21. Lev
LEV
Maksim didn’t leave last night as I expected him to. I turned to head inside my home but he called me back. Adrik had texted that Uncle Dmtiri’s vitals were heading south, so I hopped in the car with Maksim to rush to the mansion.
The private nurses managed to adjust his medications to stabilize him, but we all waited until the doctor paid a home visit and checked him over as well.
The prognosis remained the same.
He was slowly dying.
Never to resume a fraction of the life he once led so vigorously with power.
But it wasn’t until I stood off to the side, watching and waiting for the scare to pass, that I felt so alone in the room. My brother was here. All my cousins, too. But Mila wasn’t.
I felt her absence so acutely that my chest ached. That was the critical moment where I realized precisely what Maksim was talking about.
She was mine.
She’d become mine via a transaction, but that didn’t mean that it had to define all she had come to mean to me.
“I’ll give you a ride home,” Alexei offered when we all decided that things were back to “normal”.
That new normal that meant Uncle Dmitri was “breathing” with the machine doing the bulk of the work.
The new normal that meant his heart was beating with the assistance of so many drugs to keep him limping along.
I rode with my brother, mentally exhausted and almost wary of seeing Mila now.
If I so much as saw her delicate face, I’d crumble and need her so badly that I feared I’d never stop.
That I’d keep pushing and going and begging for her submission in the back of my mind until it would fully consume me.
I was obsessed. And that was why I decided to call it a night instead of checking in on her at the gym.
Distance never solved many things in life, though, and it didn’t do a damn thing where my need for her was concerned.
In the morning, when I first saw her, my heart thumped faster and my dick woke up. No matter what she did, what she wore, and how she behaved, this longing to own her completely never faded.
“Ready to go?” I asked her after she finished her breakfast and I put my protein drink shaker cup in the sink.
She nodded. But she didn’t ask what I needed her to be ready for.
“Adrik wants to meet about a couple of developments.”
We headed to the mansion, and I couldn’t help but notice how much calmer I was on this ride versus how I’d been when I rode with Maksim after the unexpected alert about Uncle Dmitri.
Being with Mila soothed me. And I hated the possibility that my view of her was shifting more and faster than hers ever could about me.
If I didn’t have that contract to make her be here, would she want to stay?
Now wasn’t the time to ask, because once we got into Adrik’s, it was clearly the time to discuss business. The business of trying to find Gregori and Yusef Antonov. Among all the things on our radar, that damn network was the biggest priority.
We filed into the office space that used to be Uncle Dmitri’s, and it didn’t faze me how we all had our places. We all had our positions for where to sit in the large room. It wasn’t crowded, but as we all took our places, it seemed like clockwork.
Even with the addition of Mila, a new constant at my side.
Viktor picked up on it and commented. “What, are we all bringing women in to the important meetings?” he quipped. Best known for his sarcasm and what would usually pass as wit, he smiled goofily at Elena.
“Shut the fuck up,” Adrik growled.
The first one of us to settle, he had the most practice in justifying why Elena would always be included.
Even before they’d started getting serious—or serious about not hiding that they were together—Elena had a role here.
She’d been the accountant from a distance and then was integrated with that same role.
“Are you implying they’re not welcome?” Maksim challenged as he held Carina’s hand and led her to sit on his lap. She went along with it, but she cringed and squirmed to get up.
“Sorry, it’s just not comfortable to sit at all today, this freaking sciatica pain,” she groused, standing and rubbing her baby bump and stretching from side to side.
“I’m not implying anything,” Viktor said. “Pretty soon, we’ll be outnumbered or something.” He was joking, but I read further into what he wasn’t saying.
Elena had a purpose here as the bookkeeper. Carina served an important role as the connection to the smuggling world and Cartels.
But Mila?
I glanced at Maksim, wondering if he had said something to his brother about how I was tugging Mila around with me everywhere. It wasn’t an insane thing to have an assistant, but it was a very big difference to have one here, in this meeting with only us.
And she wasn’t an assistant. Not in my eyes.
“Outnumbered?” Alexei smirked. “Don’t look at me getting in the mood to extend a plus-one invitation to these meetings anytime soon. Come on. What’s going on?”
Elena cleared her throat and sat up straighter. “What’s going on is that there are new developments with where this network is spending money. And where they are getting new forms of revenue.”
While it wasn’t a topic of how to find Gregori or Yusef Antonov to send them a message—or kill them—it was something.
I listened carefully to how Elena described and showed the new financial trails that she was discovering.
The network was already large and complicated with most of the clues of transactions hiding behind shell companies and loosely labeled business deals, but she was damned good at knowing what went where.
“That’s worrisome,” Viktor said with a frown after she concluded a bit about how PACs and political groups seemed to be affiliated with sending money to the network.
“It is,” Elena agreed.
“But it’s not anything new,” Alexei said. “We’ve faced our fair share of politicians campaigning on confronting organized crime.”
