Chapter 34
Iwatch it land.
The way her stillness sharpens. The way her eyes don’t widen, don’t flinch, but go distant for half a heartbeat as the information reorganizes itself in her head. Saint doesn’t react the way other people do. She recalculates.
Family changes the math.
A broker is one thing. A sister is another entirely. It means loyalty layered on obligation; blood tangled up with survival. It means there are pieces of my life she never knew existed, let alone fit together.
I let her sit with it for a moment. Let the cost show on my face because it’s real. There are secrets assassins take to their grave. I’ve buried men for less.
“She’s been my broker since I was exiled,” I say quietly. “I didn’t know she was one before that night.”
Saint’s gaze snaps back to me, sharp now, focused.
“Everyone heard about my exile,” I say. “The Guild made sure of it.”
Saint stays quiet, watching me the way she always does when she’s deciding whether the truth is being offered or negotiated.
“They said I poisoned a politician for a backdoor deal,” I continue. “That I sold my loyalty for leverage.”
I let the words hang there, ugly, and familiar.
“My sister knew better.”
That gets her. Just a flicker, but it’s there.
“Not because she trusted the Guild,” I add. “She never has. She knew better because she knows me.”
I pause, feeling the weight of what I’m not saying yet, what I’m about to drag into the light.
“And because the politician I was accused of killing was my brother-in-law.”
I see it hit her then, a second shock folding into the first. Too many fragments scattered across the table at once. Too many truths arriving without warning. She doesn’t speak, but her jaw tightens, eyes narrowing as she tries to build a picture from pieces that refuse to line up neatly.
Before she can say anything, a mechanical click sounds behind us.
Something slides into place with a soft, final sound, like a small door locking.
I turn, craning my head toward the source just as another muted hum kicks on. A panel along the wall lights faintly, heat indicators blinking to life.
Looks like dinner.
“Come sit,” I say, nodding toward the cases stacked nearby. “I’ll tell you what happened.”
My stomach chooses that moment to growl, low and traitorous. I ignore it, but Saint doesn’t miss anything.
“I need water,” she says flatly. “Or things are going to get real ugly real fast.”
She moves before I can respond, slipping between pallets with purpose, eyes scanning labels meant for the service deck above. She finds what she’s looking for quickly, hauling out two large bottles and tossing one to me while I shift a few cases into something resembling seats.
We drink in silence, the kind that doesn’t press but waits. Cold water burns its way down, settling my nerves, grounding me back in my body.
When we’re done, I cap the bottle and rest my forearms on my knees.
“That night,” I say, then pause, recalibrating even now. “It wasn’t a job. It was a favor.”
Saint doesn’t interrupt. She rarely does when she senses something buried under the words.
“Mateo Serrano called me,” I continue. “He was a politician by then. Ambitious. Careful. To him, I was former military. Special forces. The kind you’re not allowed to name or admit exist.”
I let out a breath through my nose, the memory settling into place.
“I never had to correct him. All he knew was that I wasn’t allowed to talk about my work. That part was true. He didn’t need to know I’d traded orders and shitty pay for contracts and blood.”
Mateo had called because he was scared. Not theatrically. Not dramatically. The way men get scared when the rumors are solid and coming from the wrong mouths. He’d heard there would be an attempt on his life. He wanted someone he trusted nearby. Someone invisible.
“A plus-one,” I say quietly. “That was how he framed it. Security for a night.”
My sister, Lucía, had been too pregnant to travel. The rumors made it worse. Mateo wouldn’t risk her, not then. So, I went instead. It wasn’t Guild-sanctioned. No handlers. No backup. Just family doing what family does when things start circling.
“A dinner party,” I say. “Eighteen guests. No obvious enemies. No raised voices. No political opponents or tense silences.”
The night had been almost boring.
They ate. They talked. People laughed. Nothing happened.
Mateo apologized afterward, embarrassed by his own paranoia. He joked about wasting my evening, said he’d overreacted. I told him it was fine. That it was what family was for.
We were riding in the back of the limo when he asked me if he’d pulled me away from anything important.
I remember smirking.
“As a matter of fact,” I’d told him, “you had.”
I’d been thinking of Saint then. Of the island. Imagined the way she would be asleep waiting for me, one leg kicked out from under the sheet, her body turned just enough that it felt like an invitation. Like a beacon saying come back alive.
I never finished the thought.
Mateo started coughing. Then gasping. His breath hitched, sharp and wrong. His lips went blue fast, veins in his neck darkening like ink spreading under skin.
