38. Chapter 38
Addy
Surprisingly, it took a ridiculously short amount of time to work out that the men standing in the damp warehouse, surrounded by enough firearms to start a small civil war, were not actually arguing about territory.
Territory would have been easier.
Territory came with maps and shipping logs and coordinates and quantifiable problems, which could be solved using logistics, spreadsheets, and the occasional aggressive email.
What they were actually arguing about — though none of them would have admitted it out loud if you held a gun to their heads — was pride.
And pride, as it turned out, was dramatically worse.
The warehouse itself smelled of diesel, sea air and testosterone — a strangely potent combination causing the entire space to feel heavier than it should have. It was as though the tension in the room had settled into the concrete floor and made itself at home.
My pulse still hadn’t settled fully. It lingered, beating too fast and too erratically.
It was as if my body hadn’t quite caught up with the fact that I was no longer staring down the barrel of a gun, even though I could still feel its cold, phantom touch against my temple if I thought about it for too long.
So I didn’t.
Instead, I defaulted to what I was good at.
Sasha stood to my left like a dark sculpture carved from violence and restraint, tall and silent, his tense shoulders exuding a control making everyone around him carefully consider their movements.
Kyrill had joined us, leaning against a nearby crate with his arms folded. He looked like a man who had arrived fully prepared for bloodshed and was now experiencing the unsettling realization of the evening taking a very unexpected detour.
Rafael stood across from us, his posture rigid and his jaw locked in that particular way men do when they are determined not to give an inch, even when the ground beneath them is clearly crumbling.
Something thin, brittle and perilous stretched between the two groups of men, like a sheet of ice liable to crack if anyone spoke too loudly.
I cleared my throat and … no one reacted.
Fucking rude considering I had been kidnapped and held a fucking gunpoint. Didn’t this warrant some entitlement to at least a little conversational courtesy?
I tried again. “Quick question.”
Still nothing.
Sasha didn’t turn his head, but I could tell from the subtle way his chin tilted that he knew I was about to do something inconvenient. The fact that he didn’t stop me made me feel like we had finally made progress and built some trust.
Rafael, meanwhile, was looking at me with the same slightly perplexed expression he’d been wearing for the last twenty minutes. Like he still hadn’t fully processed how the woman his men had captured earlier had somehow become an active participant in the negotiation.
So, naturally, I plowed on. Sometimes one just had to bulldoze their way through.
“Okaaaay,” I drawled, gesturing vaguely between the two men like the preppy mediator to their very hostile group therapy session, “so from what I’ve gathered, your shipments got delayed.”
Rafael’s dark eyes snapped to me immediately.
Apparently shipment was the magic word here.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“And you assumed there was interference.”
“Yes.”
“And you,” I added, glancing up at Sasha, “increased patrols because you thought his people were pushing your boundary.”
Sasha didn’t answer, but the slight tightening of his jaw was basically the Sasha equivalent of signing a formal document. Which, to be fair, was about as close to confirmation as I was going to get without a notarized statement.
“So,” I continued, clasping my hands together thoughtfully, because if I kept my hands busy maybe they wouldn’t start shaking again, “both of you escalated.”
Silence.
“Simultaneously.”
More silence.
Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Definitely not intimidating at all.
“And neither of you stopped to check whether there was an actual inciting incident before assuming the worst?”
The silence dragged on so long, I briefly wondered if I had somehow violated some unspoken mafia conversational protocol.
This is great. So productive.
Rafael scoffed. “There was an incident. Three shipments were delayed and one didn’t arrive at all.”
Kyrill straightened slightly at that. “One of ours disappeared too.”
That got everyone’s attention. I’d already heard enough to know that this wasn’t a coincidence.
My gaze flickered between them. “Right. Yeah. That tracks.”
Rafael frowned slightly. “You knew?”
Tilting my head, I replied, “I had a suspicion.”
Two very stressed kidnappers with zero impulse control had helpfully told me everything I needed to know earlier, after all.
“And now you’ve just confirmed it,” I added lightly.
Beside me, Sasha shifted slightly, and I could feel the way his attention sharpened. I could practically hear the gears in his head turning.
Rafael blinked. “That’s why you increased patrols.”
“We increased patrols because your men suddenly increased activity near our docks.”
“Because our containers were delayed.”
“Oh my God.” I let out a breath through my nose, something between a laugh and disbelief, but steadier this time. “You’re doing the Spider-Man pointing meme.”
Rafael had a bewildered look on his face. “The what?”
“Never mind. Okay, so just to recap,” I said quickly, waving it off, “your shipments start disappearing, you assume it’s him—” I pointed at Sasha, “—your shipments start getting delayed, you assume it’s him—” I pointed at Rafael, “—and instead of, I don’t know, comparing notes like rational human beings, you both immediately jump to ‘let’s escalate and see who dies first’? ”
Kyrill made a strangled noise behind me.
Rafael’s expression darkened. “There was no reason to assume otherwise.”
“Except,” I cut in gently, “the part where it was happening to both of you.”
Elena spoke from the side of the room, her tone quieter now. “There have been rumors. Ships have been arriving late before they even reach port.”
Rafael turned to her sharply. “Why hasn’t Manuel mentioned this?”
“He probably didn’t make the connection either,” she shot back.
Kyrill let out a slow breath. “Caribbean routes have been messy lately.”
Sasha’s voice cut in, low and controlled. “The Cubans.”
Rafael’s expression darkened. “You think this is them?”
