She steps toward me, and there is no fear in the movement, no caution. "How many bodies have you handled for the cartel, Mr. Reyes? How many crime scenes have you erased? And how many of those were directly related to your brother's operations?"
I don't answer. I don't need to. She already knows.
"You're not a stupid man," she continues. "I can see that. The way you planned this, the sedative, the farmhouse, the care you took with the room. This isn't the work of a thug. This is the work of someone intelligent, someone methodical, someone who thinks three steps ahead. So why aren't you thinking about this? Why aren't you asking the obvious question?"
"Which question?"
"If your brother is innocent, why did the cartel order you to kidnap me instead of simply providing exculpatory evidence?"
The question sits in the room between us like a trap with its jaws open. I can see the mechanism. I can see exactly how it works. And I still can't move around it.
Because she's right. If Alejandro was innocent, there would be evidence of that innocence. The cartel has resources, lawyers, fixers. If there was a legitimate legal path to overturning the conviction, Diego Vega would have taken it. It would have been cheaper, quieter, and infinitely less risky than ordering the kidnapping of a federal prosecutor.
They didn't take the legal path because the legal path doesn't exist. Because the evidence against Alejandro isn't manufactured. It's real.
I've known this. Somewhere, in the locked compartment where I store the things that would make my work impossible, I've known this for longer than I want to admit. I just couldn't afford to examine it. Not when Alejandro was my reason. Not when the entire architecture of my life was built on the foundation of protecting my brother, keeping him safe, giving him the future our mother begged for when she put us on that bus.
If Alejandro is guilty, then everything I've done, every body, every crime scene, every piece of my humanity I fed into the machine, was in service of a lie. And the person who told that lie is the person I love most in the world.
I push away from the doorframe. "Eat your breakfast," I say, and close the door.
In the kitchen, I pour myself coffee and stand at the counter. The farmhouse is surrounded by trees and beyond them there is nothing. Fields, then more trees, then the low ridgeline of the Hudson Highlands in the distance. The isolation that made this place perfect for a distribution relay makes it equally perfect for holding a woman prisoner. No one drives down that road unless they mean to.
My phone has one bar of signal. I check it out of habit, but there are no messages. Diego made it clear. I have days, not weeks, to break her, to convince her, to get the result the family needs. After that, the next step is not one I want to think about.
I think about it anyway, because that's what I do. I plan for outcomes, including the ones I don't want.
If she refuses, and she will refuse because she is constitutionally incapable of doing anything else, then Diego will send men to handle what I couldn't. Those men will not bringher breakfast. They will not give her a room with clean sheets. They will not care about the pharmacology of whatever they inject her with or whether she can walk afterward.
I have a limited time to find a way through this that doesn't end with Sofia Navarro dead and buried on a piece of cartel land, and right now, standing in this kitchen with bad coffee and worse options, I have no idea how to do that.
She appears in the hallway a little later. I didn't expect that. I closed the door when I left her room but didn't bother locking it. She's barefoot, phoneless, and miles from anything in the cold of February. The geography is a better cage than any deadbolt.
Or so I thought.
She stands in the hallway in her bare feet and her wrinkled clothes, with fury sharpened to a point by twelve hours of uninterrupted calculation.
"You left the door unlocked," she says.
I set down my coffee. "You're in the middle of nowhere with no shoes and no phone. Where exactly would you go?"
"Nowhere. Yet." She says the second word with the particular emphasis of a woman who has already started planning and wants me to know it. "But I wanted to see if you'd try to stop me."
"And?"
"And you didn't. Which tells me you're either confident or careless. I'm still deciding which."
"Sit down," I say, gesturing to the table. "I’m betting you didn’t eat the eggs I brought you and they’re cold by now. I'll make something fresh."
"I'm not hungry."
"You need to eat. You've been sedated and you haven't slept. You're no good to anyone running on empty, and right now I need you sharp."
"Don't pretend to care about my body. You drugged it and put it in a van."
"I'm not pretending anything. I'm managing a situation. You eat, you think clearly. You think clearly, you make better decisions. Better decisions keep you alive. This isn't kindness, Sofia. It's maintenance."
She chooses the table. She sits in the chair closest to the door, which tells me she's already clocked every exit in the room. Her posture is rigid, coiled, the posture of someone ready to move. But she's not running. She's smart enough to know that running in February, barefoot, miles from anything, is a death sentence that has nothing to do with me.
