I pick up the shirt from the bed and put it on.
And go to dinner.
Chapter Twenty
RYAN
The dining room sits at the back of the main house.
Floor-to-ceiling doors open directly onto a terrace, and beyond it, is the ocean, black and enormous in the dark. The sound of it is constant and low beneath everything else, the kind of sound that should be calming and isn’t. Not here. Not in this house.
The table is set for four.
Noting that before anything else, four place settings, four glasses, four chairs arranged around one end of a table that could have seated twenty. It’s the intimacy of a powerful man who wants his guests close enough to read.
A servant shows me in and disappears.
Standing for a moment in the doorway, I read the room the way I always do. The artwork on these walls is different from the rest of the house, more personal, less performative. A genuinely beautiful painting hangs above the fireplace, at exactly the right height, by someone who understood it.
Then the doors at the far end of the room open.
Diego comes through first, still in the Hawaiian shirt, slightly less wired than this morning, the cocaine edge worn down to something more manageable. He crosses to me, shakes my hand, and makes the kind of small talk that is purely functional, filling the space until the real entrance happens.
And then Clemente walks in.
With Riley on his arm.
Knowing and seeing are two completely different things. I had known since Sam told me in that hospital room, on the plane, when I walked through the hacienda gate, and every moment since I arrived in this country.
She is wearing a long, fitted, and elegant black dress with a slit that runs high up one side, diamonds at her throat and ears catching the candlelight. Her dark hair is up, a few pieces loose around her face, the way she always wore it when she was dressed up, which I know because I have seen her dressed up, and I was the one to tell her she was beautiful, and I meant it every single time.
She looks extraordinary.
She looks completely at ease.
She looks like a woman who belongs exactly where she is, at the side of a powerful man in a beautiful room above the ocean, and that performance, that absolute seamless performance, is simultaneously the most impressive and the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen.
Because I know what it costs.
I know what is underneath it.
Clemente guides her to the table with his hand at the small of her back, and I watch his proprietary ease, the way he touches her as if she is his, has always been his, and the idea of her belonging to anyone or anything else has simply never occurred to him. I keep my face still, my hands loose, and remind myself that Marco Reyes has never seen this woman before in his life.
Diego makes the introductions, gesturing toward Riley with the practiced ease of a man who has done this before.
“Marco, this is… Ava.” Clemente’s voice is smooth. The name lands with the ease of a man comfortable with the world he’s constructed around himself. He looks at Riley, at Ava, with something that, in another context, might have looked like affection. “She is important to me.”
Riley looks at me. “Marco.” Her voice is warm, professional, and without recognition. “Welcome.”
“Thank you.”
And we sit down to dinner.
Diego makes his excuses twenty minutes in, something about a call, something about arrangements, and Clemente dismisses him with a glance. Diego shakes my hand, kisses Riley briefly on the cheek, and is gone.
And then it is three.
The servant moves quietly around the edges of the room, filling glasses, bringing courses, appearing and disappearing with the practiced invisibility of someone who has learned that seeing and hearing nothing is the safest way to exist in this house.