Vicente Amador and Arturo Flores. Lovers, rivals, cartel royalty on a leash. They’ve been feeding us scraps for months, when they feel like it. When it doesn’t clash with whatever mess they’re calling love now.
The whole arrangement’s duct tape and bad faith. No long-term plan. No proper access. Vicente only plays nice when he wants something, and Arturo plays nice to make you underestimate him. It’s a joke.
I’ve said as much in three briefings. No one’s listening.
They want results, not reality.
I scroll absently through secure logs on my phone. Other ops, other messes. I pause when I hit a flagged message from Mason, Callie’s husband.
Officially, he’s a consultant for the Agency now, task lead for the Amador intel pipeline. He runs an auto shop off Wilshire. Restores classic cars. Keeps his daughter in a playpen in the back of his shop while he works. Looks like someone who’s figured out how to put the gun down and stay human.
Unfair, maybe, how easy he makes it look.
But I’ve seen the scars. I know the past.
Mason used to move weapons for a man who carved up his enemies with a straight razor and prayed over the blood. He came back from that world with a new name and a daughter he almost didn’t get to keep. Callie knows all of it. She chose him anyway.
I walked Zoey down the aisle. Stood with him and my sister at the altar. Zoey looked like a sugar-dusted cherub in a flower crown. Mason looked like someone holding on with both hands.
Callie was incandescent. Like she’d finally stopped apologizing for being brilliant and terrifying in equal measure.
They looked like peace.
And I looked like someone who still flinches at his own shadow.
I don’t resent him.
But I don’t understand how you climb out of hell and call it home either.
The next few hours pass like the inside of a gun barrel. Long, pressurized, quiet.
Layover in Denver. Of course.
I don’t leave the gate. Just shift seats and stare out a window like it’s going to offer me a different version of the city. I know this place too well to feel anything good about it. Home, technically. Or whatever passed for home when Mom wasn’t flying back and forth between hearings and black-site meetings, and Callie and I were pretending like silence made us strong.
Somewhere out there, my mother is probably prepping for her next committee appearance. Wyatt and Nina are probably still in the hotel, figuring out what last night meant. Or deciding not to.
I don’t mean to check my phone, but do it out of habit anyway.
Nina’s name sits at the top of my recent messages. Wyatt’s a few down, task force updates, wedding logistics, the kind of contact that’s unavoidable when you share an op and a brother-in-law. Pre-wedding check-ins. No new texts. I swipe the screen off before I can start imagining what it would say if there was one.
The second leg passes in a blur, just enough time for my body to stiffen and my brain to recycle every choice I didn’t make.
The plane jolts into descent. The pilot’s voice murmurs something about landing protocols. I don’t hear most of it. The woman beside me checks her seatbelt. Her perfume is too sweet. Thoughts of Nina slip in before I can stop them... her scent, how she looked last night, how she might have looked this morning if I’d stayed. I hate that I care, but I hate even more that I wasn’t there when she woke up.
There’s a dossier on my phone about a psychological operations insertion that hasn’t been assigned yet. Some Langley plan to place a civilian asset in the orbit of Vicente and Arturo. Therapist cover, soft access. A solution to the intel bottleneck I’ve been warning them about for months.
I skim it and keep going. No names. Just a placeholder op. Probably dead in the water.
Good.
No one should get close to those two unless they’ve already decided how they want to die.
We touch down too hard. I don’t flinch. The woman next to me gasps and mutters something about turbulence.
I stay quiet. Breathing steady. Thoughts locked down.
Wyatt and Nina ended things months ago, but I’ve run enough surveillance to know when someone hasn’t let go. The way he tracked her at the reception, positioned himself in her orbit without crowding, always one conversation away, that’s not a man who’s moved on. I kissed her first. In the elevator, champagne-stupid and desperate. Wyatt didn’t stop me. He followed. And none of us looked back.
