Viktor shook his head. “No. Because if you look at the map, she has a good point. Several of them.”
I held my hands up to quiet them all. “It’s going to take me more than a fucking day to know if she’s here against us or reluctantly for us.” Looking at Adrik directly, I aimed to be honest. “As far as I can tell, it’s still up for debate whether the ‘mistake’ with that weapons shipment was truly an error or if Arturo is trying to abandon us and our trade agreement to move on to a new power. So yes, she could be here to deceive me or to spy on me. Or she could be here because Arturo Garcia realized he’d screwed up.” I stabbed my finger to the paper on his desk. “But there’s no way she could have known I’d be looking at this information. She couldn’t have rehearsed all that she explained. I think she knows more than anyone has ever given her credit for.”
Adrik sat back and sighed. “I recall Miguel Garcia mentioning her more than once. Mostly about how stubborn she was. But she would’ve only been a girl then.”
“Maybe he included her on some operations,” Lev guessed.
“Based on how confidently she corrected me about the flaws in this plan, she had to have been exposed to a lot of experiences.” I imagined a younger, tougher version of Carina.
“If she’s some expert strategist, why would Arturo ever want to arrange her in marriage and lose her?” Nikolai asked.
Good question.It seemed too early to know if his loss was my gain, though.
“He didn’t even care enough to come to the wedding,” Adrik said. “Or haveanymembers of the Cartel there.”
“Yet, she’s aware of who is who. Not specifically,” I added. “She had to guess and assume. But she’s not a stranger to the families. She’s been informed—to some degree—but she’s still out of touch. She hadn’t been aware of Father’s decline.”
It was recent news, but Arturo had to have heard, which would imply that Carina could have too.
“What are you suggesting?” Adrik asked.
I bit back a smirk at that word. Redirecting Carina to seeordersorinstructionsassuggestionswould be my new favorite and secret joke.
“Are you saying we should trust her? To take her word about this sort of thing?” Alexei asked.
I nodded. “Not yet.” I’d given it thought on the ride here. “I intend to test this theory about her being more knowledgeable than even some of the men I supervise with the shipments and runs.”
“How?” Adrik asked, clearly nervous about taking a leap of faith to trust an outsider who’d entered our family in what seemed like sabotage.
I summarized the experimental scenario that had come to my mind. No one objected, and since I wasn’t revealing anything critical, it wasn’t as though I was giving away any confidential information or any dire secrets about our operations.
She’s got to be done working out by now.
As I drove back to my place, I imagined her sweaty and tired, stripping off her clothes. Peeling those tight garments off and stepping into the shower, the same one where I’d fucked heragainst the wall and sworn I’d black out from the intensity of how hard I’d come.
Shit.
You need to shut this down.
It was bad enough that I was deviating from all the other things that needed my attention. Running my wife on a test hadn’t been planned.
And imagining her naked—or otherwise—wasn’t a productive use of my time, either.
I headed upstairs and sought her out without asking Jeremiah for her whereabouts. After a couple of knocks on her bedroom door, I entered, finding her brushing her hair.
She raised her brows, surprised and annoyed.
“Come on.”
I didn’t give her a chance to play riddles with me, asking if I was ordering her around. To my delight, she didn’t protest. She didn’t ask what was going on, though, and I felt like she was deliberately keeping quiet just to piss me off. Isawthe curiosity in her eyes.
Back in the car, I tried not to glance at her every two seconds. With her long hair down and flowing in the breeze with the window partly down and those sunglasses on her face shielding her eyes, she looked casual. Confident. Almost laidback.
But the regal arch of one eyebrow ruined that image.
“What’s going on?” she asked by the time I’d pulled onto the main highway from this area.
“Hypothetically, let’s say two vans were heading north up this route from Mexicali.”
