***
The club was its usual loud self—that particular late-night energy of a space that existed outside the ordinary rules of the city, the bass in the floors and the smoke in the air and the presence of men who occupied rooms differently than other men, who carried a specific gravity that had nothing to do with size and everything to do with what they were capable of and didn’t need to announce.
Camila listened without interrupting, not reassuring before she understood, just present and focused and giving me the full weight of her attention while I laid out the missing trucks, receipts, the industrial location, and our father’s genuine, unsettling confusion.
When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
“You think someone’s using our trucks to move weapons,” she said. Not a question.
“I think someone is using our trucks to move something they don’t want traced to themselves,” I said. “And they’ve structured it so that if anyone finds the trail, the trail leads to us.”
Camila’s jaw tightened. A small movement, controlled, but I knew her face the way I knew my own.
“Papá doesn’t know.”
“Papá doesn’t know,” I confirmed.
She reached across the table and covered my hand briefly—the same gesture she’d always used when something mattered, and words weren’t quite enough—and then she sat back and looked at me with a sharp, but worried expression on her face.
“Be careful,” she said. “Who you talk to. What you document. How visible you make yourself in this.”
I knew what she meant. I knew the architecture she was describing—the danger of being the person who sees too much before the right people know you’ve seen it.
“I know,” I said.
We sat with it for a while, the club loud around us, the conversation contained in the noise.
When I finally stood to leave—jacket on, bag on my shoulder, the weight of everything I knew and didn’t know settling into its familiar position behind my sternum—I moved through the crowd toward the exit, and something made me look up.
Gregory was across the room.
He was standing near the far wall—not lounging, not restless, just present with his eyes on me.
They had been on me before I looked up. I understood that immediately.
He wasn’t coming over.
He wasn’t looking away either.
Just watching me with that cold blue gaze that did the thing it always did—that complete, focused attention that made the rest of the room go slightly out of focus, as if the space between us had its own quality distinct from everything around it.
I looked at him for exactly three seconds, then I walked to the door, letting the cold air hit me like the correction it was.
As I walked to my car with the folder of receipts in my bag and the weight of four days of careful, methodical discovery behind my eyes, I thought about patterns and trails and the specific danger of seeing things before you understand what they mean.
I thought about a man across the room who watched me like he wanted to say something.
And couldn’t.
Or wouldn’t.
I still didn’t know which it was.
I wasn’t sure which answer was worse.
Chapter 8 – Gregory
I watched Tomas Alvarez move product through channels that didn’t exist on paper, using a fleet of trucks that left his facility with full manifests and arrived at their destinations with empty ones, through a network of handoffs so carefully constructed that, if you looked at only one piece of it, you saw nothing. You had to look at all of it simultaneously, hold the whole structure in your mind at once, to understand what you were actually seeing.