We continue building the case structure. Sofia works the way I've watched her work for days, with total commitment and every cell in her body engaged, her mind operating at a speed that makes mine feel sluggish by comparison. She creates a timeline, cross-referencing my cleanup jobs with everything she remembers from the federal investigation: dates, locations, surveillance records, witness statements she reviewed during trial prep. The woman's memory is unreal. She recalls case file details the way I recall crime scene layouts, with photographic specificity. Patterns emerge that I never saw when I was inside it.
"They used you like a chess piece," she says at one point, tracing a connection between two jobs I'd done in the same week, one in the Bronx and one in New Jersey. "These two scenes. The Bronx job was legitimate cartel business. But the New Jersey job was a cover operation. They sent you to New Jersey to create an alibi for your movements."
"I didn't know."
"Of course you didn't. That's the whole point. They gave you enough information to do the work and not enough to see the pattern." She marks the napkin with her pen. "You were compartmentalized and isolated from the larger strategy by design."
"You sound almost impressed."
"Professionally, the operational security is textbook. Personally, I want to burn their entire organization to the ground." She glances up at me. "Those aren't contradictory positions."
"For a federal prosecutor, you have a surprisingly flexible relationship with proportional response."
"For a cartel operative, you have a surprisingly rigid moral code. We all contain contradictions." She goes back to the napkin, but the corner of her mouth is doing that thing it does when she's holding back a smile, and I realize I'm staring again.
"The analysis," she prompts without looking up. "Focus."
"I am focused."
"You're focused on the wrong thing."
"Debatable."
She does look up then, and her eyes catch mine, and the charge between us is so immediate and so physical that the air in the kitchen seems to contract. She holds it for exactly two seconds, then drops her gaze and picks up another napkin.
"Mateo."
"Sofia."
"If you don't stop looking at me like that, I'm going to lose my train of thought, and my train of thought is the only thing standing between you and a life sentence. So I need you to channel whatever you're feeling into something productive and help me identify which of your jobs correspond to known cartel operations. Can you do that?"
"Yes."
"Good. The New Jersey cleanup. What was the address?"
I give her the address. She writes it down. Her hand doesn't waver. Mine does.
The clarity of her analysis is merciless, even when her cheeks are flushed and she won't meet my eyes.
I need air. I step onto the porch, and the sun is low, turning the snow amber and the trees into dark cutouts against the sky. The cold is sharp and clarifying, and I stand in it and breathe and let the temperature scour away everything but the work.
My phone buzzes. I check it reflexively. It's a text from a number I don't recognize, and there are no words, just a photograph.
The photograph shows the exterior of a building in Jackson Heights, Sofia's building, her apartment. The shot was taken from across the street, recent enough that I can see fresh snow on the sidewalk from yesterday's weather.
Below the photo comes a second message:
Tick tock.
The blood in my veins goes cold. I've felt this before, standing over a scene that's about to go wrong, the body shutting down everything unnecessary so the essential systems can work. Fight or flight, stripped to the wiring.
They know where she lives. They've been watching her building. The message is clear: if I don't deliver Sofia, they'll deliver consequences, not to me but to the people she cares about. To her neighborhood. To the building where her mother may or may not still be, depending on whether the old woman believed her daughter's phone call enough to actually leave.
I go back inside. Sofia is still at the table, working through the timeline with the concentration of a woman who has decided that building this case is the most important thing she'll ever do.
"We have a problem," I say.
She looks up, reads my face, and sets down the pen.
