I was the woman who’d bestedEl Diabloat his own game, and I’d be damned if I let a group of wives frighten me.
* * *
Sigrid stepped up to me the moment I walked into the dining room, locking eyes with Rafael as he turned back to me from the hallway. He smiled, giving me one last boost of confidence before he disappeared around the corner and went to conduct his own business.
And left me to mine. I didn’t want to negotiate drug contracts and weapon sales, but building a foundation of my own within the wives of the men who did that was something I could do.
How difficult could it be to make friends?
I swallowed down my protest that I’d never been very good at it, even back in Chicago.
“Isa!” Sigrid said, leaning forward to kiss each of my cheeks. “I’m so pleased you decided to join us! Come. The others are simply dying to get to know the new Mrs. Ibarra.” The way she saidnewgrated on my nerves, because while Rafael’s mother had been Mrs. Ibarra over a decade prior, to call her that when her husband was no longer Mr. Ibarra struck me as odd.
Women sat at small tables around the room, the main table filled with platters of bite-size food. Most didn’t look as though they had any interest in eating, preferring to sip their mimosas. “Would you like a mimosa, Mrs. Ibarra?” one of the staff members asked as she made her rounds through the room with a pleasant smile that felt indicative of a familiarity with this lifestyle that I suspected I would never possess.
“Just water, please,” I said, shaking my head as my hand dropped to my stomach.
“So it’s true? Rafael is finally to have an heir?” one of the women asked from her perch on the edge of her chair. She was one of the older women in the room, her light grey hair pulled back into a severe bun in a complete contrast to my loose, dark waves that hung around my shoulders.
“Mother,” one of the younger women scolded her, shaking her head as she turned her gaze to me. “Ignore her. Most of us do. She’s evidently forgotten what it is to have manners. I’m Fleur, and my rude mother is Vera.”
“Isa,” I said, introducing myself as the other women went about giving me their names. There were too many of them for me to focus on any one face, and I immediately became lost in the sea of names I would never be able to remember.
“It’s alright,” Sigrid said smoothly, taking my arm and guiding me to one of the chairs at the edge of the room. “There are so many of us. I’m sure you’re overwhelmed.”
“I wasn’t expecting Rafe to have so many...friends,” I said, uncertain what to call them. Allies seemed like a man’s word, something that they would use to describe one another but the women might find too harsh if they tried to stay away from the more brutal aspects of the business.
“Power attracts power,” Fleur said. “And our husbands and fathers are wise enough to see when a man is amassing more of it. They’ve drawn their line in the sand between Rafael and his enemies. Human trafficking was more popular in the past generations, like my father’s, but many of our generation have eradicated such things from our territories. We simply did not dare to dream of what we might be able to do on a global level.”
“Rafael has always been a man of action in ways that most cannot comprehend,” another woman said. “He has been a very sought-after prize for years for that reason alone, let alone the fact that he is a handsome and wealthy man.”
I bristled at the mention of my husband being handsome, even if it wasridiculousto be jealous over that. He was a stunningly beautiful man, with darkness lurking beneath the surface and giving him a feral edge that I knew women found attractive.
I was one of those women, heaven help me.
“Now that the introductions are complete and we’ve gushed over the prize you’ve caught in your honey trap,” Vera said, shooting a glare her daughter’s way. “Has he knocked you up? It would explain such a rushed wedding.”
I stilled, leveling the woman with a glare. I truly hated the assumption that the only thing I could have of enough value to warrant marriage was the child growing in my womb. “I’m certain you’ll be happy to note we were married before we discovered I was pregnant,” I said, not bothering to suppress the bite in my tone. “The pregnancy was very intentional on my husband’s part, and I hardly used it to trap him. If you’d like to take up your concerns with Rafael himself, feel free, though I certainly wouldn’t advise it. He’s been known to react violently to insults against me.”
The woman stared at me, watching as I shrugged as if her opinion didn’t matter to me. In the end, it wouldn’t. As much as it may aggravate me at the moment, I would shrug it off and move on with my life as soon as she was out of sight. I knew the truth.
Rafael had used the pregnancy to tie me to him, so he’d been the one to trap me altogether.
“I like her,” Vera said, sitting back in her chair and smiling at me. “Most of you cower far easier.”
“I’m pleased to know I meet your approval,” I said, smiling sardonically as the woman barked a laugh. She turned to her daughter, continuing on with whatever conversation they must’ve been in the middle of when I entered the brunch. The server brought me my water, handing it to me before she scurried off.
I drank it quickly, hoping to quell the nausea churning in my stomach. Evidently I didn’t do a good enough job of hiding it, because Sigrid stood and grabbed one of everything off the table and plated it for me. “Never hesitate to eat when you’re pregnant. It is the one time you should be able to eat whatever you want, whenever you want, without fear of judgement.”
I picked up a crostini and lifted it to my mouth, grateful for the bread even if something sour would be hard to come by. The women talked around us, and Sigrid involved herself like this was her court. It was enviable really, but not something I felt comfortable ever saying I would be able to do.
The conversations the men had with Rafael the night before had often gone over my head with talk of deals and such that I had no knowledge of, but the women’s discussion of the latest fashion and gossip from their home territories was too superficial for my taste.
And something I knew nothing of, given my upbringing. I hardly recognized brand names being thrown about. I knew, without a doubt, that their conversation was more small talk than it might have been had I not been there, and I could appreciate their caution around a new person.
I just had to hope that I would make it through the small talk to one day be privy to the more serious conversations I knew they had. Most of them had intelligent eyes, their gazes bright and observing everyone around them.
But this conversation, I couldn’t contribute to and my silence felt uncomfortable.