Page 91 of Carnal Wagers

“I’ll go through Tessa if I have to,” I warned, “but I’d rather not get her involved. If it’s a contract you both need to give the go-ahead, I’ll sign it. I’ll pay for it.”

“You’re going through an awful lot of trouble for him. Are you sure he’s worth the money?”

“I really need to learn French,” Maeve grumbled. “Just so you know, a man like Cillian O’Leary doesn’t give protection to someone he doesn’t care about.”

“Or,” Erel said in English, “someone he doesn’t trust.”

I liked Maeve’s theory much better. “All that matters is that his focus stays on me, and he can’t do that if it’s split with the cartel.”

My phone still had no new messages from him, and the ones I’d sent were still unread. Was it a transmission problem?

Let me know if you get this.

This time, the text showed as sent but not received.

Five minutes later, I tried again and got the same result. That little slice of hope from Maeve’s protection theory rotted away. He’d blocked me.

He. Blocked. Me.

Again.

My inner temperature gauge beeped a warning that a gasket threatened to blow.

No. Fuck no. He didn’t get to ghost me. Not after everything I’d shared with him. I deserved better than this, and the moment I got back from New York, I was going to make him understand that.

My anger stewed over the next three days, and nothing distracted me from it. Not the meetings I sat through with suppliers or with my partners and their department heads in New York. Not the dinners they invited me to or the guided tour of the city they gave—which I’d already experienced because, hello, international business owner here. Neither did clubbing help, nor the hunk of a man who hit on me and the stranger who offered to buy me a drink. Certainly not the eyes I felt on me everywhere I went, judging my every move at all hours of the day.

Because not one single message, phone call, or email to Cillian—I was back to trying those with him too—went through. Not one reply came back. It was radio silence.

On top of that, he shut off the camera connection. The only hint that I held any importance to him was my tail of five burly men who stuck out on New York’s busy streets as intensely as the reek of ammonia in freshly washed laundry.

I was in a blind rage by that point. The moment I got back to Boston, I was done. I was getting that damn divorce no matter what, even if I had to strap him to a chair, rip out every single one of his toenails, and stick them up his ass before he signed on the dotted line.

Chapter 25

Joaquin Sosa didn’t care how many runners and grunts he lost if it meant he got access to the whole pie, not just a slice. There were always more mules to bribe or coerce. More smugglers to entice with a stack of bills. More dealers to sell drugs that had no place on our streets if we weren’t getting a cut. If I was to get my point across to the Urabá cartel, I had to hit him where it hurt: his product.

Picking Sosa’s men off the streets came at a profit. Every man had their breaking point, and his were no different. It didn’t matter how much they feared him. In the end, when it came to pain and suffering, the one with the immediate grip on their lives usually won out. There had been plenty of pickings to capture and pry information out of in the last three days since I dragged myself through muck and left Alice in my bed. It was the distraction I needed.

As was this. Sitting in my car under pouring rain in the dead of night, waiting, knee bouncing in anticipation, knife spinning around my thumb in full rotations. Our vans and cars idled off the side of a road south of the I-90, where rumor had it, Sosa ran his drugs out of a pair of food trucks twice a week, after the product was flown in from Florida to an airstrip outside Worcester. Tomorrow, we’d hit a secondary road used on two other days of the week. If nothing else, this kept me away from my demons and my mind off a brunette with storm-blue eyes and a mouth made for sin.

My phone rang.

“We got them. Heading your way. Two minutes out.”

I got out of the car and signaled over my head. “Lay it out.”

Two minutes later, headlights skipped and blurred down the road.

“Incoming,” Liam yelled.

All eight of us crouched behind our vehicles, guns tracking our targets. Rain wept from my hair down my face, cool and pitiless, and steamed off our coats. My finger caressed the trigger. My blood buzzed, and my heart thudded in my ears. Tonight, we took the first real step toward putting the cartel first under our heels and then at our backs.

The trucks barreled through the spike strips. The tires thumped and hissed. Brakes squealed. The vehicles swerved as their tires slapped the asphalt but didn’t stop. I aimed my gun and fired. The bullet’s crack and recoil echoed off the shattering of glass. The truck brayed as it swerved, then tipped over, its driver draped over the wheel. Another shot popped off from our men one car down, and the second truck lolled to a stop.

We raced from our positions on their flanks. The sicarios fired blindly, yelling into the night. Interior dome lighting mottled their skin and twisted their faces into gaunt, sickly carcasses. In this rain, we were dark specters of death, sent to deliver them, and that was exactly what we did. Quickly, efficiently, and with no-nonsense. We only kept one alive for information, then we packed up the goods.

With the last kilo of drugs stacked and tied down, we slammed the doors of our vans shut and rolled the spike strips back up. Vehicle by vehicle, O’Leary men took off and dispersed until only Liam and I remained. I shook out the dripping wetness from my hair as Liam doused accelerant over every inch of the interior of both trucks and the bodies inside. His eyes gleamed and twinkled under the hand-sheltered flame of a match. His mouth split wide, and he hollered a whoop as he flicked the match into the downed truck.