And he began.
Chapter 18: What Dominic Knows
He didn't answer immediately.
That was the first thing I noticed, not discomfort, not surprise, but a particular quality of stillness that I recognized as something different from his usual stillness. His usual stillness was controlled. This one was careful in a different direction, like a man deciding not how much to say but where to begin.
He stood up from the desk.
Walked to the window, the same window I had stood at the night before, looking at the same city, and stayed there for a moment with his back to me. Not avoiding me. Thinking.
Then he turned around.
"How much do you know about the Salas family's history in New Orleans?" he said.
I understood immediately that he wasn't deflecting. He was building context. "Pre-2005. Some. The structures changed significantly after Katrina."
"They did." He moved back toward the desk but didn't sit, stayed standing, one hand flat on the surface, the weight of the posture deliberate. "Before Katrina, the territory was divided three ways. My father controlled the port, imports, logistics, the financial infrastructure. A man named Édouard Tran held the northeast corridor. And Salas's father, Ramón, held the south." A pause. "In 2001, Ramón Salas was in the process of expanding. He'd been absorbing Tran's operations for two years, quietly,and by spring of 2001 he was strong enough to move against my father directly."
Avery didn't move. "What happened?"
"My father found out." Dominic's jaw shifted, a small movement, controlled. "There were people inside Ramón's operation who were unhappy with his methods. People who had been feeding information to the federal task force that was building a case at the time." He looked at me directly. "And people who had been feeding information to my father."
The room was very quiet.
"Your mother," he said, "was not one of those people."
I hadn't realized I'd been holding my breath until I let it go.
"But she knew someone who was," he continued. "I don't know the specifics. I was twenty-two in 2001, and my father kept me at a distance from the operational details, deliberately, he said later, because he didn't want me implicated if anything went wrong." Something crossed his expression that wasn't quite bitterness and wasn't quite grief. "What I know is that in the spring of 2001, Ramón Salas identified at least three individuals who had been passing information. Two of them disappeared. One was relocated by federal protection." He stopped. "There was a fourth name on the list that I only heard about much later. A peripheral witness, someone who hadn't been an informant, hadn't been involved, but had seen something she shouldn't have and had been identified as a risk."
My hands were very still in my lap.
"The fourth name," I said.
He held my gaze. "I don't know for certain that it was your mother. I want to be clear about that, I am telling you what I know, not what I can confirm." A pause. "But the timing is consistent. And the pattern is consistent."
"What pattern?"
"Ramón Salas's pattern." His voice had a particular flatness now, not cold, but stripped of the things that usually lived underneath it. "He was methodical. He didn't move against obvious threats, that drew attention. He moved against peripheral risks. Small problems, eliminated before they became large ones. In ways that looked like accidents."
The word accidents landed in the room like something dropped from a height.
I didn't say anything.
I was processing. I could feel myself doing it, the machinery running underneath the surface, sorting and connecting and building, the way it always did when the information was real and the stakes were real and I couldn't afford to react before I understood. It was the thing that had kept me functional for twenty years.
It was also, I recognized distantly, the thing that was keeping me in the chair right now when some other version of myself might not be.
"Victor," I said. "He knows this."
"Victor knows most of what his father did." Dominic moved then, came around the desk and sat in the chair across from me, not behind the desk but level with me, the geography deliberate. "He was seventeen in 2001. Old enough to understand what was happening. Old enough for Ramón to begin his education." A pause. "Victor is not his father. He's more sophisticated and considerably more patient. But the calculus is the same."
"He knows who I am."
"Yes."
"He's known since before the marriage."