"Or they might send someone worse."
"Possibly. But it buys time. And time is the only currency we have right now."
She's right. Precious time is passing, and the plan we've assembled is fragile at best. I've been reaching out to contacts, carefully, through back channels and burner phones, trying to map the cartel's current state and find the fracture points that Sofia can exploit. It's dangerous work, the kind that leaves fingerprints I can't wipe away, and every call I make brings me closer to the moment when Diego realizes I've stopped being his operative and started being his enemy.
"There's something else," I say. "Something I haven't told you."
She looks up, alert and evaluative. "Tell me."
"Diego didn't just order me to kidnap you. He told me if I couldn't deliver results, the family would send someone else. And his exact words were that they wouldn't be as gentle."
"You told me that already."
"What I didn't tell you is who he'd send. There's a man named Enrique Salazar. The cartel uses him for jobs that need to send a message. He doesn't clean up. He creates things that need cleaning up."
Her face doesn't change, but I see her hands go still on the table, the controlled stillness of a woman who is processing a threat and calculating its probability.
"You're telling me this because you think he's already been called," she says.
"I'm telling you because if Diego thinks I've turned, the timeline accelerates. Days become hours. Hours become tonight."
"Then we need to move faster."
"Or we need to move physically. Leave the farm."
"And go where? I'm a missing federal prosecutor. You're a cartel operative with an open kidnapping charge hanging over you. Where in the world do we go?"
I don't have an answer. Every option I map leads to a dead end. If we run, the cartel finds us. If she goes to the FBI, I go to prison. If we stay here, we die. The variables loop back on themselves in a closed circuit with no exit point.
She pushes back from the table and stands. The late-afternoon sun filtering through the high window is doing something to the snow outside, turning it gold and pink, throwing warm light across her face as she stands there.
"I keep thinking about my mother," she says quietly. "She was expecting me for dinner on Sunday. I didn't show up. She's called by now, and I haven't answered, and she knows. Not that I've been kidnapped, not the specifics. But she knows something is wrong because she always knows. She knew when my father was sick before he told anyone. She knew when I was being bullied in middle school before I said a word. She has this radar for the people she loves."
I don't say anything. There's nothing to say to a woman describing the mother she may never see again because of a decision I made.
"If I die here," she continues, still standing and facing me, "she'll never know what happened. She'll spend the rest of her life not knowing. And that will kill her. Not the grief but the not-knowing."
"You're not going to die here."
The warm light catches the tears she hasn't let fall, the ones sitting on the edges of her lower lashes, held there by pure stubbornness.
"You can't promise that."
"I can promise that I will do everything in my power to keep you alive."
"Why?" She takes a step toward me. "Why do you care? I'm the woman who put your brother in prison. I'm the problem you were sent to solve. Why do you care if I live or die?"
Because you're the first honest thing I've encountered in a life built on lies. Because your mind works like light in a room that's been dark for years. Because when you saidbe carefulbefore I drove to the detention center, something inside me rearranged itself and I don't know how to put it back.
I don't say any of this.
"Because I'm not the man they want me to be," I say instead.
She stares at me. The tears still haven't fallen. She is holding them through pure stubbornness, and the effort of it, the fierce desperate refusal to be broken by circumstances that would break most people, is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
That thought arrives without permission and lodges in my chest like a bullet. I recognize what's happening. I've been recognizing it for days, since the first morning when she walked out of her room and stood in the hallway in her bare feet and told me she was still deciding whether I was confident or careless. The gravitational pull. The way my attention tracks to her in every room. The way her voice has become the organizing frequency of my days, the thing that everything else orbits around.
I am developing feelings for a woman I kidnapped, and the grotesqueness of that, the moral impossibility of it, doesn't change the fact that it's happening.
