Chapter 3
SOFIA
Two days after the verdict, I start to believe I might actually be safe.
The death threats have slowed to a trickle.
The FBI's threat assessment unit sends me a brief email: No credible, actionable intelligence at this time.
Will continue monitoring. Jon calls to check in and tells me the cartel's remaining leadership is in disarray, too busy fighting over Alejandro Reyes's territory to organize retaliation against the prosecutor who put him away.
"You're old news," he says, and means it as reassurance.
I almost buy it. The hypervigilance fades from a scream to a hum, and I start taking the same route to work again because switching subway lines twice adds forty minutes and I'm behind on the sentencing memorandum.
I stop checking the street from my bedroom window before bed.
I sleep through the night for the first time in weeks.
It's a Friday when it happens. I remember that specifically because Fridays are my long days.
I have a morning prep session with Aaron at seven-thirty, a meeting with the Bureau at ten, three hours of document review after lunch, and then an evening session with my paralegal team to outline the sentencing arguments.
By the time I leave the office, it's nearly nine o'clock, and the federal building empties out around me like water draining from a sink.
I text my mother on the subway.
Late night. Sunday still good for dinner?
She responds immediately, the way she always does, as if her phone lives in her hand.
Always. I'm making pozole. Bring bread.
The subway deposits me at my usual stop and I climb the stairs into the cold February night.
Jackson Heights is alive the way it always is, with music from an open window, the glow of the laundromat on the corner, and a group of teenagers passing a basketball on the sidewalk despite the cold.
The normalcy of it settles over me like a blanket.
This is my neighborhood. These are my streets.
Nothing bad happens here that I don't already know about.
I turn onto my block and reach into my bag for my keys.
A white van is parked halfway down the street, unmarked, the kind of vehicle that exists in the background of every New York block without registering.
I notice it the way I notice all parked cars since the trial started, with a quick scan and assessment.
No one is inside. The engine is off. It means nothing.
I'm three buildings from mine when someone steps out of the alley between the bodega and the dry cleaner.
My body reacts before my brain catches up.
I step back, my hand going to the canister of pepper spray in my coat pocket, adrenaline spiking from zero to full in the space of a heartbeat.
But the figure is just a man with his hands in his pockets, walking in the same direction I'm walking, and he doesn't look at me or slow down or do anything that should trigger alarm.
I exhale. I let my hand relax away from the pepper spray. I keep walking.
He's behind me now, about ten or fifteen feet back. I can hear his footsteps on the sidewalk, steady and unhurried. I speed up slightly. He doesn't match my pace. The distance between us grows.
I reach my building's entrance and pull out my keys, and I'm fitting the key into the lock when I feel it. Not a sound or a movement but something atmospheric, a shift in the air pressure behind me, the displacement of space by a body that wasn't there a second ago.
I spin.
He's right there, close enough to touch. Not the man I saw behind me. Tall, broad, with eyes that catch the streetlight and hold it. He has a scar along his jaw and a face that would be handsome if it weren't completely empty of expression.
I open my mouth to scream and his hand covers it.
The motion is efficient, not rough, the way you'd cap a bottle.
His other arm wraps around my waist and lifts me off the ground with a strength that turns my stomach liquid, and I'm being carried backward, away from the door, away from the light, into the narrow gap between my building and the one next to it.
I fight. I fight the way I've trained myself to fight since the first death threat arrived, with elbows and knees and every dirty trick the self-defense instructor at the Bureau taught me.
My elbow connects with his ribs and I feel the impact travel up my arm, solid, like hitting a wall.
He grunts but doesn't let go. I kick backward and catch his shin, and his grip tightens.
Then there's a sharp sting in my neck, just below my ear, and the world tilts sideways.
I try to scream again but his hand is still over my mouth and the sound comes out as a muffled groan.
My legs stop working first, then my arms. The fight drains out of me like someone pulled a plug, and the last thing I see before everything goes dark is the streetlight above the alley, a single point of yellow light that stretches and blurs and then winks out like a blown bulb.
