Chapter Nineteen #2
“The El Pasos understood the New York market,” Clemente says. “They had relationships. History. Twenty years of working those streets.” A pause. “It will take time to rebuild that.”
“Not as much time as you think. The El Pasos had history, but they also had enemies. Bridges they’d burned. People who wouldn’t work with them regardless of the product.” A pause. “I don’t carry their history. I carry connections they never had access to.”
Clemente looks at me.
“Tell me.”
So I tell him.
Streets, neighborhoods, distribution corridors, the geography of a city lived in from every angle, above ground and below it, legal and otherwise. Every piece of knowledge is real. Every contact exists. The legend is airtight because it has been built from the inside out.
Clemente listens. Doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t push back. Just listens with those still eyes and that quality of attention that tells me every word is being weighed and filed.
“You know the Bronx?”
“Which part?”
A slight narrowing of his eyes. “Hunts Point.”
“Distribution hub. The market moves through the produce center, the cover of legitimate freight. You want product moving through there, you need at least three separate handlers, and you’re paying a fifteen percent cut to the man who runs the loading dock on the east side.
His name changes every eighteen months, but the cut stays the same.
” A beat. “Last I knew, his name was Victor. Before that, Anthony.”
“East Harlem,” he says.
“Spanish Harlem. Different energy to the rest of the borough, tighter networks, harder to penetrate from outside, easier to operate from within if you’ve got the right relationships. The corridor between 116th and 125th moves more volume per square mile than anywhere else in the five boroughs.”
“And you have relationships there?”
“I have relationships everywhere I just described. That’s why I’m sitting in this chair.”
Clemente studies me for a long moment, then sits back and nods, slowly and certainly, the nod of a man who has heard what he needed to hear.
The movement reaches me a half-second before the metal does.
The shift of weight behind me, the deliberate sound of a man coming out of stillness, and then the muzzle of a weapon pressed against the side of my head with a cold, precise pressure that leaves absolutely no room for misinterpretation.
The room goes silent.
I don’t move. Don’t flinch. Don’t reach.
Don’t shift a single muscle in my face, my hands, or my body.
I’m sitting exactly as I’d been sitting, weight even, hands loose on the arms of the chair, eyes on Clemente, as if the gun at my temple is simply another piece of information to be processed and filed alongside everything else.
Inside, I am furious.
Not frightened. Considerably worse than this.
A bullet in the chest. Fire, smoke, and hands dragging me out of a burning building.
My own funeral watched from the back of a car on a gray New York morning.
A gun held by a man following instructions in a room where his employer sits watching is not fear.
It’s a goddamn insult.
I have come with a pristine recommendation. A verifiable legend. Specific operational knowledge that has just passed every question he’s thrown at me. And he is doing this anyway, because he can, because this is how men like Clemente remind everyone in their orbit where the power lives.
Keeping all of that behind my eyes, I hold his gaze.
Say nothing.
Three seconds.
Five.
Ten.
The silence in the room is absolute.
Clemente’s mouth curves before he says something in Spanish, one word, quiet, and the pressure at my temple disappears.
Then he laughs. Not cruelly, almost warmly, the full, genuine laugh of a man who has just received what he’d been hoping for and found himself genuinely pleased about it.
“I had to know.”
Looking at him, I give him the full weight of the pause before I answer, “Now you know.”
He laughs again, louder this time, leans forward, and refills my glass without being asked, that intimate gesture of a man who has just decided you are worth something.
Watching him pour, I think about the women his network has sold, the men his operation has killed, and the practiced ease with which he moves through a world built entirely on other people’s suffering.
And I smile.
Because Marco Reyes would smile.
And Ryan can wait.
“Tonight,” Clemente says, settling back with his own glass. “Dinner. Here. My home.” A pause, something moving in his expression that is closer to warmth than anything I’d seen from him yet. “I would like you to meet someone important to me.”
Not asking who—Marco Reyes wouldn’t need to ask.
“I’ll have Diego show you to your villa,” he continues. “Your things have already been moved there. You’ll stay within the grounds while you’re here, I insist. We have much more to discuss, and I prefer to continue our conversation in comfort rather than across a city.”
“I appreciate the hospitality.” A beat, just enough resistance to be believable. “Though I have arrangements in the city—”
“Already taken care of.” That easy smile, the smile of a man who has never once in his life needed to ask twice. “Consider it done.”
My villa.
Inside the perimeter.
Inside the walls.
Exactly where I need to be.
The villa sits perhaps a quarter mile from the main hacienda along a stone path that winds through low-lit gardens.
It’s a separate property within the wider grounds with its own small courtyard and entrance.
It is well-appointed in the way everything in Clemente’s world is well-appointed.
The ocean is audible from the back window, a low, constant sound that should be peaceful and isn’t.
A servant, a young woman who moves quietly and asks nothing, prepares the room, leaves water and fruit on the table, and disappears without requiring acknowledgment.
I check the room for exits, sightlines, and weak points. Then I stand at the window and look out at the grounds, the gardens, the path back to the main house, the high walls beyond which the ocean moves endlessly, and the guards moving in patterns I am already beginning to map.
On the bed, someone has laid out a dark, expensive shirt, pressed to a perfect crease.
Clemente’s hospitality extends even to this.
The controlling generosity of a man who likes everything in his world to be exactly as he intended it.
His house. His grounds. His guards. His guest dressed appropriately for his table.
Moving to where the jacket hangs on the back of the chair, the one I’d arrived in, the one Clemente’s hospitality hadn’t extended to replace, I run my thumb along the inside lining until I find the seam.
Press once.
Still there.
I sit on the edge of the bed and take it out—the three of us in a Blood Brothers’ yard, mid-conversation, not performing for anyone—Ryan, Tate, and Sophia, eight months ago, and a lifetime away.
I hold it in the low light of the villa for a long moment.
Then I put it back. Press the seam closed.
And let myself be Ryan for exactly as long as it takes to breathe through what is coming.
Looking at my left forearm, the ghost of the compass is barely visible, the needle still pointing north, even here, now, and in the middle of all of this.
‘Find your way back,’ it reads. ‘You always do.’
Sophia arrives in my thoughts the way she always does when the days are hard, not as a distraction but as a compass point. The thing that reminds me of which direction north is when everything else is trying to take it away.
Then I put her away.
Marco Reyes doesn’t know Sophia.
Marco Reyes has no one.
Turning from the window, I think about tonight. A room full of the most dangerous people I have ever been paid to sit across from.
Clemente’s table.
Clemente’s house.
Clemente’s rules.
And somewhere in that hacienda, walking those terracotta floors, sleeping behind those high walls, performing the most important and most dangerous role of her career every single waking moment, is Riley.
Not knowing which room she is in, how she is, or what it has cost her to get this far in, to earn this level of trust, to sit at that table as his woman while feeding information back to a Bureau that has gone weeks without hearing from her.
But she is here.
And now so am I.
Hold on, I think into the quiet of the villa. I’m here. You’re not alone anymore.
The grounds outside the window go dark as the sun finally drops behind the wall.
I pick up the shirt from the bed and put it on.
And go to dinner.