I shouted at the driver to get to the nearest hospital and hauled him down onto the seat, already moving. This wasn’t a seizure. I knew that the moment I saw his eyes.
There was a medical kit in the compartment. I tore through it, hands steady, heart pounding. Activated charcoal. Antihistamines. An EpiPen.
I didn’t hesitate. I injected him. Forced the pills down with water. Rolled him onto his side and shoved my fingers into his throat until he vomited, violent and uncontrolled.
Then he stopped breathing.
I started CPR.
Every compression drove the air out of his lungs, and every time it did, I smelled it.
Sweet. Sickeningly so.
It’s the kind of thing you never forget. The kind of detail that brands itself into your soul whether you want it to or not.
“That’s why he lived,” Saint says quietly.
I look at her and nod once. “Yes.”
Mateo was already in office by then. Popular enough to be dangerous.
Close enough to re-election that the timing mattered more than the method.
Someone wanted his opponent to win without a fight, and the cleanest way to do that was a dead man just before voting opened.
Sympathy shifts fast. Power shifts faster.
“They wanted him to die quietly,” I say. “At dinner. In a limo. No witnesses who mattered.”
Saint’s eyes don’t leave my face.
“But he didn’t,” I continue. “Because I was there.”
Mateo clawed his way out of that hospital bed the next morning looking like hell, still pale, still shaking, still half dead. And then he did the worst possible thing for the people who tried to kill him.
He went on television.
He told them someone had poisoned him. Told them it was political. Told them he was still alive in spite of it. The country ate it up. Outrage does wonders for voter turnout. He won in a landslide.
That should have been the end of it.
Instead, it was the beginning.
“The hit failed,” I say. “So, they needed someone to blame.”
Security footage surfaced. Carefully edited. Just enough to show me entering the building. Just enough to put me in the limo. The story wrote itself. Assassin turned on his own. Poisoned a politician for leverage. Betrayed the Guild.
“They set the contract on me,” I say quietly. “And they made it look righteous.”
Saint’s jaw tightens, the faintest tell.
“That’s when my sister found me.”
Lucía reached me before the hunters did. Before the whispers turned into knives. She came in the middle of the night, eyes too sharp, voice too calm, and asked me a question I didn’t know how to answer.
She told me she was a broker.
Asked me if I worked for the Guild.
I almost laughed. Almost.
“It’s a closed world,” I say. “You don’t know it exists unless you’re already inside it. And suddenly she was standing there, telling me she’d been in it longer than I had.”
I hadn’t known. She hadn’t known about me either. We stared at each other like strangers wearing familiar faces, both realizing the same thing at the same time.
That we’d been lying to each other our entire adult lives without meaning to.
“From that moment on,” I say, “we worked together.”
To keep me alive. To move me without patterns. To pull threads quietly and figure out who’d staged the betrayal and why. Lucía didn’t just broker my contracts. She rebuilt my existence from the ground up, piece by careful piece.
Saint is silent when I finish. Not distant. Focused. Like she’s already mapping the parallels, lining my story up against her own and seeing how neatly they overlap.
Saint is silent when I finish. Not distant. Focused. Like she’s already mapping the parallels, lining my story up against her own and seeing how neatly they overlap.
I lean in closer, lowering my voice even though no one can hear us over the hum of the plane. Old habits die hard. So does trust.
“Sound familiar?” I ask quietly. “Because it should.”
Her eyes flick to mine, sharp and unreadable.
“They’re setting you up to take a hit,” I continue. “Not because you’re in the way, but because you’re useful as a body. Dead women don’t argue. Dead women don’t contradict the story.”
I watch it land. The tension in her shoulder’s shifts, subtle but real.
“They need someone else in power,” I say. “Someone pliable. Someone already bought and paid for. And the timing matters, just like it did with Mateo.”
I straighten slightly, just enough to look at her properly.
“This level of coordination doesn’t come from the middle,” I tell her. “Not from handlers or opportunists trying to make a name. It comes from the top.”
Her jaw tightens. Good. She’s listening.
“One person,” I say. “One hand with a finger on every trigger, every contract, every rumor that turns into a knife in the dark.”
I don’t say the name. I don’t need to. In our world, you don’t invoke monsters unless you’re ready for them to look back.
“They tried to erase me because I survived,” I add. “You’re being hunted because you haven’t died yet.”
The plane hums on, steady and indifferent, carrying us across the sky like none of this matters.
Saint doesn’t speak, but I can see the decision forming behind her eyes.
And I know, with the same certainty I had that night in the limo, that once this machine turns its attention fully on you, the only way out is through.
Together.
Whether she trusts me or not.