Because she knew in her heart if she ever lost Beck, she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to carry on.
CHAPTERSEVENTEEN
ABUNDIO
Ah,life has certainly grown more complex over the years.
The advent of technology was both a boon and a burden to men like him, with their feet firmly planted in two different centuries.
On the one hand, Abundio Segura hailed technological advances that had allowed his mining and logging companies, along with other ventures, to flourish.
On the other hand…
Idiots like his nephews Raul and Manuel, who’d ended up running what had once been Abundio’s father’s drug cartel, could more easily be tracked and captured by law enforcement.
Or…others.
Long ago, immediately after their father died, Abundio chose to walk away from his shares of the family cartel and gave complete control of it over two his two brothers. And his sister, who basically let their brothers do everything. Eventually, his brother Berto ended up in control when their other brother passed. And Berto’s sons, Raul and Manuel, ended up in charge of running it.
And now I am the last.
Because, no doubt, Manuel was dead.
He already knew Raul was dead.
Abundio had only been blessed with one child, his daughter Miranda, who was nearing forty. While she was aware of the cartel he’d kept her away from it, shielded her from the details, and instead taught her his business, planned for her to take it over.
While he’d announced it publicly a couple of months ago, secretly he still kept close watch on everything from the shadows. Some of that she was aware of, and some she was not.
What concerned him was her response to Manuel’s disappearance.
That she was too easily swayed to let it drop.
Like she didn’t want to raise suspicions regarding her own suspicions.
When his nephew had arrived unannounced at his gate several months prior, telling a fantastical story about all of his best men being murdered in Idaho by people who seemed to have the ability to turn into wolves, Abundio had initially wanted to dismiss the story out of hand.
He’d certainly told Miranda he didn’t believe it.
Still, he’d allowed Manuel to play out his tale, thinking perhaps he would at least learn the truth about what happened. Even sent his two best men, Carl and Mateo, to the US with Manuel in an attempt to hunt down someone else associated with the group out of Idaho to seek answers from them.
And they had all gone off the radar.
A lesser man would have assumed they tangled with a crime syndicate of gun-nut Americans who quickly outmanned the three of them and ended up buried in an anonymous hole somewhere.
Or, perhaps, run through a woodchipper, as Manuel claimed happened to his other men.
But Abundio was not a lesser man.
He’d watched his daughter closely, all while himself pretending to be an old man resigned to the natural progression of time.
She thought she was being sneaky, but he’d learned his daughter’s tells well in her childhood and she wasn’t nearly as opaque as she believed herself to be.
Now he had the start of what he believed to be a two-pronged problem—that Miranda was looking for inroads to take over Manuel’s now rudderless cartel operation, and that she was digging deeper into the disappearance of Manuel, Carl, and Mateo than she first let on.
Just because Abundio felt a life of crime was distasteful didn’t mean he wouldn’t resort to ruthless methods to get what he wanted.
It was a side he’d carefully worked to hide from his daughter, but this old wolf could still bite.
