"Almost certainly."
I sat with that.
I thought about the smile in the ballroom, the precise, private smile Salas had given me when Dominic and I camein from the garden. The smile of someone reading what he'd seen. I had read it as opportunism in the moment. I understood now that it was something older. He hadn't been gathering new information. He had been watching a piece move into position that he had been expecting for some time.
"He set this up," I said slowly. Not a question.
"The leverage." Dominic's voice was careful. "Yes. I believe the pressure on your father, the circumstances that led to his disappearance, were designed to create exactly this situation. An Callahan inside my household, with a reason to gather information, with a history that Victor could use as additional pressure if the primary mechanism wasn't sufficient." He looked at her steadily. "I don't believe he expected the mechanism to fail."
"Why did it fail?"
The question sat between them.
Dominic didn't answer it. But something in the way he didn't answer it was itself an answer, and I felt it land somewhere in the vicinity of my sternum and stay there.
"The flash drive," I said, moving because I needed to move something. "You believe it has documentation of Ramón's operations. Including the, peripheral risks."
"I believe it has documentation that would end Victor's ability to operate in this city permanently." His voice was flat in the way of someone who had turned that sentence over many times. "Reyes was meticulous. He spent four years building the case before he disappeared. If he had what I think he had, it doesn't just document the operations, it documents the methods. The names. The events that were ruled accidents." A pause. "Events like a car accident on Highway 90 in March 2001."
The room held very still.
"He was going to expose it," I said. "Reyes. That's why he disappeared."
"Yes."
"And Victor has been looking for the drive ever since."
"Yes."
"And now he thinks I might know where it is. Because of my father."
"Yes." Dominic leaned forward slightly, a small movement, but I noticed it because I noticed everything about how he moved. "Avery. Does your father, is there anything he told you, before he disappeared, about what he was investigating? Anything that might indicate where the drive..."
"No." I shook my head. "He didn't tell me anything. I didn't know any of this existed until six weeks ago." I paused. "He was protecting me."
Dominic's expression shifted, something very brief, something that looked almost like recognition. "Yes," he said quietly. "That does seem to be what parents do."
I looked at him.
It was the first time I had heard that register in his voice, not the authority, not the calculation, not even the careful precision of the garden. Something underneath all of those things. The texture of someone who had also learned the shape of a thing by its absence.
"Your father," I said.
"Dead." The word was clean, without drama. "Six years ago. Before I understood the full extent of what he knew and what he chose not to tell me." He sat back. "I spent a considerable amount of time being angry about that. I've arrived at something more like, comprehension. Which is not the same as peace, but is more useful."
I thought about my father. About the way he'd gone quiet whenever I'd approached the edges of certain subjects. Aboutthe particular tiredness around his eyes in the last years before he disappeared, not the tiredness of a man who was overworked but of a man who was carrying something he couldn't put down.
I had been angry too.
I was still angry, if I was honest. Underneath the focus and the structure and the methodology, there was a layer of clean, cold anger that I didn't look at directly very often because it didn't help and because I couldn't afford the fuel expenditure.
"He thought he was keeping me safe," I said.
"He probably was," Dominic said. "Until he wasn't."
I nodded once.
Not because it made it better. Because it was accurate.