"You’ll stay here." He moves through the house as he talks, and I realize he's been planning this. He pulls the cord from the landline and coils it into his pocket. "The front door and the back door both deadbolt with a key, and I'm taking the only one. Your phone's been gone since the van. The landline is disconnected. Your shoes and coat are in my vehicle."
He's methodical about it, the same way he's methodical about everything. He isn't cruel, just thorough, stripping away each option the way he probably strips down a crime scene: systematically, leaving nothing useful behind.
"You're going to leave me here alone with no way out and no way to call anyone."
"For a few hours. I'll be back by evening."
"I could break a window."
"You could. And then you'd be barefoot in February with no coat, a mile from the nearest road and further than that from anyone who could help you. The cold would get you before the road did." He says it without malice, the way a man states a weather forecast. "There's food in the kitchen and the heat is running. Stay inside and I'll be back before dark."
"And what if you're not? What if the cartel decides to move on your timeline? What if they send men here while you're gone?"
He's quiet for a moment. Then he reaches into his jacket and pulls something from an inside pocket. It’s a knife, not large, a folding knife with a four-inch blade and a wooden handle. He sets it on the table between us.
"Lock yourself in the bathroom," he says. "If anyone comes who isn't me, use this."
I stare at the knife, then at him. "You're giving me a weapon."
"I'm giving you a chance. If it comes to that."
"I could use it on you right now."
"You could try." There is no challenge in his voice, no amusement, just the flat assessment of a man who knows his own capabilities. "But you won't. Because right now I'm the only thing between you and the men who sent me here. And they won't send someone as patient as me next time. You're smart enough to know that."
He's right. I hate that he's right, hate it with a fury that tastes like copper in the back of my throat, but the math is simple and I've always been good at math. Mateo Reyes alive and between me and the cartel is better than Mateo Reyes bleeding on this kitchen floor and the cartel's next man walking through the door.
I take the knife. I fold it closed and slide it into the pocket of my skirt.
"If you're not back by dark tomorrow," I say, "I'll find a way out of here. I'll walk to the nearest road and flag down a car and call the FBI, and they will come for you with everything they have."
"If I'm not back by dark, I'm dead, and you should absolutely do that and pray that you survive."
He says it with the casual certainty of a man who has considered his own death many times and made peace with it. It should scare me. Instead, it lands with a weight that I wasn't expecting, a gravity that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the sudden, unwelcome recognition that Mateo Reyes is not the man I thought he was.
He's worse. He's better. He's both at the same time, and I don't know what to do with that.
He stands, clears the coffee mugs, and moves to the kitchen to start dinner. I sit at the table with a knife in my pocket and a crack in my certainty that I don't want to examine. Not yet. Not while I'm still his prisoner and he's still my captor and the lines between us are still clear enough to see.
I'll examine it later, in the dark, in that small room with the high window and the clean sheets. I'll lie awake and try to reconcile the man who drugged me with the man who handed me a weapon, and I'll fail, and in the failing I'll begin to understand something I am not ready to understand.
That the man who kidnapped me is as much a prisoner as I am. And that the thing holding us both is the same lie.
6
MATEO
This morning while I get ready to go to the detention center, I think about yesterday and what happened. We sat at the kitchen table, and Sofia took my brother's case apart with the methodical precision of a woman dismantling a bomb, snipping each wire and holding it up for me to see. The rhythm of it had started to feel like something dangerously close to normal. I listened and asked questions and dug through the wreckage looking for something to salvage.
I stopped looking for flaws in her case and started looking at the empty space where my brother's innocence used to be.
It was a large space. It held a lot of wreckage.
Every question I asked, she answered. Every objection I raised, she buried. She did it without notes, without reference material, working entirely from a memory that operated like a database. She could quote specific line items from financial records, cite exact dates and dollar amounts from wire transfers, and recall the precise wording of phone intercepts she'd listened to months earlier.
I've worked with professionals my whole life, men who are meticulous about erasing evidence, covering tracks, leaving nothing for the law to find. Sofia Navarro is more meticulousthan any of them, except she builds the evidence they’re trying to destroy.
Now she stands at the table, wearing a flannel shirt of mine instead of her blouse because her shirt is inadequate for a house where the furnace runs on diesel and prayer, and a space heater to fill the gaps. The sight of her in my shirt does something to me that I need to not examine. It's possessive and territorial, the kind of instinct that has no business surfacing toward a woman I may have to kill.
