Chapter 30
THIRTY
Lucía waited until the door was locked, the curtains drawn. Only then did she open her laptop.
Ryan was still in the bathroom, tending to his bruises. She heard him rustling around in his first aid kit, uncapping of a bottle of painkillers or antiseptic. The kind of noises that sounded normal in a place like this.
She sat cross-legged on the bed, the laptop balanced in front of her.
He came out a few minutes later, shirt off, jaw darkened with stubble and bruises.
The blood was gone from his bottom lip, but it was still swollen and red.
She had to force herself not to stare at it.
Problem was, the only other place to stare was at his bare chest, which was heavily muscled and dusted with golden hair.
It spread across his pecs, then trailed down his flat stomach, before heading south and disappearing beneath the waistband on his jeans—
“That the ledger?” he asked.
Lucía’s eyes flew back up to his eyes, which were cooly surveying her, giving no indication they’d just caught her perving. Her cheeks heated, matching the warmth that was spreading low in her stomach.
She forced her attention back to her screen. “Most of it.”
“You said you’d already leaked parts.”
“I did.” She paused. “It’s the last part they want back.”
Ryan stepped closer. “Why?”
Lucía clenched her jaw. He was only a few feet away, and she swore she could feel the heat radiating off him. Was he one of those men who ran hot? Who, when you lay in bed with him naked, almost burned you when his skin touched yours?
Her cheeks were now so hot they probably glowed. “Because it’s the key,” she said, glad that her voice came out steady and business-like. “Not just to the money, but to the names.”
“You mean, like, cartel leadership?”
“Cartel, yes. And bankers. Politicians. Two cabinet-level officials in the Mexican government. A guy who used to work at Langley.”
She let that settle, then went on: “This isn’t just criminal evidence. It’s leverage. It’s blackmail. And it’s an insurance policy…one I wasn’t supposed to survive long enough to cash.”
She paused, then added, “It’s encrypted at 256 bits with a triple-split key. Military-grade encryption. Unbreakable unless you’re God or a quantum computer. I used it to protect the ledger.”
Ryan folded his arms. “And that key is the final fragment?”
She nodded. “It’s a sequence only I know.
Without it, the other two fragments are just noise.
They can’t decrypt it, they can’t stitch it back together.
” She tapped the side of her head. “And I’ve never written it down.
” She smiled, but there was no humor motivating it.
“That’s why they haven’t killed me. Why they can’t. ”
She leaned forward, speaking slower now. “They need me to open the vault. Only then can they destroy its contents.”
Ryan stared at the screen. He didn’t move, didn’t speak. But something shifted behind his eyes. “That’s a hell of a target,” he said quietly.
Lucía closed the laptop. “No. It’s a hell of a weapon.”
Lucía lay on her side, staring at the faded water stain spreading across the wall. The laptop was back in its case.
Ryan sat on the floor by the window, leaning back against the peeling wall, shirt still off, knees drawn up loosely. He hadn’t asked more questions. Not about the ledger, not about the key. But the silence between them was thick enough to hold shape.
He cleared his throat. “How?”
She glanced at him. “How what?”
He took a moment to answer, as if he’d forgotten the question he was asking. “…did you get involved in all this?”
Lucía rolled onto her back, staring up at the cracked ceiling. “My dad worked in logistics in Oaxaca City. Freight shipments. Containers. The kind of job that meant he knew what moved where, and when. He never said much, but I think he saw more than he let on.”
Ryan didn’t speak, so she went on.
“I was good at math. Got a scholarship. First in my family to go to university. Graduated in finance. I used to dream about IPOs and ethical investment portfolios.” She gave a faint, self-mocking smile.
“I thought I’d end up in one of those sleek skyscrapers in México City, pushing numbers around. And I did. For a little while.”
“And that’s where you met him,” Ryan said.
She hesitated. Then nodded. “I interviewed with Javier Esquivel when I was twenty-five. He ran a boutique investment firm with impossible connections. It felt like a fantasy job, exclusive and powerful. And he…” She hesitated again, then offered a small shrug. “He was very persuasive.”
Ryan said nothing.
Lucía sat up on the bed, elbows on her knees. “It wasn’t legal. Not all of it. I figured that out quickly. Offshore routing. Fake donors. Shells inside shells. But it was genius, like watching a chess match played in eight dimensions.”
She looked down at her hands. “At first, I told myself I’d learn what I could, then leave. But then he asked me to help with something bigger. Said it would only be temporary. Private. A special ledger system, for a ‘client of significance.’”
Ryan frowned. “The cartel.”
She nodded once. The memory of that name on the encrypted ledger when he’d first shown it to her jumped into her mind.
SinalData Holdings. “Sinaloa. I saw what the ledger was tracking: port fees, ghost shipments, smuggling channels through Chiapas. And not just money. Names. Bribes. Political protection. I was building a financial nervous system for a hydra, and I was in too deep to pull out.”
“And you stayed?”
“For a little while. Because I was scared. And because I was under his spell. I wish I could say it was all fear. But part of me still wanted his approval. Still believed I mattered to him.”
She stared out the window for a long moment.
“Eventually, I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
I told my colleague Mateo. We were going to make a plan.
I don’t even know what we were intending to do with it.
Expose it, maybe. Leak it to the press, or to someone in the government who hadn’t already been bought.
” She shook her head. “It all sounds so na?ve, now.”
She paused, but Ryan didn’t respond, so she kept going, even though these were things she’d never said out loud before.
“We were supposed to meet that morning at his apartment.” She hesitated.
Her jaw clenched, and she had to force the next words out.
“The door wasn’t locked. I remember thinking that was strange.
And the lights were off, but the windows were open.
Like someone wanted the neighbors to hear if I screamed.
” She swallowed. “He was on the floor by the bed. Face down. One arm bent behind him like it had been broken. There was blood on the wall. On the ceiling. They’d made it messy, on purpose. His eyes were open.”
Her fingers curled against her leg.
“Officially, it was ruled a break-in. Wrong place, wrong time. But nothing was taken. Not his wallet. Not his laptop. Not even his watch.” A pause. “Just him.”
Ryan didn’t interrupt.
“I ran,” she said softly. “I took the ledger and vanished. I’ve been moving ever since.”
She folded her arms across her knees. Her voice went flat. “So. That’s how I got involved.”
Lucía’s eyes drifted to him again. He was watching her. Not like she was a threat. Just with that same steady gaze he’d had since day one.
His bare chest rose and fell, slow and even. The bruise along his ribs was darkening.
Her gaze dropped, then flicked back to the ceiling. Dios mío, contrólate. “We should get some sleep,” she said, her voice a little too crisp.
Ryan pushed off the wall. “Yeah.”
He didn’t look back as he crossed to the other bed and lay down. But the air between them stayed heated.