27. Maksim
MAKSIM
It made the most sense to keep Carina from this conversation about what the captured man told us.
Talking about her brother wasn’t a black-and-white ordeal.
The Garcias had always been allies but I couldn’t, in good conscience, think that anymore.
Too much grayness crept in when I thought about how he’d let our shipment end up with the Hernandez Cartel.
I couldn’t budge on the need to eliminate a threat to our empire, but I also couldn’t willingly let my marriage crumble apart because of it.
If it could.
That was the sticking point that weighed me down.
How loyal would Carina stay to the memory of her brother, if at all?
Adrik and I met at one of our clubs on the Strip. We sat at a private table in the restaurant that anchored this casino and nightclub. Music was muted this time of the day. Guests weren’t cramming the place outside our VIP area. My food remained untouched on my plate while he carried on.
He wasn’t oblivious to this development with the Cartels. But he had the freedom to view the situation with neutrality. To him, this was just business. To him, the decision to kill Arturo Garcia was just another action to check off his to-do list.
Only business as usual.
No emotions applied.
Yet, he understood how I was in a tricky position.
“How do you think she’ll take the news that you need to handle this problem?” he asked before taking another bite of his food, his appetite wholly unbothered.
He meant the problem of Arturo Garcia being alive. The problem of my brother-in-law being able to stay connected to Gregori’s network, even if it was through Yusef Antonov.
Arturo hadn’t ordered that ambush.
He hadn’t played a part in that drive-by incident, either.
Enough stood out to me, though. There was no way, in my mind, that Arturo Garcia was innocent.
“Assuming you tell her beforehand,” Adrik added.
I shrugged. “I don’t intend to hide anything from her. Not this, at least. I suspect that she’s been expecting something like this to happen. Dreading it.”
Adrik nodded. “I get that impression as well. She’s too smart not to see the big picture. She’s been acting like she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“When she talks about Arturo, it’s not favorably.
She is fully aware of how gullible he is, how he doesn’t think and plan about his decisions.
The best that I can sum it up is that she’s been suffering from guilt and letting the Cartel down by coming to be my wife.
In her absence, she can’t protect the Cartel from his poor leadership, and she values her past.”
“She’s Miguel Garcia’s daughter,” he said. “Of course, she would. He was a fine man. A solid trade partner.”
Whereas Arturo was a massive liability. And now, our enemy.
“So, would you tell her?” he asked. “That you intend to have him eliminated?”
I looked down at my plate, as if my lunch would have a fucking answer. It didn’t. I wasn’t sure I’d find an answer anywhere I looked. Some things in life just weren’t decodable.
“You told Elena,” I reminded him.
He nodded and wiped his mouth before lowering the napkin. “Our situations were different. Elena disowned her father the day she was given to me. She had zero alliance and respect for him when he ejected her from the financial firm. There was no love lost between them.”
“But she still struggled with the fact that you were going to kill her father,” I said.
“No.” He shook his head. “Not quite. It’s taken some time to discuss this and talk about it, but she’s made herself much clearer since the day I executed John Morovov.
She mourned the life that she’d lost to him.
She was grieving the belated understanding that he’d robbed her of so much of her life by taking advantage of her working for him.
She didn’t grieve him, but that he’d made her have a miserable life.
She grieved having no one, which wasn’t a concept that applied for long.
She has me, the family. She is anticipating our child soon.
It…” He lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “It worked out.”
How will things work out between me and Carina, though?
I sat back in my chair and let my legs stretch out under the table, too tense in my posture. “Carina can’t deny the danger and damage Arturo is causing, both to us and the Cartel.”
“She would be practical enough to admit that,” he agreed.
“But I don’t know how things would work out afterward. She still cares about what remains of the Cartel. She can’t go running things after he’s gone.”
He furrowed his brow. “Absolutely not.”
“And that’s part of what I’m deliberating over.
If there is a vacuum of power in the Cartel and she’d want to assist. Or something.
