I didn’t hesitate. I injected him. Forced the pills downwith water. Rolled him onto his side and shoved my fingers into his throat until he vomited, violent and uncontrolled.
Then he stopped breathing.
I started CPR.
Every compression drove the air out of his lungs, and every time it did, I smelled it.
Sweet. Sickeningly so.
It’s the kind of thing you never forget. The kind of detail that brands itself into your soul whether you want it to or not.
“That’s why he lived,” Saint says quietly.
I look at her and nod once. “Yes.”
Mateo was already in office by then. Popular enough to be dangerous. Close enough to re-election that the timing mattered more than the method. Someone wanted his opponent to win without a fight, and the cleanest way to do that was a dead man just before voting opened. Sympathy shifts fast. Power shifts faster.
“They wanted him to die quietly,” I say. “At dinner. In a limo. No witnesses who mattered.”
Saint’s eyes don’t leave my face.
“But he didn’t,” I continue. “Because I was there.”
Mateo clawed his way out of that hospital bed the next morning looking like hell, still pale, still shaking, still half dead. And then he did the worst possible thing for the people who tried to kill him.
He went on television.
He told them someone had poisoned him. Told them it was political. Told them he was still alive in spite of it. The country ate it up. Outrage does wonders for voter turnout. Hewon in a landslide.
That should have been the end of it.
Instead, it was the beginning.
“The hit failed,” I say. “So, they needed someone to blame.”
Security footage surfaced. Carefully edited. Just enough to show me entering the building. Just enough to put me in the limo. The story wrote itself. Assassin turned on his own. Poisoned a politician for leverage. Betrayed the Guild.
“They set the contract on me,” I say quietly. “And they made it look righteous.”
Saint’s jaw tightens, the faintest tell.
“That’s when my sister found me.”
Lucía reached me before the hunters did. Before the whispers turned into knives. She came in the middle of the night, eyes too sharp, voice too calm, and asked me a question I didn’t know how to answer.
She told me she was a broker.
Asked me if I worked for the Guild.
I almost laughed. Almost.
“It’s a closed world,” I say. “You don’t know it exists unless you’re already inside it. And suddenly she was standing there, telling me she’d been in it longer than I had.”
I hadn’t known. She hadn’t known about me either. We stared at each other like strangers wearing familiar faces, both realizing the same thing at the same time.
That we’d been lying to each other our entire adult lives without meaning to.
“From that moment on,” I say, “we worked together.”