“I think someone is hitting both of us,” Sasha replied evenly, “and letting us blame each other for it.”
Silence fell as everything clicked into place.
I nodded once, more to myself than anyone else. “Yeah. That’s exactly what’s happening.”
Kyrill huffed. “We might be on the same losing side.”
Rafael dragged a hand down his face. “They disrupt supply, drive up tension…”
“Force retaliation,” Sasha finished.
“And weaken both operations,” Elena added.
I pointed at all of them. “Yes. That. That is the thing I was trying to say, but with less … organized crime terminology.”
Rafael exhaled sharply. “We were played.”
“No,” Sasha corrected calmly. “We allowed ourselves to be played.”
The following silence was long enough to develop its own personality.
Finally, Elena sighed softly. “You’re both idiots.” She hitched a thumb over her shoulder at Javier. “Not as big an idiot as he is, but you’re both idiots.”
Her brother shot her a scathing look, but she didn’t flinch.
“Tell me she’s wrong,” Elena challenged him fiercely, nodding toward me.
I smiled, a little brighter than I probably should have, but honestly? I’d earned it. “Thank you.”
Near-death experience aside, I was choosing to take the win.
Beside me Sasha cursed in Russian.
Rafael slowly rubbed the side of his face and turned his gaze to Sasha. “There was no attempt to interfere with our shipments?”
Sasha’s face was completely unreadable. Then his gaze darted to me briefly in a brief, assessing glance, as though he was recalibrating something.
“No.”
“And no intention of restricting access to the south docks.”
“That would be a no, too.”
The realization dawned slowly, like two freight trains racing towards each other, only to discover they were in fact on parallel tracks.
“Oh,” Rafael muttered.
“Yeah,” I said sympathetically. “Oh.”
Realizing you almost started a war over the wrong problem probably deserved a moment. There was another long pause until Rafael turned to face Sasha.
“We miscalculated.”
Sasha studied him carefully; the tension in his posture was still evident, but it was no longer explosive. Rafael extended his hand then, and for just a moment I thought Sasha might reject the gesture out of principle alone.
But then he took it, and Kyrill exhaled quietly behind me. “How anticlimactic.”
“Today is not at all going the way I thought it would.” Rafael shook his head slowly.
Elena scoffed and jabbed her brother in the chest. “So what? We just solved all your problems. You’re welcome, by the way.”
I nodded in agreement.
Rafael and Sasha shared a long, meaningful look, suddenly unified in their exasperation.
Kyrill snickered. “I see we’ve moved onto support group portion of today.”
And just like that, the tension in the warehouse shifted. We were a long way from anything akin to friendship, but there was a kind of reluctant understanding forming between men who had both realized sometimes their way wasn’t the only way.
I glanced around the room. “Soooo … no war?”
Sasha slowly turned his head to face me and replied dryly, “No war.”
“Oh good,” I said with relief. “I’d really like the rest of my day to be significantly less eventful.”
My body finally caught up with that information, the tension draining out of me in uneven waves now that my brain had officially downgraded the situation from “imminent death” to “mildly traumatic incident.”
Kyrill tilted his head. “Statistically unlikely.”
Rafael laughed, a short and startled sound that seemed to surprise even him.
Sasha, however, was still looking at me with such intensity, it made my stomach flip.
“You solved it.”
I shrugged. “You were both reacting to the wrong problem.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He stepped closer and the warehouse suddenly felt smaller. “I was prepared for bloodshed tonight.”
“I gathered that.”
His hand lifted slowly, brushing a stray strand of hair away from my face with surprising gentleness. The same hands that had just put bullets into people now touching me like I might fracture under the pressure.
“I was wrong about you.”
My eyebrows rose. “Wow. That must have been difficult to admit.”
Behind us Kyrill choked on a laugh but Sasha ignored him.
“I thought I could shield you,” he said slowly, eyes on mine. “But I should have realized I can’t always do that. And…”
I raised my eyebrows. “And?”
“And I’m so proud of you,” he said slowly, “for putting the pieces together like only you can. I wouldn’t have believed this could have been solved without more violence.”
A shiver raced down my spine, not from the cold, but from the shock of being truly seen despite all the craziness around us.
My chest constricted, my stomach fluttered and, for a moment, my hands clenched into fists. Not out of anger, but because something inside me was trying to comprehend the sense of pride, validation and awe washing over me.
The air between us felt heavier, charged as if it had finally been acknowledged I had actually accomplished something and survived. My lips twitched into a half-smile I couldn’t quite hold back, and I swallowed against the lump stubbornly lodged in my throat.
“I mean … I did shoot someone in the balls earlier,” I said, letting humor ground me even as my pulse still screamed from the adrenaline.
Kyrill lost the fight and burst out laughing, while Rafael muttered something about crazy women under his breath.
Sasha only had eyes for me, though. “You really are something else.”
I smiled. “I know.”
He stepped closer, moving with certainty and deliberation as he effortlessly drew me into his embrace, causing my knees to buckle. Lifting his hand, he brushed a stray strand of hair behind my ear, and his touch hit deeper than any words ever could.
I felt the world narrow as the chaos of the warehouse and my fear faded away.
Surrendering to the moment, I leaned against his chest and felt something violently alive inside me stir. A reminder that yes, I had survived; yes, I had done it my way — and yes, he saw it.
Behind us Kyrill muttered to Rafael, “He’s never going to recover from this.”
“Probably not,” Rafael agreed, shaking his head.