18. Carina
CARINA
Maksim wasn’t in bed when I woke up.
Thank God.
I hugged a pillow and refused to feel guilty about being glad I was alone.
It was easier like this. Simpler to not endure the warmth and security that I felt when we were in bed and able to sleep in and be lazy together. Cuddling, with him spooning me.
Those episodes of comfort were too intimate, and it threw me off even more.
Sex was one thing. It was a glorious highlight of my life with him.
But anything deeper and more meaningful than that threatened me, forced me to recalibrate who I was here and what I was doing.
I slumped on my back and stared at the ceiling. Waking with immediate regret and relief was a lousy and conflicted start to the day, but that was what I felt.
I’d caved and surrendered to him last night when he put me on the spot and asked if I was loyal to him, in the present, or if I was clinging to the loyalty I’d always fostered as a daughter of the Cartel.
He hadn’t tried to dominate me, though. Instead, he’d applied just enough pressure to get me out of my head long enough to answer him.
To show him. To appease him and let him see that I could be flexible.
Giving up my past was too cruel of a request. Staying stuck between two worlds wasn’t any better.
How do I move forward, though?
Sitting up and hugging my knees, I let out a deep breath and wished an answer would just come to me and smack me in the face.
You’re not giving up who you were. Who you are.
If anything, showing him how loyal and faithful I could be—which at the time, seemed like a chance to go down on him—was nothing more than a strategy.
A step in convincing him I wasn’t here with the same chip on my shoulder as I had when I arrived.
Giving in and being able to pivot with him was a method of ensuring peace in our marriage.
And that was something I had witnessed in my childhood.
My mother often explained that sometimes, arguments with my father were only discussions and differences of opinions.
She also pointed out that occasionally, it became a matter of picking the hills she wanted to die on.
To choose her priorities and disagreements with him wisely.
And that’s what we did. Maksim and I were not fighting.
He’d just been determined to pull me out of this funky mood that I’d been stuck in.
We vented out our mutual desire. Nothing more. It wasn’t as though he was “fixing” me through orgasms. He wasn’t transforming me into a new person when he ate me out and later pounded into me until I came so hard that I saw sunbursts behind my closed lids.
Nothing more.
I got up to get dressed for a visit to the gym. As soon as I stood, I winced at the soreness between my legs.
Nothing more than venting physical desire.
With force.
And so much need.
I shook my head, wishing he wouldn’t linger in my mind like this.
But as I got dressed, and then during my workout, I found it impossible not to feel the remnants of his touch.
Impossible not to recall the vivid details of him lapping up my juices or the growly sounds he made when he watched his dick slide into my pussy.
Even now, as I cooled down from my jog on the treadmill, arousal returned. The telltale throb of blood rushing south. The precise ache of my nipples going hard.
Merely from thinking about him.
He owned me, all right. My body was proof of it. Wanting him like this—all from the memories of last night—showed how horribly my body betrayed me and tricked me into wanting him again.
And again.
More and more.
I left the gym irritated with the possibility that I’d never feel like I’d gotten enough of Maksim Volkov.
Since there weren’t any meetings for me to attend, no smuggling run plans for me to review, and Maksim was out with Nikolai and Alexei to check on some businesses on the Strip, I figured today would be the most convenient day to take Elena up on her offer to get lunch together.
She’d invited me a couple of weeks ago, but I’d put it off until now. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her. I didn’t know her and I was dragging my feet to get more acquainted with her.
Most of the women I’d known at the Cartel compound were girlfriends and wives of the Cartel men who lived nearest the villa. All the upper-ranking men and soldiers and runners.
None of those women were truly friends, though, and I had never invested much time in getting to know them, either.
When would I have had the downtime to play houseguest and have girl time when I was so busy cleaning up my brother’s messes and being his unofficial and underappreciated second-in-command?
I drove to the main mansion where Adrik and Elena called home.
Dmitri did, too, but I wasn’t going to interfere with the old boss.
Maksim explained that his father was dying.
The story of the Volkov brothers and cousins learning about Dmitri’s cancer was a tragic one, but I couldn’t blame him for wanting to spare them the pain of knowing he was dying.
It was far better for it to be over quickly, wasn’t it?
To avoid the dragged-out agony of saying goodbye and feeling hopeless to stop fate?
I missed my father every day. I grieved for my mother. And I knew that one day soon, Maksim would be in that same position of missing his father.
Elena was waiting for me out on the patio. She sat at a table with a laptop open in front of her, concentrating so seriously that she didn’t glance up when I approached. The covered dishes of our lunch seemed like an afterthought, not visible beyond her laptop screen.
“We don’t know each other well enough for me to say this, but your posture?—”
“Oh, I know,” she groaned, rolling her eyes.
Her self-deprecating smile took the sting out of her reply.
“I slouched even before I got big.” Arching her back emphasized the baby bump she couldn’t hide in her dress.
She wasn’t that far along, but showing enough for it to be obvious. “Adrik nags me about it all the time.”
I sat and nodded. “I can see that.”
She smiled wider. “He doesn’t nag that often.”
“He leads,” I said, telling the truth and trying to get out of potentially sounding like I was critiquing the interim Pakhan. “Ergo, he can nag.”
“He means well.” She closed the laptop and slid it aside. Then sitting back as she gestured for me to help myself to the light lunch dishes, she rested her hands on top of her belly.
The possessive gesture wasn’t lost on me.
This woman, my sister-in-law, was absolutely glowing as an expectant mother, relaxed, comfortable, and at ease about the prospect that she would soon be bringing a child into this dangerous world.
