“No. If Adrik thought you were a spy, you wouldn’t be here.” She wasn’t being rude, just blunt.
I liked it.
I preferred it.
Although she seemed so quiet and delicate at first, I started to think we might get along well, after all.
I decided to go easy on her and risk being vulnerable. Maybe she’d be the only one who could commiserate. “It’s been difficult figuring out how to settle in as his wife, especially with our marriage being arranged.”
“But that’s not uncommon, right?”
“Right. But…”
“But it was still a forced situation.” She nodded sagely. “I understand how that feels. Adrik and I didn’t have the most conventional start either. We gave each other a chance, though, and I’ve acknowledged that it’s not a weakness to fully embrace and choose a future with one of the Volkov men.”
“It does feel like a weakness,” I admitted. Because to pledge myself fully to him and give up thinking about the Cartel, it seemed like I wasn’t strong enough to hold on to what mattered in my past. It was a competition in my mind.
“It feels like that, but it’s not. It’s freeing to accept these men, flaws and all, and to want to support them.”
I furrowed my brow, not lifting my gaze from my plate.
What?
I stifled a laugh that bubbled in my throat at her choice or words.
“Support them?” I asked incredulously, as if I were mocking.
She nodded. “Yes. To choose to support them. I chose to stand by Adrik like that, and unless I’ve been assuming too much, it seems like you have been choosing to support Maksim.”
“We don’t—” I let out a deep sigh. It wasn’t my intention to school her and educate her since she was already in this family before I was, but I wondered how naïve she was. How sheltered she still was about how the dynamics worked in a crime family. “We’re women. We don’t have true power around here. They don’t rely onusfor support.” Not even in the home. Ample staff were hired to run the households. The patriarchal system was part of why I felt so out of place here. My father never held back from letting me learn the ropes of the Cartel. Since he was gone and my brother wanted to dismiss me, I felt like I wasn’t rooted anywhere.
“No.” Elena shook her head gently. She was meek but she wasn’t afraid to debate this with me. “No, Carina,” she corrected. “It might seem like that, and maybe that’s how things were with the Cartel you came from, but since I’ve been here, it’s not like that.”
For the next ten minutes, she gave me a summarized version of how she’d arrived here and was more or less hired to be the bookkeeper. Her expertise was in accounting, and after she shared her story, I realized that she was an asset to the Volkov Bratva. She wasn’t experienced with designing and planning smuggling runs like I was, but she was an expert with financial records and spreadsheets that could clue her in to where corruption had been established.
While I listened to her, I couldn’t help but compare her journey with mine.
I was an asset too. Maksim didn’t hesitate to bring me in as a consultant on runs. He’d given me access to the operational core of the Bratva. When he was in the bedroom with me last night, he’d called me his strategist.
“It’s not an easy lesson to learn,” Elena said gently, “but it’s not so bad to love these strong men of ours.”
I raised my brows.
Say what now?
Love?
That was the sticky glue I was trying to steer clear of.
I couldn’tloveMaksim.
We’d been thrust together in what felt like a sham of an example of good faith between our families.
A political maneuver.
An arrangement.
Love isn't at play here.