” I shook my head. “It’s not as easy as taking out one banker.
This is another family that Gregori could have Yusef assume under their network, and that’s ultimately making it easier for them to compound and accumulate their power in the region. ”
“Perhaps she could be an ambassador of some sort. She could assist in finding another leader for the Cartel—one she would trust to run it.”
That was the best conclusion I could agree with.
Shortly after we finished lunch, I headed home.
After the emotionally charged night I’d had with Carina where she was tender and taking care of me after my injuries, where my protectiveness and gratitude for her were heightened following the danger, and where we’d both celebrated that we were alive and together, I was eager to see her again.
When I did, though, I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
She was aloof, citing that she was busy looking at maps of a route that she and Dean were thinking of testing out.
Later, after she napped, she was irritable and cranky with me.
I let her be, assuming she wanted some space as she considered how far this territory might extend under Yusef Antonov’s reach—something that I realized Elena must have filled her in on.
With how “off” she was acting, it didn’t cross my mind to tell her precisely what the man in Lev’s dungeon cells had told us.
Maybe that’s it.
Maybe she can tell that I’m withholding information from her.
Maybe she is angry and annoyed with how I’m shutting her out from the news about Arturo’s involvement.
Or could she be more stressed about how the other shoe is dropping now, like Adrik had termed it?
It was one thing to notice her mood shifting during the day, but as we neared the time to go to the main house for dinner with the others, I couldn’t shrug off this hunch that she was hiding something.
“I’m telling you, she’s acting weird,” I told Lev when we arrived at the mansion.
Carina had immediately made an excuse to leave my side and go see Elena.
While seeing the two women befriending each other was a good thing, evidence of them both warming up to having a sister here, I felt like Carina was just trying to avoid being by me.
“Did you tell her about what that runner said this morning?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Not yet. Adrik and I are still deciding exactly what to do about Arturo.”
He nodded.
“What if she’s ill?” I asked, trying not to let my imagination get the best of me. “What if she hit her head when the car rolled? Or what if she’s infected with something somehow?”
He raised his brows, giving me an incredulous expression.
“I should call the doctor. I will. She can check her out and give her a clear bill of health. And if she needs medication, then we’ll expedite it.” I nodded once, satisfied with my preliminary speculations about how to solve the problem.
Lev chuckled lightly, shaking his head.
“What?” I scowled at him, not finding a single thing funny about this.
“Not to sound like a broken record or repeat myself…” He smiled. “But maybe you’re overthinking this. Again.”
“What the fuck do you mean?”
He smirked. “Perhaps there is a chance you’ve knocked her up.”
Instead of schooling him about how stereotypical his comment was, I stopped and considered it.
Wait a second.
She hadn’t ever turned me down. Since she’d come here and we’d entered this spell of unstoppable desire for each other, she’d never shown any indication that she wasn’t in the mood to have sex with me.
She was insatiable, much to my delight.
But she was also willing to be with me regardless of what day it was.
She hasn’t had a cycle yet.
I’d know because that was how intimate we were. I’d know because she never told me that she was bleeding.
Could she be pregnant?
Expecting my son or daughter?
The sweet vision of her as the mother of my child filled my mind. It sent my pulse racing. It caused a sense of fierce possessiveness to cloud my thoughts and all that I couldn’t help but envision now.
Her belly swollen with my baby.
Her body changing with the demands of nurturing our child.
Her reliance on me to protect them both.
Fuck.
What if she is pregnant?
All my protective instincts sharpened into obsession as I debated and wondered if this was happening.
Carina, pregnant with my child.
It sounded too good to be true.
But now that the very valid possibility was floating in my mind, I wouldn’t dismiss it.
I had to know. We had to talk and at least discuss the chance of her expecting.
I’d demand to know.
As soon as this dinner was over, I would get an answer from her, one way or another.
If we would be anticipating our future changing with the blessing of a child, I had to know how to fine-tune my plans for closing another chapter of her past.