Chapter 20
TWENTY
Lucía sat stiffly in the wooden chair, painfully aware that her gun was now in Ryan Inglis’s possession. He held it calmly at his side, not pointed at her, but its absence from her own lap left her feeling exposed in a way that had nothing to do with weapons.
Across from her, he leaned forward, forearms braced on his knees. Still as stone. Watching her like a man waiting for a verdict. The burner phone sat between them, screen black now, as if the message had never existed.
Clock’s ticking. Find Lucía Duarte or the boy dies.
She ran the words again in her head. They hadn’t said it to her. They’d said it about her. To him.
“Start from the beginning,” she said.
Ryan nodded once. Then he started to talk.
He told her about the first video. The surveillance footage. The boy playing soccer in a Tennessee yard. The woman—his ex-wife’s mother—in the background.
Lucía didn’t interrupt. But she watched him closely. The tight line of his jaw. The way he said the name Noah like it hurt.
“He’s your son?” she asked quietly.
Ryan shook his head. “Not mine. I barely know him. Kylie and I, we had a complicated relationship. We were kids when we got married. Things went sideways fast. After she died… I thought he was safe. With her mother.”
“And now he’s not.”
He exhaled through his nose. “No.”
Lucía leaned back. The chair creaked beneath her. “So they want me. And they’re using the boy as leverage.”
“Looks that way.”
“Why not just come for me directly?”
He shrugged. “Maybe they couldn’t find you. Maybe they want something from you and they don’t want to risk killing you by accident.”
She stared at him. “They want the ledger.”
“What ledger?”
She hesitated. Then shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Point is, they want it. And they think I still have it.”
“Do you?”
She looked away. “I had pieces. The last of them was uploaded yesterday. There’s nothing left.” The lie rolled off her tongue with surprising ease.
He leaned back now too, letting the silence stretch. “They think you’re still valuable. That makes you bait.”
She nodded slowly. “And you’re the hook.”
“More like the line,” he said dryly. “I don’t think they care what happens to me once I’ve done my job.”
Lucía laced her fingers together and rested her hands on the table.
For a long moment, she didn’t speak. But her mind raced.
He was waiting for instructions from kidnappers, men she could only assume were cartel.
And she was the package to be delivered.
The leverage was obvious: if he turned her over, he might get the boy back.
So she had to make herself more useful than the ransom.
“You said they’ll contact you again,” she said, voice careful. “But you don’t know what they’ll say. What if they want proof? What if they want you to bring me in?”
He didn’t flinch. But his silence told her enough.
“I might be able to find the boy,” she added quickly. “Faster than they can.”
His eyes narrowed. “How?”
“I don’t know yet. But I can trace financial pings, encrypted messaging, network activity—anything. If they’re moving him, there’ll be a footprint. No matter how careful they are.”
It wasn’t just survival. It was the boy. His name—Noah—had stuck in her head like a splinter. If there was a way to help him and not die trying, she’d take it.
It hung between them, a lifeline hastily braided, already fraying.
He said nothing, just scrolled his eyes over her face. She didn’t like being looked at, and the way he was doing it was deeply unsettling.
“Well?” she prompted.
Ryan hadn’t moved. Not since she made the offer.
Lucía sat across from him, hands still folded on the table. Her eyes tracked him, waiting. She wasn’t fidgeting. She didn’t look scared. But he could tell she knew she was vulnerable.
He had her gun. Not pointed at her. But it was there, clasped lightly in his hands. The ball was very much in his court.
He got the sense that she wasn’t used to that.
Wasn’t used to not being in control, of not being the smartest, most capable person in the room.
He gathered from the way she spoke there hadn’t been many occasions when she wasn’t.
He studied her face, reading her: calm exterior, looking for possible signs of internal damage.
You have five days. Two, at most, left now.
And Lucía’s voice echoed: I can find him faster than they can.
Could she?
He didn’t know her from a hole in the wall. He sure as shit didn’t trust her. But she hadn’t begged. She hadn’t bargained. She’d laid out a plan, sharp and fast.
And she’d flinched when he mentioned the boy. Not the way someone flinches when their own life is in danger. The way someone flinches when they recognize a life that shouldn’t be wasted.
He looked down at her gun, turning it over in his hands. “Colt 1911. Doesn’t seem like…you.”
Her gaze sharpened. “How on earth would you know what seems like me?”
He shrugged. When it came to weapons, he just knew. She seemed like the kind of person who’d favor something efficient and unremarkable. Sleek. Modern. A Glock, maybe. Not this—an old slab-sided relic from a bygone era.
Her eyes dropped to the weapon. “It was my grandfather’s. Then my dad’s. I’ve had it with me since…”
She trailed off, but he caught the words she hadn’t said, or some variation of them anyway. Since I had to leave. In a hurry.
A relic, maybe. But people didn’t carry their past for nothing. Especially not when it weighed this much. He knew, because he’d had to do the same. More than once. And he’d watched others do it, too.
“You don’t trust me,” she said.
“No.”
“I don’t trust you either.”
“Good.”
They sat in silence again.
“If you double-cross me,” he said quietly, “there won’t be a second warning.”
Lucía didn’t blink. “Noted.”
He nodded once. Lifted her gun and slid it across the table.
She took it with one hand. Didn’t aim it at him. Didn’t thank him, either. But something passed between them in that moment. Not trust.
Something else.
He said, “They’re holding a kid. They need somewhere secure. Low visibility, but accessible. Somewhere they already control.”
She nodded. “If that upload rattled the right cages, I might be able to see who’s moving money or scrambling to cover their tracks.
That might give us a location, or at least a chain of names.
” She got to her feet. “If I can get us to a connection point, somewhere quiet, I can try to trace who moved after the upload.”
He stood up too. “Then let’s move before they beat us to it.”
The air was heavy with adrenaline. He could feel her heat as she brushed past him, walking toward the bed where her pack was laying.
They didn’t have a plan yet. Not really.
But they had a pact. And sometimes, that was enough to start a war.