Page 61 of Married with Blood
It was hard to lose someone in the family. While Enrique was someone from her Cartel and not someone within the Bratva, I wouldn’t hold a grudge against her for caring about a runner being beaten and killed. There didn’t seem to be a direct link between Carina and the older man. I wasn’t worried about her being particularly sentimental about his death, but I understood that she hadn’t wished for it to happen like this.
And she clarified that my assumption was right when I found her in the bathroom that night, showering and standing there under the pressure of the water as if it were soothing. I joined her, wordlessly, and waited for her to react.
“My brother got him killed,” she stated, the most she’d said to me since I came home and found her holding the old runner’s corpse.
I nodded, not in any position to argue with her.
“He is loaning out runners, he’s breaking protocol and risking the Cartel men for services and jobs that have nothing to do with the family’s interests. Loaning them out!”
I wrapped my arms around her slick, naked body, holding her close. She heaved out a deep exhale and leaned against me.
“He sent him out to assist strangers, probably for a pathetic fee, and he got him killed.”
I stroked my hand over the back of her head. I didn’t need to convince her to mold her impression of her brother. She was putting him on her shit list all on her own.
“He’s not doing as my father would have wished,” she admitted in a softer, guiltier tone.
I reared back to see her face. “Are you?”
She furrowed her brow, and I wondered if I’d found the critical conflict that was bothering her so much.
“Do you think that you are doing as your father would have wished?”
“Yes.” She swallowed hard. “It was inevitable that I’d be married off, and since my father struck the trade agreement with Dmitri and both of them saw each other as allies, yes, he would’ve been proud to see a marriage between our families.”
I saw how she truly believed that, but in the back of my mind, I wondered if she worried that she was letting the ghost of her father down by not being there with Arturo to stop him from making poor choices, decisions that weakened and hurt the integrity of the Cartel.
Before I could ask her something else—and perhaps because she intuited that if I asked her something, it would be a difficult question to address—she closed the distance between us and kissed me hard. Pressing her hungry lips against mine in a desperate kiss, she indicated that she was fine with the dam breaking between us. If she wanted to vent all her sadness, anger, and frustration out on me, fine.
I was here to steady her. To give her what she needed.
And for the rest of the night, that meant worshiping her body. Eating her sweet pussy until she screamed. Stuffing my dick into her until she moaned. Feeling her shatter and tremble asI pushed her to multiple orgasms between the shower and the bed, then back again.
Come morning, though, it seemed that she was ready to compartmentalize the loss of Enrique. She was prepared to be more direct in this investigation of what her brother was plotting and whether he’d continue to be a threat against the Bratva.
Over breakfast, with Adrik, Dean, and Nikolai accompanying us, I filled her in on the details of the operation I’d been planning with them.
“It’s risky,” she concluded as she finished her coffee. “Accepting a shipment directly from Bogota and bypassing his territory.”
I nodded. “But it isn’t anything that would outright break the trade agreement with him.”
I intended to challenge Arturo’s reach by ordering a shipment of assault weapons from the connections in Colombia. While the agreement between my father and Miguel Garcia had designated the Cartel as our primary weapons source, we had an understanding with the guerilla and Cartel factions further south that we could order other, specific things from them on an as-needed basis.
“True,” Carina said. “But he’ll get word about the convoy coming through. And he’ll wonder why he wasn’t informed about your intentions ahead of time.”
Adrik shrugged. “Then he will. And his reaction will give us more of an indication of how he views working with the Bratva any longer.”
Nikolai scoffed. “His reactions to this surprise request for arms will hint to whether he’s working with Gregori.”
“It will put him on his toes,” Carina said with such a blunt, matter-of-fact confidence that made me believe she had tried tokeephim on his toes often. “This operation will be riskier just for the sake of the Colombians bringing it all themselves. They’re not the most trustworthy or reliable runners.” She twisted her lips. “But this smuggling run will be manageable so long as the handoff site is scouted in advance for any of the federal agent presence that can happen near the city.” She pointed at the screen of her phone, where she was viewing the emailed map of the route proposal that was provided with encrypted coordinates that she had no issue deciphering.
“I assume that how we went about arranging the plans for this should work in our favor too,” Adrik said.
I nodded. “That’s what I’m angling for.” Yesterday, I pitched making this hasty request with the Colombians to throw off Arturo. The last-minute and rushed nature of this smuggling run should surprise him. He wouldn’t be expecting a run to happen near his territory south of the border, and we could catch him off-guard about our intentions. My goal was that this would shake him up and make him question who he’s better off siding with—us or Gregori.
“When do we leave?” Carina asked.
Adrik shot me a look, but I ignored him. This handoff site would be the closest she’d been to her Cartel villa since we’d been married. But I wasn’t worried. Not about her homesickness luring her to stray from me.
