A click.
Then a voice, thick with accent and smoke.“¿Quién habla?”
I let the silence lean for a heartbeat, a practiced pause to disguise my nerves.Then I supply the name they know me by.
“El Vigilante.”
“Ah.Sí, por supuesto.Hace rato te tengo en la mira, Vigilante.”
My Spanish is shit, but I don’t need it.I have a program at my fingertips, translating his words into English.
The voice belongs to a top dog in the Colombian cartel.I don’t know which dog, but he knows who I am.The cartel gave me this number after all.
“What do I call you?”I ask.
“Jefe.” Two purring syllables meant to disarm.
It’s rumored the cartel uses a decoy in every meeting and phone conversation.If the voice on the line claims to be the boss, there’s a good chance it’s not.
Matias Restrepo, the realjefe, remains elusive to anyone not paying attention.
But I’ve always paid attention.
I was eighteen when I started selling pieces of myself to criminal organizations.Too young to be sentimental, too desperate to care, and too clever to be honest about it.
I didn’t stumble into human sex trafficking so much as trade my hacker skills in small, soulless auctions.
Who would’ve thought the hours I wasted as a skinny gamer kid, balls-deep in code and cheat mods, would turn out to be such valuable currency in the dark net?
“Habla,” he purrs, seductive and threatening all at once.“¿Qué quieres?”
I hear the danger behind the syllables, years of other men’s terror soaked into the simple question.
What do you want?
“I’m calling in that favor.”My mouth goes dry, but I keep my voice even.
The pause lasts long enough to count teeth.Then the man laughs, deep as a dug well, velveted with smoke, the edges worn by time and appetite.
“This favor is not a small thing,” he says in accented English.“You want to waste it on your pretty bird and her wolf?”
There it is.He knows as much about me as I know about them.
The Restrepo cartel and The Shadow Collection are the same machine.Most people don’t know it, but thejeferuns both.
Cocaine keeps the books fat, but flesh is easier to move across borders, harder to trace.Nobody reports a missing girl from a nowhere village.The cartel moves the product.The collection launders the bodies through ports and pipelines, and it all circles back to the same table where one man counts the profit.
At least, that’s the story they’re selling.
It goes so much deeper.But I don’t care about their ethics.I’m only interested in strengthening our partnership and using it to my advantage.
They control the global slave trade, and I sell them dirt and doors.They infiltrate enemy territories, and I give their runners access to move quietly.When a job goes south, I open holes to slip through, patching nodes, scrubbing traces, and tidying feeds.
I’ve met three names in person.The rest are voices, packets, and time stamps.
Twenty-two years of dirty work bought me more than a feared name in the black market.It bought a favor from one of the deadliest criminal groups in the world.
I attach myself to them because they’re the enemy of my enemy.I’ve always known that one day, I would need their reign of terror on my side.
