Clemente stands, and that is the signal for everything else to end, Diego pocketing his phone, Riley sliding off Clemente’slap with that same composed ease, the room reassembling itself into something ordinary. Clemente speaks briefly to Diego about something logistical, his hand resting at Riley’s waist as he does, casual, proprietary, and certain.
She catches my eye once as I stand from my chair.
Just once.
Just briefly.
‘I’m okay,’ it says again.
Walking back to the villa along the stone path, my pace stays unhurried, my hands are loose at my sides, and the evening settles around me, the garden on either side, the sound of the ocean growing as the main house falls behind, the guards moving at the perimeter in their familiar patterns.
***
Late that night, I stand at the villa window.
The ocean beyond the walls is doing its constant thing, that low, steady sound that has never been calming in this place, carrying underneath it the weight of everything this hacienda contains and everything it has done.
I think about Tate.
About the certainty of my brother, the way he’d always known which direction to move when everything was unclear. Wondering if he knows I am still alive. Wondering if Sam has found a way to tell him. Wondering about Sophia somewhere out there, whether she is okay, if Tate is keeping his promise, and if the grief has started to ease even slightly around the edges.
She’s okay, I tell myself.Tate has got her.
And then underneath that, quieter and less examined, something else entirely. Something that belongs to a different life and world, and isn’t going to be named here, not in this place, not as this person.
Not yet.
I look at my left forearm in the villa’s low light.
The compass ghost, needle pointing north.
Six weeks inside. Every day, another piece of what they need, one day closer to the end of all of this.
Come on, I think into the night.Let’s finish this.
Chapter Twenty-Three
TATE
It’s been a month.
That’s what it had been since Quill and his men rode back to New York, a month of planning, waiting, and the frustration of a man who knew exactly what he wanted to do and couldn’t do it yet.
The intelligence was close.
Cable had the hacienda mapped to within an inch, with security rotations and patrol patterns, the blind spot on the north wall confirmed and measured, and entry and exit points identified and cross-referenced. Two weeks had become three, three had become four, and the reason for the delay had shifted from incomplete intelligence to something considerably more complicated.
Three weeks ago, Cable pulled me aside after church. Just the two of us in the hallway outside the room, everyone else filed out, Cable with that focused stillness of a man who has been sitting on something and has decided it is time to put it on the table.
“We’ve got a problem.”
“Tell me.”
“We’re being watched.” His voice drops low even in an empty corridor, old habit, good habit. “Digital surveillance on our communications, not everything, they’re not that deep in, but enough. Phone patterns, movement tracking… they know we’ve been gathering intelligence on something, and they’re trying to work out what.”
He looks at me steadily.
“FBI?”