“It’s also not new how there are more federal agents directed to certain routes,” Carina said. “And we think that’s the point.”
Elena nodded. “They’re finding new sources of money and expanding who they bribe.”
“Which is an attack against us,” Adrik said, “if they are singling out our enemies and rivals.”
“And they’re placing more pressure on the smaller groups around us too,” Carina said.
“Especially with the uptick of agents on the routes they might think as relevant to us.” She went on to share more about that.
With what the Garcia Cartel shared with her and the system of informants that she could still count on, we had a wealth of tips to wade through.
It all pointed to an increase of federal activity where there usually wasn’t much, and it looked, again, like a conducted effort against our regional interests.
“Most concerning to me is how some operatives seem to be roving the area to do nothing but stir up trouble,” Carina said with a frown. “They’re traveling like agents, or scouts, and every time they try to get in with a smaller Cartel, it causes infighting.”
“Like they want to make them all fall apart from the inside out,” Maksim guessed. “Then they can come in and take over and consolidate for more power.”
“Like the Garcias,” I said, glancing at Carina, who pursed her lips and dipped her chin in acknowledgment.
Her brother, Arturo, had been courted by Yusef just like that.
They’d tried to take over the Cartel or influence them with malleable leadership, and that would’ve been an attack on our business.
Mila cleared her throat and shifted in her seat.
I glanced at her and wished she’d speak up. She didn’t. She never wanted to. But I had learned her tells and I knew that something was waiting on the tip of her tongue.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“You agree?” Carina asked. While Elena and Carina hadn’t had much time or space to personally befriend Mila, there was an undercurrent of sisterhood that they would embrace if the time ever came.
All of us in here understood that, like Carina, Mila was once closely in with the Cartels—if not by choice.
“I do,” she told Carina. With a quick glance at me, then the rest of the room, she cleared her throat again. “I noticed a lot of infighting in all the Cartels. Like there was a higher power trying to shift who was in control regionally.”
“When you were with the Hernandezes?” Adrik asked.
She nodded. Then she gave the names of other Cartels she’d been sold to. “All the leaders seemed to argue more than usual. Lots of fighting among the members.” She shrugged. “It seemed like they were all under the influence or pressure of someone ‘bigger’.”
I wanted to smile with pride.
She’d spoken up.
She’d offered her insight.
And fuck, did it feel good to witness it.
It was a small step, but one in the right direction.
“All right. But what about that tip from Dean?” Maksim asked, rubbing his hand over his face.
“Yeah.” Nikolai frowned. “He said that location they’d been looking into might be a stronghold where Yusef Antonov is basing his operations from.”
Adrik nodded. “That’s the last thing I wanted to discuss. It’s another chance to get a lockdown on him, and if we can watch him, or even place a tracker on him and those close to him, we could find Gregori.”
And end him. For good.
“I can prepare a crew to go check it out,” I told them.
Adrik grimaced. “We need to, but I’m concerned that so many of our spies might be compromised. That Gregori will recall who is who from before.”
Those were valid points, but a lot of time had passed since Gregori faked his death and resurfaced.
Not all the familiar faces from before would be on his radar.
He could, however, have stakeouts and spies on us and know who to look out for.
After all, we’d been under the assumption he was dead all this time.
We had no idea how long he’d been forming this network and potentially spying on us.
Elena had previously hinted at his starting his global network years ago.
“I want a task force to spy on where this lieutenant might be,” Adrik decided. “But we’ll need to be careful with who we send.”
“You mean we need someone new and not associated with working for us for long?” Viktor gestured at Mila.
Fuck. He has a point.
“Someone sneaky and fast with lightning-fast reflexes?” Maksim added, also gesturing at Mila.
She shot me a quick look but didn’t seem intimidated.
My instinctive reaction was to tell them to forget about it. I didn’t want to send her into danger. She mattered too much to me.
But she was sneaky and fast and could think fast on her feet. She was skilled for something like this, an espionage assignment.
“Mila?” I asked. I was looking at her as I spoke, but I meant for my brother and cousins to answer me.
She did instead, nodding. “I’ll do it.”
“Actually, this isn’t a bad idea,” Adrik said. “You are new and not many will know that you’re working for us now.”
“She can do it,” I said, nodding slowly.
There was no way in hell I was letting her be the main operative on this mission to see if she could track Yusef Antonov to this location and hopefully track him.
I would be there, orchestrating it from the sidelines.
I would go with her and dispatch her to get closer, as close as she could.
Mila locked her gaze on me and nodded, and beneath the determination burning in her eyes, I wondered if this was something she’d been waiting for.
A chance to prove herself to me. To my family.
I tried not to be crushed at the fact that she felt it was necessary after I’d already started to show her that she mattered to me on a more intimate and personal level.
“I’ll do it,” Mila said without a hint of hesitation.
No. We. We will handle this task force—together.
Maybe then, she’d see how she was so much more than someone who could be included on the high-stakes missions that kept our empire safe and thriving.