“In a minute.”
The clouds are thinning now, the first pale light of dawn bleeding through. The pool is still churning from the rain, bloodstains darkening the travertine where they pulled the body out.
“I said it,” I tell them. “Everything I’ve been carrying. I said it out loud. And he heard me.”
“How does that feel?” Nina asks.
“I don’t know that either.” I take a breath. “But it’s out now. It’s real.”
“That matters,” Wyatt says.
“Does it?”
“It matters to you.” He squeezes my shoulder. “That’s enough for now.”
I turn away from the ocean. Nina’s on one side, Wyatt on the other. They don’t ask me if I’m okay. They already know the answer.
55
Wyatt
The sky is almost aggressively blue when we pull into the hospital parking lot—LA after a storm, scrubbed clean, like the night’s violence never happened.
Tatiana disappeared just as cleanly. One moment she was zip-tying an assassin in the rain; the next she was gone, slipping away before anyone thought to ask where she was going. No goodbye, no forwarding address. Just gone with the clouds.
Inside, the surgical waiting room smells like industrial cleaner and stale coffee. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead. Arturo is pacing by the window when we arrive, Rafael sitting rigid in a chair against the far wall. They’ve been here longer than us. The helicopter took thirty minutes while we spent over an hour navigating canyon routes that weren’t washed out.
Arturo looks up when we enter. His face is gray, exhaustion carved into every line, but his eyes are sharp. They soften slightly when they land on Nina, then harden again as they move to Chris and me. Taking our measure. Deciding how much to trust us with his partner’s life hanging in the balance.
“Any word?” Nina asks.
“Nothing yet.” His voice is hoarse. “They said it could be several more hours.”
We settle in to wait. Chris takes a chair near the door, angled so he can see both exits. I sit beside him. Nina crosses to where Arturo has resumed his pacing and touches his arm, murmuring something I can’t hear. Whatever she says, his shoulders drop half an inch. He stops pacing. She guides him to a chair and sits beside him, her hand resting on his forearm—grounding him the way she grounds all of us.
I watch her work. There’s no performance in it, no calculation. Just Nina, doing what she does: seeing someone in pain and refusing to let them carry it alone.
Rafael is in a chair against the far wall, elbows on his knees, staring at his clasped hands. Someone put butterfly bandages on the gash at his temple, but dried blood still crusts the edge of his hairline.
The minutes crawl by. An hour. Two.
At some point, Arturo rises from the chair Nina guided him to and crosses to sit beside Rafael. The younger man tenses, but doesn’t move away.
“Your mother,” Arturo says quietly. “How is Selena?”
Rafael’s jaw tightens. “She’s well. Building her empire.”
“She always was ambitious.” Arturo’s voice goes wistful. “Lola used to say her little sister would own half of Mexico someday.”
Selena. Lola’s sister. The pieces start clicking into place—Prieto Resorts in Cancún, tangential to the Amador Cartel but never quite connected. The family always looked clean. Now I’m wondering how much of that was intentional.
“Did you know?” Rafael asks. His voice is low, controlled. “About me. All this time.”
Arturo doesn’t answer immediately. His jaw works, and I can see him weighing his words.
“This isn’t the place,” he says finally. “When we know he’s going to be okay—when we’re not sitting in a hospital waiting to find out if he lives or dies—we’ll talk. All of us. But not here.”
Rafael holds his gaze for a beat, then nods once. Goes back to studying his hands. His posture has shifted. Less rigid, maybe. Like he’s found an unexpected ally in this room full of strangers.
