Page 262 of Lodestar

“Outside these walls, she’s Lee, LyLy to her friends. She’s mine now.Mine, do you hear me, Star?

“No one will take her from me. Not the goddamn Sparrows, not fucking Jorgmundgander.”

Lyra shivered in her arms, hearing the words, her fear becoming a visceral thing—and I needed to ease that.

“I have no intention of taking her from you, Troy. I’m neither with the SparrowsnorJorgmundgander,” I told her softly. “But the girl in Ohio, in that car, Iamher cousin and…”

Troy’s mouth firmed into a stark line of rejection. “No.”

“Yes, I am. Our grandfather is the reason I’m here. I didn’t know about himorher until this week.”

“He can’t have her,” she spat, shuffling back a step, but she was hemmed in, and I had to reckon that that only augmented her fear.

“He can’t have her,” I agreed, watching as some of the tension in her shoulders relaxed. “He only wanted to know if she was being looked after. He was scared that she was in a foster home or something. That she was without a family when family wanted her.”

“And he only started searching for her now?” she hissed. “Some fucking grandfather he is. Hecares, does he?

"Who was the one who held her through the nightmares and who comforted her when she wept? Who got her through her surgeries and who?—”

“Her surgeries?” Conor questioned tensely. “She’s ill?”

“No. After her…after,” she said, tone blunt, “she ran into traffic to escape. She got knocked over.”

“They tried to find her in the hospitals.”

“I have contacts,” she muttered, telling us without words that a black-site hospital had been used to help Lyra through her injuries.

Black-site hospitals were only accessible while serving in the CIA actively, which she hadn’t been doing because she was working with Jorgmundgander.

I frowned at the news though, asking, “Since when did you have those kinds of contacts?”

She scowled at me. “Since when were you so nosy?”

D tilted her head to the side. “I thought that was bullshit about you being involved with the Çelas.”

Troy stiffened. “Don’t even think about saying that name under this roof.”

“Çela,” D taunted, hands plunked on her hips as if she baited a pissed-off lion.

The other woman growled, but I snapped, “Less of the infighting. Who are the Çelas?”

When Conor chuckled, I scowled at being the only one left in the dark. “YouareHelen, aren’t you? Elena Çela?”

I demanded, “Who’s that?”

“Albanian Mob. Big in Kentucky and have been for the last twenty or so years.”

Kentucky?

He heard my unasked question. “Massive presence in racehorses but small fry in the scheme of things.”

“Race fixing?”

“That, but deeper too. They own massive stables and have a stud and everything.” I sensed his curiosity at this revelation. “Elena was the daughter of Altin Çela. It was like that whole Shergar situation in Ireland.”

“The what with the what now?” I queried.

“Shergar was a horse who got stolen by a gang of armed thieves in County Kildare. Well, the same thing happened here. Only Kelmendi, a prize-winning stallion, got snatched but the daughter did too. The horse was found dead; the daughter wasnotfound.”

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