Claim

38

FORTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER

Her heels clicked on the concrete floor of the warehouse as she made her way toward the stairs with Rurik at her side. She’d expected to be nervous about the meeting ahead, but after twenty-four hours of despair that had felt like it was splitting her heart in two, she felt calm.

And angry.

More angry than she’d ever been.

Alek emerged at the door of the stairs leading to the warehouse’s mezzanine. He looked pale, and he moved stiffly due to the bullet he’d taken to his right shoulder, but his eyes were lit with the determination that had settled into her own body like the eye of a hurricane.

“The men are assembled,” he said.

She turned to Rurik. He spoke before she could.

“I’ll be right here. The other men are out front.”

She nodded. She was taking no chances. Not with Lyon’s baby.

She didn’t dare think about where she’d be if not for the life growing inside of her. Curled into the fetal position, probably.

Dead, maybe.

She didn’t want to live without Lyon, and she kept seeing his lifeless body disappearing into the trees. She saw it when she was awake and when she was asleep and even when she was dreaming.

The child she’d made with Lyon kept her from falling into the pit of grief that seemed to grow wider with each passing day, and she’d spent the last twenty-four hours arranging security that would have made the President of the United States envious.

The penthouse now had plainclothes guards stationed at the private elevator in every lobby, and there were more guards in the house, taking shifts sleeping in the guest rooms in the wing occupied by Rurik.

She’d paid a small fortune to arrange for armored cars, and right now, as she made her way up the stairs of Lyon’s headquarters, three armored SUVs sat outside the warehouse complex holding six of the bratva’s most deadly soldiers.

Lyon would be pleased. She never went anywhere without the detail now. One SUV remained behind the car driven by Rurik — the one with her in the backseat behind bulletproof glass — and the other remained in front.

She followed Alek up the stairs to the warehouse’s offices and looked around at the hulking space. She’d never been here, had never seen a reason to come, but now she marveled at her husband’s forethought.

He’d bought this space after he’d been demoted to Yakov Vitsin’s security detail. Any other man would have seen the reassignment as the death knell on his career as a leader in the bratva.

Her husband had seen it as an opportunity to lay low, to plan his coup of the organization that was destined to belong to him.

They reached the top of the stairs and a flutter of nervousness rose in Kira’s stomach.

How would she face the men who’d fought for Lyon? For her? Bash, the sweet-faced newest member of the bratva, had been killed in the invasion, and several of the men had been injured or shot, Borya included, although Annie told her he’d be dead if not for Lyon’s intervention at the last second.

Would the men hate Kira? Blame her for being foolish enough to hold the wedding with so much uncertainty in the bratva?

She placed a hand on Alek’s arm.

“What is it?” he asked.

“What if…” She trailed off and then decided to voice her worst fear, the one that woke her screaming in the night, that had settled into her blood like poison. “What if they blame me? What if this is my fault?”

Sympathy shaded Alek’s eyes. “It’s not. Vadim’s men would have come for Lyon anyway, and they would have done it when you were at home, with only Rurik for protection. They might even have killed you.” His gaze dropped to her stomach. She’d told him about the baby during the first hours after the invasion, when they’d been forced to set up a field hospital in the living room of the Lake Forest house — the bratva’s off-the-books doctors attending — when she’d been hysterical, alternating between crying and ranting and insisting on combing the woods for evidence that Lyon was still alive. “They might even have killed the baby. Do you think Lyon would want that? That he would trade his safety for your life and the life of his child?”

She swallowed the lump that rose in her throat. “No.”

Lyon wouldn’t have wanted that. Wouldn’t have allowed it. Not if they tore him limb from limb.

“The men… Bash…” She could hardly say the name of the young man who’d been killed.

“The men know what they signed up for,” they said. “And you protected their wives and children by leading that man away from the house where they were hiding, by killing him.”

Did she? She could hardly remember the chaotic events at the house. She’d been stunned to learn the whole thing had been over in less than half an hour. It had seemed to last forever, but other than that — the slow stretching of time, like taffy at Navy Pier — the only clear memory she had was of Lyon being taken from her.

Alek squeezed her arm. “No one blames you. And we both know Lyon would be furious if he thought you blamed yourself.”

She drew in a breath, the mention of Lyon making it seem like he was close.

Like he was still alive.

“Let’s go,” she said.