Chapter Twenty
RYAN
The dining room sits at the back of the main house.
Floor-to-ceiling doors open directly onto a terrace, and beyond it, is the ocean, black and enormous in the dark. The sound of it is constant and low beneath everything else, the kind of sound that should be calming and isn’t. Not here. Not in this house.
The table is set for four.
Noting that before anything else, four place settings, four glasses, four chairs arranged around one end of a table that could have seated twenty. It’s the intimacy of a powerful man who wants his guests close enough to read.
A servant shows me in and disappears.
Standing for a moment in the doorway, I read the room the way I always do. The artwork on these walls is different from the rest of the house, more personal, less performative. A genuinely beautiful painting hangs above the fireplace, at exactly the right height, by someone who understood it.
Then the doors at the far end of the room open.
Diego comes through first, still in the Hawaiian shirt, slightly less wired than this morning, the cocaine edge worn down to something more manageable. He crosses to me, shakes my hand, and makes the kind of small talk that is purely functional, filling the space until the real entrance happens.
And then Clemente walks in.
With Riley on his arm.
Knowing and seeing are two completely different things. I had known since Sam told me in that hospital room, on the plane, when I walked through the hacienda gate, and every moment since I arrived in this country.
She is wearing a long, fitted, and elegant black dress with a slit that runs high up one side, diamonds at her throat and ears catching the candlelight.
Her dark hair is up, a few pieces loose around her face, the way she always wore it when she was dressed up, which I know because I have seen her dressed up, and I was the one to tell her she was beautiful, and I meant it every single time.
She looks extraordinary.
She looks completely at ease.
She looks like a woman who belongs exactly where she is, at the side of a powerful man in a beautiful room above the ocean, and that performance, that absolute seamless performance, is simultaneously the most impressive and the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen.
Because I know what it costs.
I know what is underneath it.
Clemente guides her to the table with his hand at the small of her back, and I watch his proprietary ease, the way he touches her as if she is his, has always been his, and the idea of her belonging to anyone or anything else has simply never occurred to him.
I keep my face still, my hands loose, and remind myself that Marco Reyes has never seen this woman before in his life.
Diego makes the introductions, gesturing toward Riley with the practiced ease of a man who has done this before.
“Marco, this is… Ava.” Clemente’s voice is smooth. The name lands with the ease of a man comfortable with the world he’s constructed around himself. He looks at Riley, at Ava, with something that, in another context, might have looked like affection. “She is important to me.”
Riley looks at me. “Marco.” Her voice is warm, professional, and without recognition. “Welcome.”
“Thank you.”
And we sit down to dinner.
Diego makes his excuses twenty minutes in, something about a call, something about arrangements, and Clemente dismisses him with a glance. Diego shakes my hand, kisses Riley briefly on the cheek, and is gone.
And then it is three.
The servant moves quietly around the edges of the room, filling glasses, bringing courses, appearing and disappearing with the practiced invisibility of someone who has learned that seeing and hearing nothing is the safest way to exist in this house.
Clemente talks.
He talks the way he talked that afternoon, expansively, confidently, with the energy of a man who has never once been told that what he is saying is too much. But there is something different about him at this table, in this room, with this woman beside him.
He is looser. More himself, somehow, than he had been in the formal room with the chairs, the test, and the gun. At his own table with the ocean behind him and Riley’s hand occasionally finding his on the white linen cloth, Clemente becomes something that surprises me more than the gun had.
Human.
Not in a way that changes anything or makes what he is or what he’s done any different.
But human in the way that all genuinely dangerous people are human, capable of warmth, capable of something that looks remarkably like love, capable of sitting at a dinner table, laughing and touching a woman’s face with something that in another life on another man might have been tenderness.
And then he talks business.
That is what shocks me most.
In front of her, openly, with the complete lack of concern of a man who either doesn’t care or trusts absolutely, he talks about the New York operation, the distribution gaps, what he needs from Marco Reyes, and when…
names, numbers, routes. It’s the kind of operational detail that any competent agent would be cataloging as fast as it comes.
Which Riley is.
I see it beneath the ease, beneath Ava, beneath the hand in his, the smile at the right moments, and the glass raised at the right times. Riley working, filing it away. The quality of attention of someone absorbing everything while appearing to be absorbed in nothing.
She is remarkable at this.
She has always been remarkable at this.
And Clemente has no idea.
The trust in his face when he looks at her, the openness of a man who has let someone through every wall he’s ever built, tells me that whatever Riley has done to get here, whatever it has cost her, she has done it completely.
She hasn’t just gotten inside his operation.
She’s gotten inside him.
Keeping my face attentive, engaged, and neutral, I think about what that has required of her and feel something cold and complicated move through me that I don’t have a name for and am not going to examine at a dinner table in Clemente’s house.
“The El Pasos were useful,” Clemente says, refilling his glass with the ease of a man who drinks expensive wine the way other men drink water.
“For a long time, they were very useful. But they became careless.” He sets the bottle down.
“Careless men make mistakes. Mistakes create exposure. Exposure…” a pause, and he smiles. “Exposure ends things.”
“How did they go?” Keeping it casual. Curious without being invested.
Clemente’s expression shifts, something darker moving briefly across it.
“The Blood Brothers,” he says. The name carries a weight.
“They have been a problem for some time. Tracker…” he stops.
Something in his jaw tightens almost imperceptibly.
“One of their men caused considerable disruption to my operation. He is dead now. But the club… they are angry. They took the El Pasos as revenge.”
I sit with that.
Tracker. My road name, spoken at this table by the man responsible for everything, said with the casual certainty of someone reporting a problem that has been handled.
