Chapter 57 Chris
Chris
Someone from admin has strung garlands along the whiteboard and set out a bowl of candy canes on the table.
The building’s PA system is playing a jazzy instrumental version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” at a volume just low enough to be ignorable.
Two weeks until the holiday and the Los Angeles field office is leaning hard into festive.
Wyatt unwraps a candy cane and crunches into it like a man who’s never heard of savoring anything. I watch him decimate the thing in three bites while the feed from Nina’s office loads on the wall-mounted screen.
“You’re a monster,” I tell him.
“They’re meant to be eaten.”
“They’re meant to be sucked. Slowly. Over time.”
“That sounds tedious.” He reaches for another one. “Also, phrasing.”
The screen flickers to life before I can respond. Four camera angles tile across the display: two from corner fixtures, one from a smoke detector, one from what I’m pretty sure is a decorative plant. Nina’s office from every angle.
Vicente and Arturo are already seated when Nina enters the frame.
Vicente moves more carefully than he did before the shooting.
There’s a stiffness in his left side that he’s working to hide, a slight hesitation when he lowers himself into the chair.
Two weeks out from a bullet that nicked his pulmonary artery and he’s sitting in a therapy session like nothing happened.
The man’s capacity for denial is almost admirable.
Arturo sits closer to him than usual. Their shoulders nearly touch. I’ve watched enough of these sessions to recognize the shift. The shooting changed something between them, stripped away whatever remaining pretense of distance they’d been maintaining.
Nina settles into her chair across from them and doesn’t reach for her notepad. That’s new.
“Before we begin,” she says, “I need to address something directly.”
I can’t quite see Vicente’s face, but he moves his hand fractionally toward Arturo’s knee. Arturo’s shoulders square.
“I’m in a relationship,” Nina continues. “With two federal agents. One CIA, one DEA. Both of whom are actively working your case.”
She lets that sit. Neither man reacts visibly, but the temperature in the room shifts. Even through the camera feed, I can feel it.
“One of those agents,” Nina says, “has personal history with you, Vicente. History that I now understand in detail. History that, frankly, makes me question whether I can maintain any pretense of professional objectivity where you’re concerned.”
Beside me, Wyatt stops crunching. His hand finds my arm, steadying.
“Your son uncovered an assassination plot and came halfway around the world to warn you,” Nina continues.
“When the assassins found us at the safe house, he helped take them down. I was there while you were bleeding out on the floor. I held pressure on your wound while we waited for the helicopter. I’ve crossed so many ethical lines at this point that I should probably refer you to someone else and recuse myself entirely. ”
Vicente opens his mouth to speak, but Nina holds up a hand.
“I’m not finished.” Her voice is calm, but there’s steel underneath it.
“I’m not going to refer you out. We both know the parameters of your arrangement with the federal government, and we both know I’m the only therapist read into this situation who’s willing to take you on.
So we’re going to continue. But I’m done pretending I don’t have opinions about what I’ve learned. ”
She leans forward slightly, and even through the grainy camera feed I can see the shift in her posture, the therapist mask slipping, the woman underneath emerging.
“What you did to Chris Longo was abuse,” she says.
“I don’t care what you told yourself at the time.
I don’t care what justifications you’ve constructed over the years.
You took a young man who started as your captive, who had no power and no choice, and you exploited that.
You used sex as a tool of control. You conditioned him to associate violence with intimacy.
You broke him, Vicente, in ways he’s still trying to put back together. ”
My chest constricts. Hearing it laid out like that—clinical, precise, spoken not as my lover but as a therapist who’s seen the damage up close—
I don’t know what I expected to feel. Vindication, maybe. Satisfaction at watching Vicente get called out.
Instead there’s just this strange unraveling. Like a knot I’ve been carrying so long I forgot it was there, is finally starting to loosen.
Wyatt’s hand slides down my arm to my wrist. His thumb presses against my pulse point.
On screen, Vicente’s expression has gone carefully blank. Arturo is watching him, not Nina.
“I’m telling you this once,” Nina says. “And then I’m going to do my job, which is to help you both become better versions of yourselves.
But I needed you to know where I stand. I needed you to understand that I see you clearly.
Both of you. The good and the monstrous.
