Page 23 of Chris

“You should go watch Maria while I discuss details here,” Jorge told her.

Fine with me.

“Sure,” Valeria replied.

He didn’t let her go, so she didn’t move. She understood what Jorge expected; she gave him a quick kiss on the corner of his mouth, swallowing back the bile that flooded her tongue, before giving the other two men a smile. One she had practiced time and time again in the mirror. That way, no one had a clue it was a fake.

“Very nice to meet both of you,” Valeria said.

The men greeted her in kind, not that she cared for small talk, or whatever business they had come here to do. She still counted down the seconds when she could get away from her husband for the evening though. Jorge had that effect on people.

Tiptoeing out of the room Maria would use to sleep in for the night at her grandfather’s mansion, Valeria carefully closed the door without making more noise that might wake her daughter up. She could stay upstairs for a bit—a few minutes more, safely—and Jorge would know nothing different, but she wasn’t stupid.

He expected her to put their child to sleep after dinner and come right back down. He would send someone up after her, if he figured she was taking too long, and no one needed that problem.

Mostly, dinner had gone well. The Canadians kept conversation on everything but business, although Jorge hadn’t seemed to mind indulging their chattiness, for once. She figured because he banked on being able to supply their territory in order to get out of the arrangement his father had made with the García cartel. If they wanted to talk about the sky, he would probably do it as long as it got him what he wanted, no doubt.

Valeria didn’t care either way. She liked it when Maria didn’t have to hear about all of that nonsense, anyway. Wasn’t it bad enough that the girl had a front-row seat to her father being horrible against her mother, did she also need the cartel spelled out for her, too?

Maria wouldn’t be young forever.

Eventually, she would understand.

Not now, though.

Valeria navigated the halls of the upstairs, walking down the grand spiral stairs where at the bottom, she listened to the echoing voices of the men inside the large sitting room. She edged closer to the doorway, but stayed hidden beyond view to peek inside.

With dinner over, business took its place.

“You expect to need that many kilos a month?” Jorge asked.

Gian stared at Chris. “Oui?”

“We can supply Canada-wide through our connections with the gangs, and other organizations. We’ve had the stronghold over most organized crime in Canada for … longer than I have been alive,” Chris added.

“He isn’t wrong,” Gian added. “So yes, monthly.”

“The smuggle runs will have to go in through several ports of entry,” Jorge muttered, his gaze narrowing on the glass of liquor in his hand, “to avoid detection. We’ll have that covered, but once it gets over the border, it’s your problem.”

“We can handle that.”

“Now, on the money side of things.”

Valeria tuned their conversation out. What did it matter? She concluded that anyone working with Jorge, or the cartel, was likely no fucking better than him at the end of the day.

Did they understand how the family built the cartel?

How they became so strong?

On the backs of the weak and the ignorant, breaking down a country’s justice, legal, and political systems piece by piece until nothing was left but corruption. With the blood of innocents, spilled across crate after crate of every shipment of cocaine that crossed the borders.

There was nothing good here.

Even thinking these Canadians couldn’t be any better or worse than her husband and his family, her gaze still drifted to the younger of the two.

Chris.

She didn’t understand why, but she enjoyed looking at him, even if she had no business doing it, and that would be a dangerous game for her to play. He was just another good-looking man, nothing special, right? He’d barely spoken two words to her, so she didn’t need to be staring at him, not like she might want to know more about him. She didn’t get curious about men, not when she had neither the time, the give a damn, nor the ability to do something with it.