From down there, it’s something else entirely.
I think about Riley.
She’s been inside Clemente’s operation for months, longer than the original parameters allowed and no one had planned for, and she is weeks overdue for contact. Surrounded by some of the most dangerous men in the Western Hemisphere, sleeping under the same roof as the man she’s there to help destroy, performing a version of herself every single day that has nothing to do with who she actually is.
Fearless in a way that has always made me proud and terrified in equal measure.
She doesn’t know I am coming.
She doesn’t know I am alive.
And when she sees me, if she sees me, she’s going to have to look at my face, feel whatever she feels, and keep every single bit of it invisible.
That’s going to cost her something, and I hate that.
But Riley is the best undercover agent I’ve ever worked alongside, and she will hold it together because that’s what she does, and I’ll be there now. She won’t be alone in it anymore.
Hold on, I think, like she can hear me from thirty thousand feet.I’m coming.
***
Nuevo Laredo spreads out below us, dense, sprawling, and loud even from the air, the city pressing right up against the border like it’s been trying to get through for years. The airfield we land on sits on the southern edge of the city, another small private strip that appears on no public registry.
The wheels touch down.
The engines drop to a low settling hum.
And I sit there for a moment in the quiet of the cabin, just breathing, just existing in the last few seconds before this becomes real and irreversible, and I let myself be Ryan one last time.
Ryan, who walked into a Blood Brothers’ clubhouse in New York and found exactly what he didn’t know he was looking for.
Ryan, who met a blonde-haired woman in a café in Vixen Falls and couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Ryan, who loved his club, his brothers, and the life he’d built out of the rubble of everything he’d walked away from.
Ryan, who made a promise from the back of a car at his own funeral.
‘I’m coming back.’
I close my eyes, then open them, picking up the bag before stepping off the plane as Marco Reyes.
The heat immediately hits me the moment I step onto the tarmac. Absolute, and without mercy. I stand there for a second, letting it settle over me, letting the weight of this new skin find its shape.
Marco Reyes.
Colombian father, American mother. Grew up between two worlds. Knows how to move in both.
A man with New York connections and a business proposition for the most dangerous man in Mexico.
A man who arrived at exactly the right moment.
I look down at my left forearm, at the ghost of a compass barely visible beneath the faded skin, needle still pointing north even now, even here, even in the middle of all of this.
‘Find your way back,’ it reads.
‘You always do.’
Somewhere in this city, Diego is already moving toward me.
