“We’ll handle it.”
“Good.” Her voice is steel. “They threatened children. My children, in every way that matters. There’s no mercy for that.”
I leave her office, pulling out my phone as I walk.
Charles answers on the second ring. “Silas?”
“I found our leak. Diego Ruiz, works at Maria’s dealership. He had access to the plate-making equipment.”
“Where is he?”
“Still on site. I’m about to collect him, take him to the Blackwood location.” The remote property we use for situations exactly like this—isolated, soundproof, no neighbors for miles. “You should be there.”
“I’m twenty minutes out. Don’t start without me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I hang up, signaling to Marcus and Rodriguez. “Target is in the back lot. We take him quiet, get him in the vehicle. He doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t alert anyone. Clean extraction.”
They nod, moving into position.
Diego Ruiz never sees it coming.
He’s bent over his clipboard, counting inventory, completely oblivious. Rodriguez approaches from behind while I come from the side, boxing him in.
“Diego Ruiz?” I ask pleasantly.
He looks up, startled. “Yeah? Can I help you?”
“We need to have a conversation.”
I see the moment recognition hits—not of who I am specifically, but of what I represent. Danger. Threat. Violence.
He reaches for his pocket—for the knife Maria mentioned—but Marcus is already there, grabbing his wrist, twisting it behind his back.
Diego opens his mouth to shout and I’m on him, my hand clamping over his mouth and nose, cutting off air and sound simultaneously.
“Quiet,” I murmur in his ear. “Or this gets much worse.”
He struggles for a few seconds, then goes limp as the lack of oxygen hits. Not unconscious yet, but compliant.
Marcus zip-ties his hands behind his back. Rodriguez gags him with a strip of cloth. I inject him with a mild sedative—enough to keep him docile for the drive, not enough to knock him out completely.
We move him to the SUV parked in the shadows, loading him into the back. The whole thing takes less than three minutes.
No one sees. No one hears.
Diego Ruiz just disappeared from the Ramirez dealership, and no one will ever be able to prove he was taken.
The Blackwood location is forty minutes outside the city, down a series of back roads that don’t appear on most maps. It’s an old industrial building—used to be a meatpacking plant before it was abandoned, then acquired by the Carter organization for exactly this purpose.
Interrogations. Disposals. The work that can’t be done anywhere people might notice.
I pull into the facility’s garage, the door closing automatically behind us. Charles’s car is already here—he must have driven like hell to beat us.
He’s waiting in the main room when we bring Diego in. The space is exactly what it needs to be—concrete floors with drains, walls lined with tools, a metal chair bolted to the floor in the center, industrial lights overhead that make everything stark and shadow-less.
No place to hide. No comfort. Just cold efficiency.
