24 - Adrian #2
But then I picture her family. Her sister, Eleanor Rosetti, who married into the New York crime family to protect her. Her brother-in-law, Leonardo Rosetti, who looks at her with brotherly love. That kind of emotion is almost impossible to fake.
Finally, I think of Isa. Isa trusts exactly two people in this world, me and Juliet. She only lets people in after they prove themselves to her time and again, and I trust her judgment implicitly. If Isa believes Juliet is on our side, then I do too.
Which brings me back to the original question. Why is Juliet going to Santiago Zayas’ personal island?
"Did Hugo take her?" I ask.
"That's the thing,” Roberto tells me. “He says she paid cash, insisted on going immediately. Took her out that same afternoon."
"And?"
Roberto pauses. "Haven't heard from either of them since."
The truth of it settles in my chest like ice. Juliet walking straight into the arms of a monster while I sit here, unable to save her, unable to save Isa, unable to save anyone despite all my careful control.
"Keep this quiet," I tell Roberto. "But let me know immediately if you hear anything."
I end the call and stare at my phone. The pieces form a picture I can't quite resolve. Why would Juliet, of all people, deliberately seek out Santiago Zayas? Juliet, who trembled whenever his name floated at the edge of conversation? What the hell was she thinking?
The consequences arrive faster than expected. My phone rings. Unknown New York number.
"Adrian Marín?" The voice is professionally neutral. "Please hold for Leonardo Rosetti."
Oh, fuck.
Eleanor must have realized that her sister is unreachable. The New York Rosettis are on the phone.
"Adrian." Leonardo's voice carries that Rosetti edge. "My wife has been trying to contact her sister. My cousin Nico mentioned that you might know where she is?"
"Leonardo. I understand your concern."
“I don’t like the sound of that. Should I be concerned?” He doesn't raise his voice. Rosettis never need to. I’ve only met Leo Rosetti once, and learned everything I need to know about him in that short encounter. He is a man who punches before he asks questions. I’m glad he’s in New York.
“She’s been out of contact since yesterday, but we are not worried for her at this point. We have people working on it," I say, though my people means me, alone, hitting walls.
I leave out that her last known location was a boat to Santiago Zayas’ private island, which in our world is the equivalent of stepping into a black hole.
“Keep me updated.”
The call ends before I can respond. Leonardo doesn't negotiate, doesn't discuss.
Here’s the thing about the Rosettis: They aren’t the kind of people you can pacify with a phone call or bullshit long enough to buy time.
They move quickly, decisively, and often with a kind of benevolent brutality.
If Eleanor thinks her sister is in danger, she will bring the full weight of their resources to bear, whether or not I’m ready.
And if Leonardo so much as suspects I’ve been lying or holding back, he’ll send someone down here to break my kneecaps and then buy the hospital to make sure I don’t get a morphine drip.
I sit at the counter, suddenly exhausted.
The timeline is collapsing. I had planned for contingencies, had worked out alliances, had run dozens of simulations in my mind of how to keep Isa safe from her past, from her enemies, from herself.
I didn’t plan for this. I didn’t plan for Juliet to run straight at the hurricane’s eye.
A thousand scenarios run through my head, each more catastrophic than the last. If Santiago Zayas gets his hands on Juliet, what then?
Ransom? Blackmail? Public spectacle? He doesn't play by the same rules as the rest of us, he only cares about chaos and power.
The Rosettis will respond with equal force, and Miami will become a war zone.
In the middle will be Isa, and the little world I convinced myself I could build for her—safe, contained, walled off from every other predator—will collapse in a matter of hours.
Evening creeps across Miami. I stand at my window watching the city I thought I controlled slip through my fingers. Isa still hasn't emerged from her apartment.
My phone buzzes with updates that mean nothing. Territory disputes at the port. Logan and Gunner handling situations I should care about. The machine of our world grinding forward while the only thing that matters slips further away with each hour.
Then a message that means everything.
My contact watching the Lins: Your PI problem got worse. He pulled the county file on the quarry death this morning. Incident report, settlement records, the contractor's insurance paperwork. Now he's requested the payroll for that summer.
The payroll. Forty-some names of men who hauled stone and poured concrete through that August. And one seventeen-year-old laborer, three weeks into the job, entered in the company's own careful hand: A. Marín.
I sit with the phone while the shape of it assembles.
He's a former cop. He'll run every name on that roster against his clients' file the way cops do — mechanically, without inspiration — and inspiration won't be necessary.
Adrian Marín, on site the day Meiling Lin died.
Adrian Marín, who fourteen years later owns the club where Isadora Navarro pours drinks.
Owns the building where she sleeps. He doesn't need to understand what happened at the quarry.
He only needs to show the Lins that their daughter's accident had a witness, and that the witness spent fourteen years wrapped around her best friend.
I could make him disappear. A week ago I might have.
But the Lins' suspicion doesn't die with him — it multiplies.
They'd hire two more and add my name to their list of questions, and the county file would still be sitting in a records office with my name inside it, waiting for anyone patient enough to ask.
Days. Less, if the records clerk is efficient.
Then the Lins will do exactly what grieving parents do with a weapon like that.
They'll take it to her. They'll put it in the ugliest possible words — he watched, he covered it up, he's been handling you ever since — and every word will be true, and Isa will hear the truth of her own life for the first time from people who want it to open her throat.
The walls close in, but not close enough.
I need her skin against mine, need her breath in my lungs, need her to know that everything I've done has been to keep her here.
Every lie, every manipulation, every truth I've swallowed.
To keep her mine, keep her breathing in a world that would devour her without my protection.
For fourteen years the truth stayed locked in my chest, because losing her to hatred would destroy me more thoroughly than losing her to ignorance. Now a stranger billing by the hour is picking the lock.
There's only one thing left in this that I get to author: whose mouth she hears it from.