Black Widow | 18+

9 | Bullets

Anton 

"I know what Raul did to you after the gala Artemisia." I said and I watched as her body froze completely, my hand still resting on the side of her neck. 

It was as if time had stopped in her mind, as if she was frozen in fear. I watched her as she slowly withdrew herself from my touch and slid back into her original seat, leaning back and closing her eyes as her hands rested on her thighs, gripping them before they began to run up and down her jeans. 

"How do you know about that?" she managed to whisper, not looking at me. 

"Leandro has a man on the inside there, one of our Mexican contacts monitoring things for us whose gone undercover as a hired guard. He told us what happened, he bugged Raul's room, he's got the interaction on tape." I revealed, and I watched as she squeezed her eyes shut, as if it would help remove her from this situation. 

"Why did no one fucking tell me?" Artemisia rasped, but I didn't respond. Leandro and I both knew about this guy, and it was a good question, why didn't we?

In a way I could only answer for myself, but deep down I knew that Leandro's response would be the same. I knew how Artemisia worked, and she used a lot of her anger to fuel her actions, however if that anger ever turned and she decided to turn on us and work with Raul then we needed to stay ahead of that. 

We didn't tell her because we didn't fully trust her to do the job and move on, there were too many emotional connections and having someone else on the inside of the operation was allowing us to keep everything in check, to stay one step ahead. 

But how could I tell her that? 

"He's Leandro's guy, he's barely gotten anything to us, he only bugged the room last week and just started to provide us with intel." I lied and watched as she did her best to stay calm, running a hand to her neck and rubbing the nape of it as she looked up at the roof of the car. 

"I told you both, I don't work with ever, this is the first time. I made it clear that if I wasn't the one with the final word then I wouldn't be doing this." She muttered, but I noticed how she began to dig her nails into her neck as she breathed in and out at a slow and controlled pace. 

"This is a discussion for a different day Artemisia," I said gently, reaching across the middle seat and taking the hand that rested on the back of her neck in mine. The dark-haired beauty didn't look at me, and I was starting to understand why she was so angry. 

Artemisia had never been one that was scared; she had never allowed herself to be vulnerable, or submissive, or even resentful. However, Leandro and his presence bringing back a lot, in combination with what Raul had done to her, and maybe even whatever was going on between us, all of these things were making her feel emotions that she had spent the last decade running from. 

Often, when someone was provided protection by someone who cared about them they felt safe and honoured, valuable and worthy. This was never the case with Artemisia, because I knew that she would have gone on acting as if it never happened if she could've. 

Leandro was shocked and angry when Sebastian (our man on the inside) had told us what he recovered this morning, as was I. So, this was how we ended up here; we both agreed that we had enough on the rats, Raul and Manuel to properly deal with the Mexicans, but we also had enough to make Raul's death look like he'd been killed by someone else.

Raul had gotten too confident, we'd pin it on a low-life Queens dealer where the Colombian quarter was, and when that happened we'd take the dealer out the mix and send him to Boston with his family.