She almost seemed too delicate and mild-mannered to eke out a living like this, with the Mafia, but it sounded like she’d stuck with Adrik through all the highs and lows of her life since her father gave her away.
Well, how about that?
We’ve got something in common, then.
As far as I could recall from what Maksim and his brothers and cousins explained, Elena had been given to Adrik as a payment for sin.
Whereas my brother had gone about it “officially” in arranging for me to marry into the family.
But we were both displaced and removed from where we’d called home.
We’d both been forced to drastically change our identities.
She doesn’t look conflicted about it.
I tried to pay attention and listen as she listed the menu for our lunch. A server came out to check on whether she needed anything, and I gave my drink order. All the while, I watched her so pleased and content there.
So happily married and pregnant.
Not questioning her purpose or who she really belongs to.
Would I look that happy and chill if I were carrying Maksim’s child?
Wondering about that wasn’t something new on my mind. Because we never used protection, it was very well a possibility that he would knock me up sooner or later. I had no grounds to insist on waiting for a child, but if I could, I would rather put it off.
Becoming a mother was a goal. I had been so close with my own mother that it was natural for me to have the ambition of being one myself. I looked forward to having children… just not yet. Not when I felt stuck between two identities and two worlds. Two families and powers.
I wanted to feel settled. I wanted to have closure, if that was the best term for it, about what Arturo was doing without my presence in the Cartel.
Things seemed too off-balance at the moment, and should I find out I was pregnant anytime soon, I would likely panic at it happening before I could be confident about where I belonged.
Finished with the conversation about what there was to eat, and with our plates full, we fell silent as we ate. Elena didn’t seem like one of those kinds of people to be comfortable with too much quiet, though. She surprised me when she piped up.
“Adrik more or less is expecting me to have ‘girl talk’ with you.”
I huffed a wry laugh. “Oh?”
“Do you know how that works?”
I shook my head, unintimidated to be honest. “No. You?”
She smiled shyly and shook her head.
“You can tell him that you’ve obeyed his expectations. We are ‘girls’ and we are having a conversation. That meets the basic criteria.”
She nodded, but once she was done swallowing her bite of salad, she wiped her mouth and shrugged. “I think he was hoping that I’d get you to talk about how you’re adapting and settling in as Maksim’s wife.”
“You mean he also thinks I’m a spy?”
“No. If Adrik thought you were a spy, you wouldn’t be here.” She wasn’t being rude, just blunt.
I liked it.
I preferred it.
Although she seemed so quiet and delicate at first, I started to think we might get along well, after all.
I decided to go easy on her and risk being vulnerable. Maybe she’d be the only one who could commiserate. “It’s been difficult figuring out how to settle in as his wife, especially with our marriage being arranged.”
“But that’s not uncommon, right?”
“Right. But…”
“But it was still a forced situation.” She nodded sagely. “I understand how that feels. Adrik and I didn’t have the most conventional start either. We gave each other a chance, though, and I’ve acknowledged that it’s not a weakness to fully embrace and choose a future with one of the Volkov men.”
“It does feel like a weakness,” I admitted. Because to pledge myself fully to him and give up thinking about the Cartel, it seemed like I wasn’t strong enough to hold on to what mattered in my past. It was a competition in my mind.
“It feels like that, but it’s not. It’s freeing to accept these men, flaws and all, and to want to support them.”
I furrowed my brow, not lifting my gaze from my plate.
What?
I stifled a laugh that bubbled in my throat at her choice or words.
“Support them?” I asked incredulously, as if I were mocking.
She nodded. “Yes. To choose to support them. I chose to stand by Adrik like that, and unless I’ve been assuming too much, it seems like you have been choosing to support Maksim.”
“We don’t—” I let out a deep sigh. It wasn’t my intention to school her and educate her since she was already in this family before I was, but I wondered how na?ve she was.
How sheltered she still was about how the dynamics worked in a crime family.
“We’re women. We don’t have true power around here.
They don’t rely on us for support.” Not even in the home.
Ample staff were hired to run the households.
The patriarchal system was part of why I felt so out of place here.
My father never held back from letting me learn the ropes of the Cartel.
Since he was gone and my brother wanted to dismiss me, I felt like I wasn’t rooted anywhere.
“No.” Elena shook her head gently. She was meek but she wasn’t afraid to debate this with me. “No, Carina,” she corrected. “It might seem like that, and maybe that’s how things were with the Cartel you came from, but since I’ve been here, it’s not like that.”
For the next ten minutes, she gave me a summarized version of how she’d arrived here and was more or less hired to be the bookkeeper.
Her expertise was in accounting, and after she shared her story, I realized that she was an asset to the Volkov Bratva.
She wasn’t experienced with designing and planning smuggling runs like I was, but she was an expert with financial records and spreadsheets that could clue her in to where corruption had been established.
While I listened to her, I couldn’t help but compare her journey with mine.
I was an asset too. Maksim didn’t hesitate to bring me in as a consultant on runs. He’d given me access to the operational core of the Bratva. When he was in the bedroom with me last night, he’d called me his strategist.
“It’s not an easy lesson to learn,” Elena said gently, “but it’s not so bad to love these strong men of ours.”
I raised my brows.
Say what now?
Love?
That was the sticky glue I was trying to steer clear of.
I couldn’t love Maksim.
We’d been thrust together in what felt like a sham of an example of good faith between our families.
A political maneuver.
An arrangement.
Love isn't at play here.
I frowned, wondering if I was losing the ability to be honest with myself.
There’s no love happening between me and my husband.
Right?