I come back in pieces.
Sound arrives first. An engine. The hum of tires on pavement, that continuous low-frequency vibration that tells me I'm in a vehicle and moving. My cheek is pressed against something rough. Carpet. The floor of a vehicle.
Then sensation. My hands are behind my back, bound at the wrists with something that doesn't cut into my skin the way handcuffs would.
It could be zip ties, or maybe tape. My ankles are free.
My mouth is uncovered. There is a blanket over me, heavy and scratchy, and beneath it my body feels like it's filled with sand.
Whatever he injected me with is still in my system. My thoughts move like they're wading through something thick, and the panic I should be feeling is muted, distant, as if it belongs to someone else and I'm just observing it.
I keep my eyes closed. I play dead and I think.
I was taken. Outside my building, in the thirty seconds between the sidewalk and my front door, a man was waiting and he took me. The operation was clean and professional, exactly the way Jon said it would happen if it happened. Not a warning but a disappearing act.
The cartel. It has to be. The Reyes family, retaliating for Alejandro's conviction. And if Jon was right about the brother, about the ghost who makes people vanish, then the man driving this van is the worst person who could have come for me.
That last thought is the one that breaks through the chemical fog and grabs me by the throat.
No one knows I'm gone. I left the office at nine.
I texted my mother on the subway. My next expected contact with anyone is Sunday dinner.
That's two full days before anyone starts to wonder where I am.
Two days before mother calls and gets no answer.
Two days before Aaron sends a text about Monday's prep session and it goes unread.
Two days is an eternity when you've been taken by a man who makes people disappear for a living.
I open my eyes. The van's cargo area is dark, but not completely. Light leaks in from the front, enough that I can make out shapes. There are tool chests along one wall, a duffel bag near my head, and the metal ribs of the van's interior curving above me.
The driver is visible through the gap between the front seats. I can see the back of his head, his dark hair, the line of his jaw, one hand on the steering wheel. He drives the way he grabbed me, steadily, without urgency, as if this is routine.
I work at the binding on my wrists. It isn't tape but something smoother and more flexible. Medical restraints, maybe. The kind that hold without damaging skin. It's a strange detail, the kind of care you'd expect from a man who understands that visible injuries raise questions.
The van slows and turns. The road surface changes from smooth to rough, and I feel every bump and pothole through the thin carpet. We're off the highway. Wherever he's taking me, we're close.
I stop working at the restraints and go still. I play dead again and wait.
The van stops. The engine cuts. I hear the driver's door open and close, then footsteps on gravel, and then the rear doors swing wide and cold air rushes in, carrying the smell of pine trees and woodsmoke and something else, the particular emptiness that rural places have, the absence of traffic and sirens and ten million people breathing.
We're not in the city anymore.
He stands at the open doors for a moment. I can feel him looking at me, assessing, the way I imagine he looks at every job. Then the blanket is pulled back and his hand touches my shoulder.
"I know you're awake."
His voice is low and quiet, with an accent that softens the consonants. It is neither threatening nor gentle. Just factual.
I open my eyes and look at him.
He's crouching at the van's rear, outlined by a sky full of stars that you never see in the city.
This close, I can see the scar along his jaw, a thin white line that looks old.
It is the same scar from the traffic camera photo in my case files.
Mateo Reyes. The ghost. His eyes are dark brown, almost black, and they're watching me with a focus that makes my skin crawl.
He is assessing me, measuring me, as if he's already mapped every move I might make and planned for each one.
"Can you walk?" he asks.
"Fuck you."
Something flickers in his expression, a twitch at the corner of his mouth that might be respect. It disappears immediately.
"I'll take that as a yes." He reaches for my wrists and I jerk away from him, pressing my back against the far wall of the van.
He waits, patient. "I'm going to remove the restraints.
If you run, there's nowhere to go. We're miles from the nearest town.
There's no cell service. It's twenty degrees outside and you're not dressed for it. "