Page 47 of Cartel Rose (Jorge)

I fight to keep my breathing steady, but I can’t help the rapid rise and fall of my chest.

“You’re only saying that to shock me.”

“You’re not rejecting it, though.”

He backs away and returns to his laptop, which he spins around to me. He points to the screen.

“Explain this.”

Chapter Twelve

Jorge

Liesel’s wary as she approaches me. I see the flash of surprise, then anger before she glues in place her poker face from our meetings. She casts an imperious expression at me. It’s easy to tell she doesn’t want to discuss what Joaquin uncovered.

“Is that what your phone call was about earlier? Not investigating what happened to my father but looking into me?”

“You know one can’t happen without the other. I need to discover anyone with a motive for this. I already know your father and uncle are into some shady shit. I didn’t want to believe that about you, but there’s a ton we don’t know about each other, isn’t there?”

“Yet, you think one day I’ll fuck you.”

I flash her a smile that’s let me get away with murder—literally. I may avoid crowds like the plague, but there’s tons to learn at busy nightclubs and bars. A little come-hither smile gets me a long way.

“I don’t have to think that.” I really am a smug fucker.

“Never.”

“Sure—” I flash her that smile again and then become deadly serious. “—but we digress. Liesel, you need to tell me the truth. If you want to be sure we all survive this, then I need to know what’s going on. No half-truths, no sort-of-truths, no maybe-truths. All the truth. Who do you work for?”

Her eyes narrow, and there’s practically palpable defiance radiating from her. I’ve seen this a multitude of times since I became an enforcer. It’s feigned courage to hide paralyzing fear. She hates that I’ve discovered enough to ask that question. Her mind’s zipping around, trying to figure out how to extricate herself from this conversation. What she can tell me that’s enough to pacify me without giving away anything. Too bad for her I’ll push until her back’s against a wall, and the only way out is to give me the info I demand. That’s the only way I’ll move aside.

“I see from the transactions that money’s being laundered through Swiss accounts. They are disguising it as commissions deposited into your accounts and then withdrawn as income. Except the one little problem is I can also see where it’s paying for goods and services provided by a syndicate.”

“You could’ve asked.”

“So, you could just lie? Would you have told me the truth? I asked who was spying and was the leak. You didn’t tell me the truth about that.”

“How could you expect me to? That was about my family’s company.”

“And look what good it’s done you to protect a company that won’t protect you.”

I stand with my arms crossed and cock an eyebrow. Does she think I’m new? As though I don’t understand what’s going on.

“You owe me an explanation, Liesel. And as for asking you, obviously that doesn’t work very well, so I had to do somedigging on my own. Since I have no concrete evidence—yet—of which syndicate this is, it means you need to explain.”

“Is there any credible reason to believe anything you see now has to do with my dad?”

I unfold my arms and appear sympathetic. I hate that it’s part of a routine I perfected when I was fourteen and started stirring up shit in our Cartel neighborhood in Queens. In Jackson Heights, my brothers and I would cause trouble no one knew—half the time still don’t know—was us. Then we’d show up for the family, offering sympathy before pressuring them into paying protection money toTíoEnrique.

“I can’t know that until you explain, Liesel.”

She pauses, and her shoulders sag. She appears so resigned to misery. It makes my heart ache, a feeling I’m wholly unused to with people outside my family, but one that is becoming familiar to me today. I wish I could make all of this go away for her, make it all better, but there’s no chance of that while I’m lacking all the pieces to put together this puzzle. I need her to give me more.

“A syndicate based in Paris approached me, but I think it’s a front for one in the U.S. Like you said, there’s no concrete evidence who, so I can’t be sure.”

Immediately my mind jumps to the other three families, especially the Kutsenkos. They’ve already tried to fuck me out of a deal with the Schlossbergs. Did they approach her months ago? Did they extort her? I want to believe they’d leave her alone and not target her because she’s a woman. But we know the old rules no longer apply. Even the saintly Kutsenkos break that promise.

Those fucknuts have always done it. They’re just more inconspicuous than the other families. Everybody always thinks they’re so angelic, riding around on their moral high horse. But they’ve used women to do their bidding ever since they rose topower. They only got pissed when it wastheirwomen who got used. Fucking hypocrites.