself to long-term attachments, and bratva families weren’t known for raising the most functional children.

Lyon would make sure that wasn’t true for his sons and daughters. They would not only have the best of everything, they would have love and stability. They would have those things if Lyon had to build a fortress around them.

He hoped Alek would find love, then felt ridiculous even thinking it. He was preparing to meet the leader of the Chicago Syndicate and he was thinking about love and family.

Kira was clearly an enchantress and he didn’t have the heart to care. It had been almost two weeks since she’d suggested they use their rehearsal dinner as cover for Ivan’s assassination, wedding plans were in full swing, and he could hardly wait to stand in front of Kira and pledge not only his loyalty, but this time, his love.

The sound of footsteps from around the corner pulled him from his reverie and he reached for his weapon as Alek did the same. A moment later, Ronan Murphy appeared from around one of the silos, his own weapon drawn.

He lowered it when he spotted Lyon and Alek. “Hey.”

Lyon introduced Alek and the two men shook hands.

“Could you have picked a creepier place for a meeting?” Alek asked Ronan.

Ronan smiled. “I was in the area. And this can’t wait.”

He wore jeans and a T-shirt, something that seemed to be a kind of uniform for him. It stood in stark contrast to Damian Cavallo’s polished style, but it suited the leader of the Chicago territory and made sense given Murphy’s background with the military.

“Sounds ominous,” Lyon said.

“It is.” Ronan reached into his jacket and produced a manila envelope. “So ominous Cavallo didn’t want to send this via email, even with our encryption.”

Lyon took the envelope, hesitating before opening it. Part of him didn’t want to know who had been funding his mother’s extravagant purchases, but that part was a child, a child who still wanted his mother to love him.

And that part of him needed to stay dead and buried.

He ripped open the envelope and came face-to-face with a photograph of an older man with wide fleshy features and the crooked bulbous nose of someone who’d spent his life drinking and had seen more than his share of fighting.

He tucked the photograph behind the other papers in the file and skimmed the first page, his eyes coming to rest on the name.

Vadim Ivanov.

“I know this name,” Lyon murmured.

“I’d be surprised if you didn’t,” Ronan said. “The NSA, CIA, and State Department know him too.”

“He’s an oligarch,” Lyon said.

“He’s more than an oligarch,” Ronan said. “It’s all in the file, but the short version is that he’s a former FSB officer, Vympel, to be exact.”

“Vympel?” It was a word Lyon had only heard a handful of times in his life, always whispered nervously by elder members of the bratva like Lyon’s father and his peers.

“Vympel’s defunct now,” Alek said.

“To a degree, but it was once the most elite unit of FSB. If Vadim is one of them, it means he’s highly trained, but even that’s not the worst of it — it also means he’s very well connected,” Lyon said.

Members of Directorate “V,” or Vympel, were trained in all manners of covert action, but they were also charged with espionage cell activation.

It was the last part that snagged in Lyon’s mind. The logistical and psychological skills necessary to trigger an undercover terrorist cell during the Cold War weren’t that different from the skills that would be required to nurture and maintain an asset with connections to the bratva.