“Spanish Harlem. Different energy to the rest of the borough, tighter networks, harder to penetrate from outside, easier to operate from within if you’ve got the right relationships. The corridor between 116thand 125thmoves more volume per square mile than anywhere else in the five boroughs.”
“And you have relationships there?”
“I have relationships everywhere I just described. That’s why I’m sitting in this chair.”
Clemente studies me for a long moment, then sits back and nods, slowly and certainly, the nod of a man who has heard what he needed to hear.
The movement reaches me a half-second before the metal does.
The shift of weight behind me, the deliberate sound of a man coming out of stillness, and then the muzzle of a weapon pressed against the side of my head with a cold, precise pressure that leaves absolutely no room for misinterpretation.
The room goes silent.
I don’t move. Don’t flinch. Don’t reach. Don’t shift a single muscle in my face, my hands, or my body. I’m sitting exactly as I’d been sitting, weight even, hands loose on the arms of the chair, eyes on Clemente, as if the gun at my temple is simply another piece of information to be processed and filed alongside everything else.
Inside, I am furious.
Not frightened. Considerably worse than this. A bullet in the chest. Fire, smoke, and hands dragging me out of a burning building. My own funeral watched from the back of a car on a gray New York morning. A gun held by a man followinginstructions in a room where his employer sits watching is not fear.
It’s a goddamn insult.
I have come with a pristine recommendation. A verifiable legend. Specific operational knowledge that has just passed every question he’s thrown at me. And he is doing this anyway, because he can, because this is how men like Clemente remind everyone in their orbit where the power lives.
Keeping all of that behind my eyes, I hold his gaze.
Say nothing.
Three seconds.
Five.
Ten.
The silence in the room is absolute.
Clemente’s mouth curves before he says something in Spanish, one word, quiet, and the pressure at my temple disappears.
Then he laughs. Not cruelly, almost warmly, the full, genuine laugh of a man who has just received what he’d been hoping for and found himself genuinely pleased about it.
“I had to know.”
Looking at him, I give him the full weight of the pause before I answer, “Now you know.”
He laughs again, louder this time, leans forward, and refills my glass without being asked, that intimate gesture of a man who has just decided you are worth something.
Watching him pour, I think about the women his network has sold, the men his operation has killed, and the practiced ease with which he moves through a world built entirely on other people’s suffering.
And I smile.
Because Marco Reyes would smile.
And Ryan can wait.
“Tonight,” Clemente says, settling back with his own glass. “Dinner. Here. My home.” A pause, something moving in his expression that is closer to warmth than anything I’d seen from him yet. “I would like you to meet someone important to me.”
Not asking who—Marco Reyes wouldn’t need to ask.
“I’ll have Diego show you to your villa,” he continues. “Your things have already been moved there. You’ll stay within the grounds while you’re here, I insist. We have much more to discuss, and I prefer to continue our conversation in comfort rather than across a city.”