Page 172 of Carnal Wagers

“Alizé.” Erel breached the last few steps between us and extended his phone. Thunder roared overhead, the sky gone murky with clouds. “Maeve wants to talk to you.”

“Well, I’m off,” my brother said as I took the phone. He jogged toward the road and yelled, “Keep the channels open.”

Erel patted his satellite phone clipped to his waistband.

“What’s going on?” I asked my brother’s second-in-command.

“We’re doing exactly what you said you’d pay us for.”

I snorted. “As if. Payment was when you were going to get rid of Sosa as men for hire, but you never okayed it, and I never signed a contract. Guess that means now you’re doing it for free.”

“You sure you want to extort Endgame?”

I flashed him a teethy smile. “I think I’m okay with that.”

He rolled his eyes in a rare show of emotion. “Just answer the phone. Let her hear your voice. She’s flipping out. You know, I’m not sure I’m a big fan of this dependency she has on you.”

“Get used to it. It’s mutual.”

Thunder crashed above. A slight drizzle pattered onto the leaves sheltering us. Overhead, the clouds darkened with flashes of lightning caught within them. We probably had minutes before another violent downpour started.

Erel mimed putting the phone to my ear, and I did so, but there was something I needed to address first.

“Maeve, ma belle. Will you hold on a second?”

“Al, is that you?” The frantic pitch of her voice screeched through the line.

I covered the phone’s microphone and turned to my husband to find him watching Endgame’s team and his crew on a split-screen live video feed on a tablet. Each group surrounded a compound, centered around a vast mansion, an oasis of palm trees, and a sprawling pool. This had to be Sosa’s home. Apparently, I’d been a lot closer to it than I thought, and that sent a sudden chill scraping down my spine. Escaping a car trunk had been one thing. A locked-down cartel compound would have been a completely different set of circumstances.

Endgame’s team jumped the fenced perimeter and silenced the armed guards patrolling the edges of the estate. Then they advanced on the mansion from the back while the Irish rammed through the front gates, guns blazing, with a crashing boom that bled out from Cillian’s single earphone.

I nudged his arm with my elbow, and his attention flicked up to me, then back at the screen.

“Mari chéri, you should go out there with them. Wouldn’t you prefer to be there to deal with Sosa once and for all?”

“No,” he stated dryly with no room for hesitation. “This is where I belong. With you. They can handle it without me.”

“If you’re certain?”

“I am.”

His lingering kiss to the back of my hand dispelled all my doubts. It was tender and sweet, paired with a rare soft smile.

Another strike of lightning, accompanied by thunder, sparked through the sky, and the downpour hit with a flourish. We all ran to the car, with Erel and two others piling into the back seat, while Cillian waited to get in for me to crawl over the center console from the driver’s side to the passenger’s seat.

Maeve’s voice seemed to echo in the enclosed space of the car.

“Come on. Be alright. Come on, come on. Pick up the phone, Al. Pick up the phone, or I swear I’m going to murder that husband of yours.”

I chuckled. No one worried about me quite like Maeve did.

I contorted in my seat and mouthed to Erel, “How much did you tell her?”

“Almost nothing,” he mouthed back.

I glared at him as he stuck an earphone in one ear, the guy next to him using the other. Maeve deserved better than that. No wonder she was so panicked.

“Maeve?” I answered.