Chapter 4 #2
If she refuses, and she will refuse because she is constitutionally incapable of doing anything else, then Diego will send men to handle what I couldn't. Those men will not bring her breakfast. They will not give her a room with clean sheets.
They will not care about the pharmacology of whatever they inject her with or whether she can walk afterward.
I have a limited time to find a way through this that doesn't end with Sofia Navarro dead and buried on a piece of cartel land, and right now, standing in this kitchen with bad coffee and worse options, I have no idea how to do that.
She appears in the hallway a little later. I didn't expect that. I closed the door when I left her room but didn't bother locking it. She's barefoot, phoneless, and miles from anything in the cold of February. The geography is a better cage than any deadbolt.
Or so I thought.
She stands in the hallway in her bare feet and her wrinkled clothes, with fury sharpened to a point by twelve hours of uninterrupted calculation.
"You left the door unlocked," she says.
I set down my coffee. "You're in the middle of nowhere with no shoes and no phone. Where exactly would you go?"
"Nowhere. Yet." She says the second word with the particular emphasis of a woman who has already started planning and wants me to know it. "But I wanted to see if you'd try to stop me."
"And?"
"And you didn't. Which tells me you're either confident or careless. I'm still deciding which."
"Sit down," I say, gesturing to the table. "I’m betting you didn’t eat the eggs I brought you and they’re cold by now. I'll make something fresh."
"I'm not hungry."
"You need to eat. You've been sedated and you haven't slept. You're no good to anyone running on empty, and right now I need you sharp."
"Don't pretend to care about my body. You drugged it and put it in a van."
"I'm not pretending anything. I'm managing a situation. You eat, you think clearly. You think clearly, you make better decisions. Better decisions keep you alive. This isn't kindness, Sofia. It's maintenance."
She chooses the table. She sits in the chair closest to the door, which tells me she's already clocked every exit in the room.
Her posture is rigid, coiled, the posture of someone ready to move.
But she's not running. She's smart enough to know that running in February, barefoot, miles from anything, is a death sentence that has nothing to do with me.
I cook in silence. I try something different from the eggs. Rice and beans from the canned supplies I brought, heated on the stove with some cumin and garlic. It's nothing special, but it's warm and it's not the meal she already rejected.
I put a plate in front of her and sit across the table with my own. She looks at the food and then at me, and I can read the calculation happening behind her eyes. The captor who drugs and transports versus the captor who cooks rice and beans.
The dissonance is deliberate. Confused people are easier to manage than terrified ones. Terror makes people do stupid things. Confusion makes them hesitate.
"Why are you doing this?" she asks.
"Making food?"
"All of it. The clean sheets. The food. The door that locks from the inside on the bathroom. You're treating me like a guest in a house where I'm a prisoner."
"You're not a guest. But breaking you down serves no purpose. I've cleaned up after men who thought cruelty was a shortcut, and all it produced was corpses and complications. There's no reason for this to be ugly."
"The kidnapping was ugly."
"The kidnapping was efficient."
"For who? For you? For your brother? Or for the cartel that's using your love for your brother as a leash?"
She's doing it again, finding the nerve and pressing on it with surgical accuracy. I take a bite and chew slowly, giving myself time to respond from the controlled center of myself instead of the raw place she keeps poking at.
"My brother is my family," I say. "My only family. I would do anything for him."
"Clearly." She picks up the fork and takes a small bite of the rice and beans.
She eats it, and the gesture is a concession to her own body's demands, not to me.
"But have you considered the possibility that your loyalty is being exploited?
That the cartel knows exactly how far you'll go for Alejandro and they're using that to turn you into a weapon? "
"I am a weapon. That's never been a secret."
"Weapons don't question their orders. You brought me here because someone told you to. But you're sitting across from me asking nothing, threatening nothing, feeding me breakfast. That's not a weapon, Mr. Reyes. That's a man who already knows he's wrong and doesn't know what to do about it."
I put down my fork and look at her across the table.
This woman, who I met just a few hours ago, who I drugged and transported and locked in a room, is reading me with the accuracy of someone who has spent years decoding people far more guarded than I am.
She sees through the control, through the routine, through the compartments I've built to keep myself functional. She sees the doubt.
"You have a limited time," I tell her. "That's how long I have before they send someone else. Use the time wisely."
"A limited time to do what? To agree to dismantle my own case? To betray every principle I've spent my career building?"
"A limited time to convince me there's another way."
It's not what I planned to say. The plan was pressure, leverage, the slow application of isolation and fear until she broke. That was the original plan because I didn't have a better one.
But she's sitting across from me with defiance and conviction in her eyes, and I know with absolute certainty that this woman will not break.
Not in a week, not in a year. I could lock her in that room until the walls rotted and she would come out still arguing her case, still reciting evidence, still absolutely certain that she is right.
So either I find another way, or I deliver her to men who will do things I cannot allow myself to imagine.
"Another way," she repeats. "Meaning you're open to alternatives."
"I'm open to not killing you. If that requires alternatives, then yes."
She studies me for a long moment. Then she picks up the coffee, takes a sip, and sets it down.
"Your brother is guilty," she says for the third time. But this time the words are not a weapon. They are an offering. The starting point of a negotiation she's decided to engage in, not because she must but because she's seen something in me that suggests it might be worth trying.
"Then prove it to me," I say. "Not like a prosecutor. Like you're talking to a man who needs to understand what his brother really is."
"And what do I get if I convince you?"
The question catches me off guard. She's negotiating. From the chair closest to the exit, in bare feet, eating rice and beans her captor made, she's negotiating.
"What do you want?"
"My freedom. Obviously."
"I can't give you that."
"Then give me something. A phone call to my mother. Five minutes. So she doesn't spend the weekend thinking I'm dead in a ditch."
I study her. She holds my gaze without blinking, and I realize she's been maneuvering me toward this since she sat down.
The evidence argument, the challenge to prove it, those were the setup.
This is the ask. The woman is running a negotiation from a position of zero leverage and somehow making me feel like I'm the one being cornered.
"Convince me about Alejandro," I say. "Then we talk about the phone call."
She takes another bite and sets down the fork, and something settles between us that doesn't have a name. It is the mutual recognition of two people who are both trapped, both operating under impossible constraints, both testing each other's edges.
I refill her coffee without being asked. She accepts it without thanks.
The clock Diego set is already running. And this woman, sitting across from me, who has a negotiation she shouldn't have been able to win under her belt, is the reason I'm starting to wonder what happens when the clock runs out and I haven't done what I was sent here to do.