“Clemente is expecting us tomorrow,” he says, his voice dropping. It’s not enough to be obvious, but it is enough to tell me he is aware of his surroundings even through the chemical haze. “I’ve told him about you. The New York connections, the distribution network, what you can bring to the table.” A pause. “He’s interested, but you need to understand… interested with Clemente is not the same as trusted. That takes longer.”
“I know how this works.”
He looks at me for a moment, assessing, recalibrating, and whatever he sees seems to satisfy him.
“He’ll want to know specifics,” Diego continues. “Streets. Neighborhoods. How you’d move product through the gaps the El Pasos left.” His jaw tightens slightly on the last sentence, something personal there, quickly controlled. “He knows they’re gone. He’s not happy about it. But he’s a practical man. He needs the gap filled, and you come with the right recommendation.”
“Then we give him what he needs.”
Diego looks at me again, that quick gaze trying to read me, and finds nothing to read, which is the point.
“One more thing,” he says. “Clemente has a way of testing people before he trusts them. I can’t tell you what or when it will be. Just…” a pause, the gum slowing slightly. “Don’t react. Whatever happens, don’t react.”
Looking at him over my coffee cup, I give him the full weight of that.
“I never do.”
***
Diego drives out the following morning, takes us through the city and beyond, the streets thinning and the landscape opening into dry scrubland and low, rocky hills, the road narrowing as we get farther from anything that looks like civilization.
Watching the road, I run through the cover story one more time. Not because I want to, but because Marco Reyes needs to be the only person in this car right now. The real Ryan, the one carrying a photograph sewn into his jacket lining and a ghost of a compass on his forearm, needs to stay where he is—small, quiet, and behind everything else.
The Bureau’s pre-mission briefing has given me everything they have on the location, including aerial imagery, perimeter assessments, and guard estimates. I’ve studied it until it lives inmy body rather than just my memory. I know the wall heights. I know the single confirmed access road. I know the security is professional rather than purely muscle, the kind of operation that wants to look legitimate from the outside.
What the briefing hasn’t told me is the ocean.
As the road curves and the hacienda comes into view for the first time, I see it, the property sitting between the dry landscape of the approach and the Pacific beyond. The water is visible over the top of the rear walls, deep blue, enormous, and completely at odds with the armed men at the gate.
Beautiful.
And from the ocean side, inescapable.
Noting that, I say nothing.
The interior of the hacienda is not what the exterior promises. The outside is high walls, professional security, and the blank face of a place that doesn’t want to be noticed. The inside is something else entirely, with open courtyards and terracotta tile, the sound of water moving, expensive furniture arranged in rooms that catch the light from multiple angles, artwork on walls chosen by someone who understands it rather than someone who’d been told to spend money.
The kind of wealth accumulated without conscience and displayed without apology. Every surface is deliberate, every detail is chosen, a man telling the world exactly who he is without saying a word.
Moving through it as Marco Reyes, unhurried, unsurprised, a man who takes expensive rooms as his due and makes nothing of them, I keep my pace even, my face neutral, and take everything in.
Clemente is waiting in a room at the back of the main house. He is standing at the window when we enter, looking out at the ocean.
Staring at the back of him, the set of his shoulders, the stillness of a man who has never once in his life had to be anything other than exactly who he is, I feel something move through me that has nothing to do with the cover and everything to do with the truth.
This is him.
The man behind all of it.
The man who built the operation that trafficked Lexi, took Paige, and sold women like they were inventory to men like Lawrence. The man whose network had put Tate and Luke in a dungeon and beaten them half to death, and whose mansion had been the last place I drew breath as myself, as Ryan, as a Blood Brother, as anything other than a dead man.
Intellectually, I had known this moment was coming and had prepared for it the way I prepare for everything—methodically, thoroughly, and from every angle.
I hadnotprepared for how hard it would hit.
The rage that moves through me is cold rather than hot, the kind that doesn’t announce itself with heat or noise but settles somewhere deep and permanent. It’s the kind that can wait as long as it needs to because it knows with absolute certainty that its time will come.
One breath, and I put it away, locked behind Marco Reyes’ calm eyes, expensive shirt, and the stillness of a man who has learned to feel nothing on the surface, regardless of what is happening underneath.