"If you don't walk into that building, my mother doesn't survive the week." She steps closer, close enough that I can see the pulse hammering in her throat, the tears she's holding back, the absolute unflinching resolve in her eyes. "You owe me this, Mateo. For what you did. For every day I've spent in this house. For the kitchen floor. You owe me this."
She's right. I know she's right the way I know the sun will come up tomorrow, with certainty, with resignation, with the quiet that comes when you finally stop running from the thing that's been chasing you.
I owe her everything. And the only currency I have left is myself.
"Tomorrow," I say. "We go tomorrow."
She nods, turns back to the table, and picks up the pen.
And we work through the night, side by side, building the weapon that will destroy the cartel and, almost certainly, destroy me with it.
11
SOFIA
We're supposed to leave at dawn. That was the plan: grab the duffle with the notes inside, get in the van, drive to Manhattan, walk into the FBI field office, and end this.
We don't make it to dawn.
I'm dozing at the kitchen table at four in the morning, my cheek pressed against a napkin covered in my own handwriting, when Mateo's hand closes on my shoulder and every nerve in my body fires at once.
"Get up," he says. His voice is wrong, low and clipped and stripped of everything except urgency. "Now."
I'm on my feet before I'm fully awake, adrenaline doing the work that consciousness hasn't caught up to. The kitchen is dark except for the glow of the space heater. Mateo is listening and looking up at the window.
"What is it?"
"Headlights. On the access road. Sounds like two vehicles."
My stomach drops. The access road is the only way in and out of the property, a single lane, unpaved, cutting through dense woods for almost a mile before it reaches the county road. No one drives it unless they mean to come here.
"Diego?"
"Or Salazar." In the dark, I can't see Mateo’s face clearly, but I can see his body, the way it's changed. The stillness that I've come to know as his default state has been replaced by something kinetic and coiled, the posture of a predator or a man who knows predators are coming.
He opens a cabinet under the sink, reaches behind the usual stuff that sits under sinks and pulls out a gun, a compact pistol with a suppressor already threaded onto the barrel. I didn't know it was there. He sees the look on my face and shakes his head.
"Stashed it when I prepped the farmhouse," he says. "Later. Right now, listen." He checks the weapon with quick practiced movements. "There's a back door off the bathroom. It leads to a wood line about twenty yards from the house. If they come through the front, you go through the back. Don't stop. Don't look back. Follow the tree line east until you hit the county road. It's about half a mile."
"I'm not leaving you."
"This isn't a negotiation, Sofia."
"You're right. It's not. Because I have every note, every name, every connection in my head, and if you die in this kitchen, the case dies with you because your testimony is what holds it together. So you don't get to play the martyr. We both leave or we both stay."
He stares at me through the dark. Outside, the sound of engines grows closer, tires on the access road, the same crunch of gravel that I hear every time he comes back from the city. Except this time it's not him.
"My shoes are in the van," I start.
"No time. And heels won't do you any good in the woods. We go now."
He grabs the duffel bag from under the table, the one I saw him pack hours ago with the notes, the newspaper margins, every piece of the case we've built. He hands it to me. I sling it over my shoulder and check my pocket for the knife. Still there. The weight of the bag, paper and napkins and the documented record of fifteen years of cartel violence, settles against my hip like a promise.
The headlights reach the clearing in front of the house. I hear engines stop; doors open and men getting out. moving with the coordinated efficiency of men who do this for a living.
Mateo takes my hand, not gently or romantically but functionally, the way you grab someone in a current to keep them from being swept away. His hand is dry and warm and his grip is iron.
We move through the house in the dark, down the hallway, past my room, past his, to the bathroom at the end. The back door has the same keyed deadbolt as the front. Mateo pulls the key from his pocket, turns it, and opens the door slowly, checking the sight lines. Cold air rushes in carrying the scent of pine and frozen earth.
