“I need a minute.”
I stop. He looks at me steadily, that composed, measured authority considerably more worn in person than on television. “I told your people to stand down. We had this. We had an asset inside who had just given us the break we needed. Do you understand what could have happened tonight?”
“I think I have some idea.”
Something shifts in his expression, brief and quickly controlled. “Lawrence is dead.”
“Is he?”
“One of your men shot him.”
“Did they?” The corner of my mouth moves. “Do you have proof of that?”
Sam looks at me for a long moment. “It just so happens…” he says slowly, “… that we don’t.” A beat. “All cameras were switched off. They were in a blind spot.”
Neither of us says anything, and then quietly, almost against his will, something shifts in his expression that is not approval and not forgiveness but something more complicated than either.
“Get your people out of Mexico. Tonight.”
“Already planned on it.”
He turns to go, stops, and speaks without turning back, “Tracker goes home with you. He’s done enough.”
“Yeah, he has.”
Sam walks away.
***
We sit on the low wall outside the villa, just the two of us, the ocean on one side and the hacienda behind us with its lights, voices, and the sound of federal police doing their work. It’s the strange quiet of an aftermath settling around everything.
Tracker still has the beard and the expensive shirt. He looks like someone I know and someone I’ve never met at thesame time, and not knowing how to hold both of those things simultaneously, I sit beside him and let the silence be what it is for a moment.
Then I say what has been sitting in my mind from the moment he was found in that villa. “How could you do this?” Not loud and not only angry, something more complicated underneath it, the exhaustion of a man who has been carrying something for a very long time and is finally putting it down.
Tracker is quiet.
“To Sophia,” I say. “To us. You were gone, brother. We buried you. She—” I stop, feeling the weight of it sitting in my chest, all of it, every day of the last months compressed into this single moment. “I had to bring her back from the dead. Do you understand that? She was barely here. And I had to—”
I stop.
He lets me stop, doesn’t rush it, doesn’t fill it.
“How could you choose this over her? Over all of us?”
The ocean moves.
Tracker looks at his hands for a moment. “I had to be part of bringing them to justice. Lawrence, Clemente, everything they did, to Lexi, to Sophia, to the club. I was already in the system. Sam gave me a choice, and I chose this… and I chose Riley. She was alone in there.”
“At what cost?”
He is quiet for a long time. “I know what it cost.” He turns and meets my gaze. His eyes are brown, not green, a stranger’s eyes, fitted over the only ones I’d have ever known, and the weight of it is there, not regret exactly, but something more complicated than regret. “I’m sorry, Tate. For what you had to carry. For what Sophia had to carry. I’m sorry for that.”
I stare at him, at my dead brother sitting alive beside me in Mexico. “I don’t know if I can forgive you for this. Not yet. You tore our hearts out.”
He nods, doesn’t argue or defend, just takes it, which is the most Tracker thing he could have done, and somehow makes it harder to stay angry.
We sit in the silence for a while, while the ocean moves.
