Page 115 of Chris

Loved her so fucking much.

Valeria let out a hard breath when her friend’s arms tightened harder around her frame, but it was so fucking good, too. Down the hall, a man came to stand in the hotel’s doorway room. His familiar face, still stone cold, and his frame, filling up the doorway as though he should be on a defensive line for a football team and not the head of a major crime family, watched them from a distance without intruding.

Andino.

Haven’s new husband.

Valeria just kept hugging her friend.

“Come on,” Haven murmured in her ear, “we’ll get food into you. We have enough time for that before the jet will be ready for us to leave. It’s not safe to stay here—it won’t be long before people find out where we are. Apparently, bribes only last so long in this country before someone else’s bribe becomes more interesting. Maybe we can wake Maria up so she can eat, too? I miss her so much.”

She nodded, but Haven still hadn’t let go.

That was okay.

Home almost seemed like home again.

Except it was missing one person, now.

Chris.

The plan to remove Valeria and Maria from Mexico was in motion long before Chris came on the scene, she came to learn on the long flight back to New York. It was how they would retrieve the two from the clutches of Jorge and the rest of the cartel they needed help with.

Removing them from the country?

Protecting them after?

Easy, Andino explained.

Valeria had no reason not to believe them, although she didn’t think it was as easy as the man said in his dismissive way, but it still stunned her. They only stayed at the hotel long enough to get food in their stomachs before they were on the road again. A Marcello-owned jet waited at a private gate for them to board at an international airport with agents that barely glanced at the fake passports Andino gave her.

Although, they looked kindly upon the envelop of cash Andino passed to them when he walked through first. It worked the same way when they entered the states after landing in New York at a small airport outside of the city where apparently, the Marcellos had connections and didn’t mind pulling them to get their business handled.

It all happened so fast.

Simple.

Valeria still felt like she was floating.

Once in New York, they moved to a hall of suites in the Manhattan Waldorf where she found more people waiting. She tried to keep track of her daughter, but let Maria run freely amongst the rooms with Haven when she figured out that the woman looking her in the face was Chris’s mother.

How did she know that?

Alessio.

“Cara,” Alessio said, smiling as he leaned in to kiss the pretty, red-headed woman with lines around her eyes that appeared whenever she grinned. “No phone calls from your boys yet, but they told me some phones ended up in the water on the way down the ladder.”

Cara frowned. “As long as they didn’t end up in the water.”

“Chris can swim.”

The statement came from the man who approached behind Cara, making Valeria’s eyes widen in familiarity when he smiled her way. “Been a minute since the two of us had the chance to speak, oui?”

“Gian,” Valeria said, taking the hand he offered when he came to stand beside his wife. “had I known that first day your intentions for being there were to help me—”

Gian shook his head. “No need to say anything or wish for different things. We’re here, now, all of us.”

“Most of us,” Alessio corrected.