Chapter Thirteen
RYAN
The safe house is empty by the time I finish.
Everything that was Ryan has been packed away, which isn’t much, because Ryan doesn’t exist anymore, and hasn’t for days. The apartment was never his. The clothes were never his. Even the burner phone sitting on the kitchen counter belongs to no one now.
I pick it up, turn it over in my hands, then set it back down.
I don’t dial her number this time.
I already said goodbye to Sophia, the only way I could, from the back of a car, watching her cry at a graveside while the world went on around her, not knowing any different.
That was the goodbye.
There isn’t another one.
I pick up the jacket from the back of the chair.
Dark and expensive—the kind of thing a man wears when he wants people to know he has money without having to say it.
The photograph sits in the inside pocket, folded and invisible to anyone who doesn’t know it’s there.
I press my thumb against the seam I stitched closed myself the night before.
Just Sam knows it’s there.
He’d slid it across the table after Cole left, no explanation or ceremony. Just pushed it between us and looked away like he hadn’t done anything. Sam has always understood the things that don’t need words.
Then I look at my arms. Ten days of laser sessions and cream, and the Blood Brothers’ ink is gone from my forearms, faded and burned away, the skin still tender in places where the work was deepest. The rest has faded enough to read as old and indistinct.
Nothing that would mark me as anything specific to anyone who didn’t already know.
Except the compass.
Inner left forearm.
Already faded significantly, and with another few sessions it will be completely gone. For now, it sits there like a ghost of itself, the needle still pointing north even as everything around it has been erased. I stare at it for a moment longer than I should.
Then I put on the jacket and step out.
Cole is waiting outside in a black SUV, offering no conversation, which suits me fine.
We drive to the airfield in silence, forty minutes through San Antonio streets that are already busy in the early morning, the city going about its business completely indifferent to what’s happening in this vehicle.
I watch it through the window.
People are on their way to work. A woman is walking a dog. Two kids on bikes are cutting across a parking lot. It’s an ordinary Tuesday morning in a city that means nothing to me, and I’m about to get on a plane and stop being myself for however long this takes.
‘Months,’ Sam said.
‘Maybe longer.'
I look away from the window.
The airfield is small, private, and the kind of place that doesn’t appear on any public registry. The plane is already on the tarmac when we pull up, a small twin-engine that looks like a dozen other charter planes and is registered to a shell company with no connection to the Bureau.
Every detail is designed to withstand scrutiny.
Cole parks, and we both get out. He opens the back of the SUV and hands me a single carry-size, dark canvas bag, already packed with everything Marco Reyes needs and nothing Ryan would recognize.
He holds out his hand, and I shake it.
“Clean entry confirmed on the other side.” Cole’s voice is level and certain. “Diego will make contact within an hour of landing. You won’t need to find him. He’ll find you.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“He will.”
I nod once and pick up the bag.
“Reyes.”
I turn.
He looks at me for a moment with those sharp military eyes, steady and certain, the eyes of a man who has done difficult things and made his peace with the cost of them.
“Come back.”
Not good luck or be careful, just those two words.
“That’s the plan.”
I walk to the plane and don’t look back.
***
The flight takes just under an hour.
I spend the first part of it in the small bathroom at the back of the cabin.
The mirror is narrow and slightly warped, but it does the job.
I put the contacts in first, dark brown, covering the green completely.
Then I check the beard, ten days of growth, fuller than I’ve ever worn it, changing the shape of my jaw enough that even people who know my face would need a second look.
I smooth the jacket and adjust the collar, and I look at the man in the mirror.
Marco Reyes looks back at me. Dark eyes, heavy jaw, and a goddamn expensive jacket. The kind of man who moves through dangerous rooms as if he owns them because he’s learned that confidence is the only currency that matters in those spaces.
I study him for a long moment.
He’s convincing.
He’ll have to be.
I go back to my seat.
The rest of the flight I spend looking at nothing but the flat brown landscape below and the thin line of the Rio Grande appearing and then disappearing beneath scattered clouds. The border from up here looks like nothing. Just a line on a map. Just geography.
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.
Somewhere beyond this city, inside a compound I haven’t seen yet, Riley is going about her day, not knowing that everything just changed.
And Tate is keeping his promise. I have to believe that. I have to trust that the brother who caught her when her knees buckled at my graveside is still catching her, still holding the pieces together the way I asked him to. The way I know he will.
I square my shoulders and adjust the jacket, feeling the photograph through the jacket lining, small and folded, known only to me, and I walk forward into the heat.
Marco Reyes has arrived.