Claim

She followed Alek down a long hall with a metal walkway, past two open doors that opened onto room with desks and chairs and a larger room with a pool table and two sofas.

Then they were at the end of the hall and a set of closed double doors.

“Ready?” Alek asked.

She swallowed her nervousness and nodded.

He opened the doors.

Any other day, she might have paused to marvel at the old factory windows that ran floor to ceiling, offering a view of the river beyond the warehouse. As it was, she could only marvel at the number of men assembled, far more than those that occupied Lyon’s inner circle, the only men she’d asked to come.

They filled the room almost to overflowing, occupying every chair, standing three deep around the conference table, pressed against the walls and big windows.

She had a moment of fear. Maybe they’d come to berate her for the wedding, for putting them all at risk. Maybe they’d revolt, refuse to listen to what she had to say.

Then, someone started clapping. More hands joined in, and soon the room was full of applause that made Kira’s cheeks flame with shame.

She didn’t deserve it.

She walked to the front of the room, glad she’d resisted the urge to wear black. She’d chosen a simple red suit with skirt and matching jacket instead and had pulled her hair into a sleek knot at the back of her head.

She took a deep breath and smoothed her skirt, then looked around at the men assembled. They were there, some of them sporting black eyes and broken noses and split lips, others, like Borya, wearing bandages over the gunshot wounds left by Vadim Ivanov’s men.

“Please,” she said, holding up a hand to stop the applause. “I should be applauding you. If not for your bravery, I might be dead. Lyon’s child might be dead.” Word had gotten out about the baby, maybe from Annie in the panicked hours after the attack when Annie was coordinating medical care for everyone at the Lake Forest house. “You saved our lives.”

“We’d do it again!” The shout came from an unseen man at the back.

“And I’m honored by your willingness to sacrifice for us,” she said. “But today, I come to you not to ask for sacrifice on my behalf, but on behalf of our pakhan, my husband, Lyon Antonov. He’s out there, alive and in the hands of Vadim Ivanov’s men. I know this because if they’d wanted to kill him, they would have done it when they had the chance.” She couldn’t be sure he was alive at this moment, two full days after they’d taken him, but she wouldn’t say that to the men. “We don’t know why they kept him alive, if it was to torture him or get information about the organization from him, but we can’t count on that being the case for long.”

“The Lion will never tell them a thing!” Stefan shouted from the back.

She nodded. “You’re right. Which is why we have to find him. We have to find him and get him out as soon as possible.”

The room descended into silence, and she wondered if maybe the men were rethinking their decision to remain loyal to the Antonov bratva. Then someone in one of the chairs around the conference table, a man she didn’t know, rose to his feet.

“Tell us what to do.”

She drew in a breath, felt stillness settle over her like a balm.

Lyon was alive. He had to be.

And they were going to find him and kill the men who’d taken him.