I am the disruption.
I am the dead man.
Picking up my wine glass, I drink and keep every single thing I am feeling locked somewhere so deep that Marco Reyes couldn’t find it even if he’d been looking.
“The Blood Brothers are dangerous?”
“Every club is dangerous,” Clemente says. “But angry clubs are predictable. Predictable things can be managed.” He looks at me across the table. “You had no issues with them in New York?”
“Our paths didn’t cross directly. I know of them. I know their territory. We stayed out of each other’s way.”
Satisfied, Clemente nods.
And across the table, Riley lifts her wine glass to her lips and looks at me over the rim.
The first time our eyes meet, I am ready for it.
Tracking her in my peripheral vision all evening, the way she moves, the way she listens, the careful grace of a woman performing a role with absolute precision, I am ready for the moment her gaze comes directly to mine.
Marco Reyes is polite, professional, and attentive to the host, appropriate with the woman at his side. Nothing more.
She looks away.
The second time is different.
Clemente’s phone buzzes against the table.
He glances at it, says something brief in Spanish that carries the clipped authority of a man who expects to be obeyed without explanation.
He then excuses himself, stands, and leaves the room with the unhurried certainty of someone who never questioned whether the world would wait for him.
It would.
It always does.
The servant has stepped out.
And then it is just the two of us.
The ocean moves beyond the open doors.
The candles burn.
Riley reaches for her wine glass, lifts it, takes a slow sip, and looks at me.
I stare back.
Marco Reyes—calm and neutral. The polite interest of a dinner guest, making conversation while his host stepped away.
She holds my gaze.
Something moves in her expression, the focused quality of a woman trying to place something she can’t quite reach. Like a word on the tip of the tongue. Like a face seen somewhere once, a long time ago, in a completely different life.
Everything stays locked.
Her eyes move over my face.
The beard. The dark contacts. The shirt. The watch on my wrist, Bureau issue, the crown flush against the case, already running, already recording everything that has been said at this table tonight.
She is almost there.
Watching it happen, the slow gathering of recognition, piece by piece, like a photograph developing in a darkroom, the image emerging from nothing into something undeniable.
Her eyes widen.
Just slightly.
Just for a fraction of a second.
The involuntary physical response of a body that has understood something before the mind has caught up with it.
And then Clemente walks back into the room.
Riley looks down at her wine glass.
Clears her throat.
Takes another sip.
When she looks back up, her expression is exactly what it has been all evening, warm and composed Ava. She turns to Clemente with a smile as he retakes his seat and says something light about the view and the evening, and the conversation flows back into whatever it had been before he left.
Reaching for my own glass, my hand is completely steady.
Inside, I am not steady at all.
Clemente looks between us at some point later in the evening, one of those casual sweeping glances that isn’t casual at all, the eyes of a man who monitors everything in his orbit, including the way his guest looks at his woman and smiles.
“She’s very beautiful, isn’t she.”
Not a question.
A test of a different kind.
Looking at Riley, at Ava, with the appropriate appreciation of a man who has noticed and is being asked to acknowledge it, nothing more and nothing less.
“She is.”
Clemente’s smile widens. Satisfied.
He reaches over and runs his hand down Riley’s face, slow, proprietary, and certain. Riley leans into it slightly and smiles up at him, and I look back at my wine.
Marco Reyes thinks about nothing at all.
Ryan thinks about everything.
***
Dinner ends late.
Clemente shakes my hand at the door with the warmth of a man who has decided something, not fully, not yet, but the beginning of trust is there, laid like the first course of something that will take time to build, and tells me we will talk more in the morning.
“Sleep well, Marco.”
“Thank you for your hospitality.”
Walking back along the stone path through the darkened gardens toward the villa, the ocean constant behind the walls, the guards move at the perimeter in the patterns I have been mapping all evening.
My pace stays unhurried, my hands are loose at my sides, and my face is the face of a man who has had a pleasant dinner and is looking forward to his bed.
Not letting any of it show until the villa door closes behind me.
I sit on the edge of the bed for a long time without moving.
The servant has turned down the sheets and left a light on, and the ocean is audible through the window, closer out here than in the main house, its sound larger, more present.
Moving to where my jacket hangs on the back of the chair, I run my thumb along the inside lining until I find the seam.
Press once.
Still there.
I take it out.
The three of us—eight months ago.
I put it back.
She had seen me.
Watching it happen across that dinner table, piece by piece, the recognition assembling itself in her eyes despite everything done to prevent it. The beard, the contacts, and the careful construction of a man who bore no resemblance to anyone she had ever known.
She’d seen through all of it.
Of course, she had.
She is Riley.
And now she is lying somewhere in that house, in Clemente’s house, in Clemente’s bed, in the role she has been performing every single day for months, knowing that Ryan Lismore is alive.
Knowing he is a quarter mile away in a villa within the same walls.
Knowing that everything has just changed, none of it can be acknowledged or said, and it can’t exist anywhere outside the two of them until the time is right.
That is going to cost her something.
I hate that it is going to cost her something.
I look at my left forearm in the low light, the compass ghost barely visible, and the needle pointing north like it always does.
‘Find your way back. You always do.’
Lying back on the bed, I stare at the ceiling and listen to the ocean move beyond the walls.
I think about Riley holding that recognition behind her eyes for the rest of dinner, the discipline of it, the control it required, the years of training, and the specific quality of a woman who could absorb something that enormous and fold it away without leaving a trace.
She is the best I have ever worked alongside.
She is going to be okay.
She has always been okay, even when nothing else was.
I close my eyes.