Claim

She never had been.

Which meant her arrival in Chicago didn’t bode well for Lyon.

Tolya took another drag on his cigarette, licked his thumb and forefinger, and pinched the end between them. He dropped it into his pocket and promptly lit another one.

Lyon watch with concern. Between Tolya’s work with the KGB and his smoking habit, the man should have been dead long ago.

Tolya took a puff to get the cigarette going, then returned to leaning on the fence. “Did you know your mother has spent quite a lot of money in the past few years?”

“No,” Lyon said. He wasn’t in the habit of staying in touch with his mother. She’d left the day after his father was sent to prison, something that hadn’t surprised Lyon at all. The relationship between his parents had always been cold, even hostile. Lyon had been closest to his father, who had been warm and gregarious, if strict. “But it’s not unusual. My mother has always had expensive taste.”

Tolya didn’t speak for a long moment. “I’m not referring to the designer clothing she favors.”

Lyon studied the other man’s profile. “Care to elaborate?”

“In the past two years, Aksana has purchased four homes — one each in Paris, Milan, Vienna, and Bern. This is in addition to an apartment in New York and a yacht that she keeps moored in Marseille.”

Cold dread trickled into Lyon’s stomach. “That is… unusual.”

His father had left Lyon a large sum of hidden money. Lyon had invested that money wisely in the nearly twenty years he’d spent plotting his takeover of the bratva. By the time he’d made his move, he’d had hundreds of millions of dollars in several hidden investments and offshore accounts.

But while his father had not left Lyon’s mother destitute, Lyon had always known deep down that his father hadn’t provided for her with the same magnitude.

He remembered his last meeting with his father before his death, one of the only times they’d been able to speak in relative privacy, owing to the fact that Stefan Antonov had been in the hospice ward at the prison.

It’s for you,his father had whispered when he’d told Lyon about the money he’d hidden before his imprisonment. He’d clearly been in pain, and Lyon had tried to quiet him. Money had been the last thing on his mind. But his father had continued with two more sentences.

Don’t tell your mother. It’s for you alone.

It had been an easy promise to fulfill when his mother left America — and Lyon — without a backward glance.

“You know what this means.” Tolya’s voice shook Lyon from the past.

“She’s working with someone,” Lyon said.

Tolya drew on the cigarette in his mouth and put it out the same way he’d extinguished the first one. Lyon was relieved when he didn’t light another.

“And now she’s here,” Tolya said.

Lyon watched as the trainer led the horse through a side gate in the fence. “Which means she’s working with someone who wants to get to me.”

“Someone wealthy. Someone powerful,” Tolya said. “This kind of money…”

Lyon thought about the oligarchs in the motherland, shadowy figures with names few had heard outside of Russia. Men with more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes and the ruthlessness to spend it seeing their will done at any cost.

“Someone is moving against me,” Lyon said, confirming his suspicion. “Someone dangerous.”

“The question is who,” Tolya said, tuning his gaze on Lyon. “And what are their plans for you?”