“You just looked so mad for a second.”
I reached forward and touched her hand. “Not at you.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” I changed the subject. “I have to take your uncle down to the docks, he wants to see something.”
Her nose wrinkled in distaste. “Tonight?”
“It’ll just be a couple of hours.”
She pulled her hand away. “Okay.”
In another marriage, I wouldn’t have let her pull away from me emotionally, but here, I couldn’t even blame her. I wasn’t showing up the way I should have, and I think she knew that.
Grisha rodebeside me in silence, my truck cab filled with the thick, suffocating smoke of his cigar. Outside, the city slid by in a blur of wet cement and dim lights. I kept my gaze on the road while he sat beside me, radiating judgment.
I didn’t give him the satisfaction of starting the conversation.
Finally he cleared his throat. “You’ve lost control.”
I refrained from letting frustration seep into my tone. “I had complete control until Sergei started to sabotage our progress.”
He made a gusty sound of disapproval. “This again. He’s only been trying to help.”
“Retaliation is bad for business and your bottom line.”
“Well, what about Mila?”
It felt like the hairs on my neck bristled. My tone dropped two notches. “What about her?”
“Well, for starters, she shouldn’t be shooting people. Lena thinks you’ve gone soft when it comes to her.”
“I won’t apologize for protecting my wife.”
“Lena thinks that maybe Mila should take a trip home.”
I didn’t speak while I parked. I waited until I turned off the truck. “My wife’s home is by my side. If you send one of us back to Russia, we’re both going back.”
He was annoyed. “Then you need to get over this rift you have with Sergei.”
“It’s not a rift. It’s a fundamentally different approach to how we want to handle the Volkovs.”
He rolled his eyes. “If I knew you’d be this dramatic about things, I never would have sent you over here.”
“We’re sitting on a powder keg here. You don’t want to go to war with this family.”
“I’ve been waiting my entire adult life to take them down.”
I didn’t know why I was arguing. The Canadians would never let it get to that point. Everyone would be arrested before a single shot was fired.
“Come on,” I told him. “Maksim told me he’d meet us at the ship.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
MILA
I wasin Axel’s bedroom, doing homework on the bed and basically holing up until Axel came home.