The rescuers and the killers. I’m not going to pretend otherwise anymore. ”
She sits back. The silence stretches.
“Do you have anything to say?” she asks.
Vicente is quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is rougher than I’ve ever heard it.
“No,” he says. “You’re right.”
I realize I’ve stopped breathing.
The session shifts after that. Nina’s laid her cards on the table, and now she’s back to doing her job, but the dynamic has changed. There’s no pretense left. No careful diplomatic hedging.
“Tell me about Rafael,” she says. “How are things progressing?”
Vicente’s posture eases slightly at the subject change. “He’s been staying at the compound while I recover. Getting to know the family.”
“Celeste adores him,” Arturo adds. “She’s already planning Christmas dinner around his preferences.”
“He’s remarkable.” Vicente’s voice carries a warmth I’ve rarely heard from him. “Cambridge-educated. International law. Speaks four languages fluently. His mother kept him completely hidden for thirty years, built him an identity so clean it took federal databases a week to crack it.”
Wyatt leans toward me. “Alejandro Vicente Prieto,” he murmurs, more to himself than me. “Became Rafael Marcano at eighteen. Selena had the whole thing set up before he graduated secondary school.”
I nod. We’d gotten the full story from Rafael himself in the hospital: how his mother constructed his new identity layer by layer, how he’d lived as Rafael Marcano through Cambridge and beyond, how the “ghost” had a digital footprint that was deliberately boring.
Clean credit history, unremarkable social media, a paper trail that led nowhere interesting.
On screen, Nina tilts her head. “You sound proud of him.”
“I am.” Vicente pauses. “Though I can’t claim any credit for how he turned out. That belongs entirely to Selena. She raised him. Shaped him. Kept him safe from my world while making sure he had every advantage.”
“Do you wish you’d known him sooner?”
“Every day.” The words come out rough. “But I understand why she did it. My life wasn’t safe for a child. She made the right choice.”
Nina gives him space to breathe. “You said Selena kept Rafael safe from your world. Tell me about that world—how you came to be part of it.”
Vicente and Arturo exchange a look. Something passes between them that I can’t read.
“The Prieto family has owned resorts in Cancún for generations,” Vicente says finally. “Lola and Selena’s father, Alejandro—he found us. Arturo and me. We were boys. Twelve, maybe thirteen.”
“We’d been taken,” Arturo says quietly. “Moved through channels that didn’t care about names or ages. Just product.”
My stomach drops. Beside me, Wyatt goes very still.
“Alejandro ran clean operations,” Vicente continues. “But the men who passed through those resorts—some of them had appetites. Thought their money made them untouchable.” His jaw tightens. “One of them bought access to us. Alejandro found out. He... handled it.”
“He took us in after,” Arturo says. “Gave us work. Mentored us. Taught us how to spot predators. How to handle problems quietly.”
“Arturo was lucky.” Vicente’s voice has gone flat in a way I recognize—the dissociation of recounting something too big to feel. “He was only held for a few days before Alejandro intervened. I wasn’t as fortunate. The man who bought me had time to—” He stops. Swallows. “He had time.”
The conference room feels too small suddenly. I can’t breathe.
“It would have been easy to become what we hated,” Arturo says. “Men like us, with our histories—that kind of rage can twist you into the same monster. But Lola wouldn’t let us forget what her father built. What he stood for.”
On screen, Nina’s expression hasn’t changed, but I know her well enough to see the recalibration happening behind her eyes. I’m not feeling quite as composed as her, and I’m grateful for Wyatt’s grounding touch.
“Thank you for sharing that,” she says carefully.
“I want to acknowledge how significant it is that you’ve trusted me with this.
” She pauses. “And I also want to be clear—what happened to you as a child was horrific. It explains certain patterns. But it doesn’t excuse them.
The harm you experienced doesn’t give you permission to perpetuate harm on others. ”
“No,” Vicente says. “It doesn’t.”
The silence stretches. I realize my hands are shaking.
Wyatt threads his fingers through mine and squeezes. He doesn’t say anything. His touch is enough.
“We continued Alejandro’s work after he died,” Arturo says eventually. “Clearing out the rot. Protecting the vulnerable. It doesn’t balance the scales—we know that. But it’s something.”