Page 6 of Married with Blood
If he messed something up, he’d eventually admit his “mistake” and come ask me for assistance.
That was just the way he wanted this to work.
With me constantly advising how to clean up his messes—ones I tried my best to avoid in the first place.
Huffing once more, too mad to linger out here and wonder what he was planning, I stormed off to get away from the sun’s unforgiving heat.
Are all men as stupid as he is?
Some days, I seriously had to wonder.
3
MAKSIM
The morning of the shipment came, and it was immediately clear that something wasn’t going as planned. No amount of double-checking details the night before mattered.
I arrived at the mansion to ride with Adrik to supervise the receipt of all the weapons down near the border. A crew was already prepared for the flight and short drive. Ample security would come with us. I routinely checked over large shipments to make sure everything was moving as it should. Adrik didn’tneedto come with me, but with this being the first major arms shipment since our father’s stroke, I suspected he wanted to be seen as in charge and hands-on, in case another could assume we didn’t have a leader for the time being. Staying in the relative public’s eye—at least in our world—was a smart goal.
I was early, but from the look on his face, my punctuality wouldn’t matter.
“Ready?” I asked him as a greeting, entering the mansion.
He gave me a stony glare. “Ready forwhat?” he asked tersely.
Elena winced, walking with him. “Morning, Maksim.”
“Morning. What’s going on?”
“Well, um…” She bit her lip and glanced up at Adrik. He was in a mood, clearly, and she was her usual quiet and timid self. I was sure she’d eventually grow out of her shell and be less skittish and nervous, but right now, something was clearly on her mind.
“I was checking some things in the accounts this morning—earlier this morning, I mean.” She cleared her throat and glanced up at Adrik again.
“Don’t tell me there’s more bullshit about insufficient funds for this shipment,” I replied, deadpan.
“No!” She shook her head. “No, no. That’s not it. And that can’t happen anymore. Not when I’m supervising the accounting and…”
She didn’t need to remind me of why else there wouldn’t be any bogus excuses for any of our business commitments not going through. Her father was the one who was playing with the accounts when we were still letting him think we were using Morovov Financials as our banking provider. Adrik had killed him, and unless John Morovov was back from the dead, no one would be messing with our accounts again. Elena was running the accounting now with Sacha and Igor’s help.
But something was clearly wrong if they both appeared stressed like this.
“The money was moved for today’s shipment.”
I nodded, respecting her wishes to not knowallof the details about what we did. She knew. She wasn’t that naïve. But she slept better by only seeing the numbers and labels in herspreadsheets. Sparing her the fact that this shipment was for guns wasn’t a hard accommodation to make for her.
“And it was processed, but within ten minutes of the money being sent, it was refunded.” She paused, wincing again while I tried to process that.
“Why?” I glanced from her to my brother, then back again.
She shrugged.
“They took the money and gave it right back,” Adrik said.
I shook my head, not following. “Did they want it sent to an alternative account or something?” I never dealt with the intricate mechanisms of the banking end of what we did. Delegating those tasks to the proper people or service providers was how my father kept our empire profitable like a well-oiled machine. I just knew that they would see to it that things got done.
“No.” Elena shook her head. “Sacha’s been looking into that and reaching out to the, um, the…”
“Cartel,” Adrik finished for her. “He’s been trying to contact them, and no one from the Garcia outfit is answering.”
