Chapter 7 #2
I watch him standing across from me in the dim kitchen, this man who carried me out of my life and into this farmhouse, who cooks meals for me and locks me in and looks at me like I'm a puzzle he can't solve.
His shoulders carry the weight of the call he just took, and his hands, the hands that covered my mouth in that alley, are curled at his sides, not in fists but in the grip of a man holding onto something invisible.
He is exhausted and cornered and more dangerous than he has ever been, and what terrifies me most is not the danger but the fact that some part of me, some reckless and irrational part that the sedative didn't knock out and the fear hasn't killed, looks at this man and feels safe.
That is insane. I know it is insane. The woman who prosecuted cartel leadership and won does not feel safe in the presence of a cartel operative who just admitted he hasn't ruled out killing her.
But the feeling is there, stubborn and irrational and real, and I can't argue it away the way I argue away evidence.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only honest one I have."
"Then what are you going to do?"
He moves to the kitchen table and sits down.
He runs his hands over his face and through his hair, the gestures of a man who is past pretense and into pure exhaustion.
He's been awake for most of the time since he brought me here, I realize.
I know this because I've been awake for most of it too, and every time I get up in the night to check the nothing has changed, I can hear him moving on the other side of the house, pacing, checking the perimeter, sitting in the kitchen in the dark.
We've been keeping the same sleepless vigil, prisoner and captor, both waiting for something we couldn't name.
"I don't know," he says. "For the first time in my life, I genuinely don't know."
I sit across from him. The kitchen is dim, with the single bulb casting a yellow circle that barely reaches the corners of the room.
Outside, the February darkness draws in, the kind of darkness that doesn't exist in the city, where there are always lights, always noise, always the ambient glow of ten million lives being lived simultaneously.
Here there is nothing except the two of us and the hum of the furnace and the wind moving through the trees.
"Here's what I know," I say. "I know the cartel won't stop. Whether you kill me or not, whether I file a motion or not, they won't stop because this was never about the conviction. This was about power, about demonstrating that no one touches their people without consequences."
"I know that."
"And I know that you, right now, are a liability to them.
You were useful when you were loyal, when you believed in what you were doing.
But you're not loyal anymore, are you? You went to see your brother and he told you the truth, and now you're a man with no allegiance and a federal prosecutor in his custody.
That makes you dangerous to them, not to me. "
He looks at me with those tired eyes that are too exhausted to hide anything. "You're analyzing this like a case."
"I'm analyzing this like a survivor. If I stop thinking, I start feeling, and if I start feeling, I fall apart. And falling apart is not an option right now."
He nods, not in agreement exactly but in recognition. Because he operates the same way. I've watched him do it since I got here, the way he compartmentalizes, files emotions in drawers he doesn't open, keeps the machine running by refusing to acknowledge the human being inside it.
We are the same in this one terrible way. We are both people who survive by not feeling, and right now, locked in this house together with the cartel's deadline closing around us, we are both failing at it.
"I bought us a few days," he says. "Diego won't wait longer than that."
"And after those days?"
"After that, he sends sicarios. Men I've worked with. Men who are very good at what they do." He pauses. "I won't be able to stop them alone."
"So we have maybe a few days to come up with a plan."
"We?"
I lean forward. "Let me be very clear about something. I did not ask to be here. I did not ask for any of this. But I am here, and I am alive, and I intend to stay alive. If that requires working with the man who kidnapped me to avoid being murdered by a cartel, then that’s what I’ll do.
Because I am a pragmatist, Mateo, and pragmatists don't let grudges get in the way of survival. "
His expression shifts. The exhaustion doesn't lift, but beneath it something else appears, the faintest suggestion of something that, in a man less carefully controlled, might be called admiration.
"You're remarkable," he says. It comes out unplanned and unfiltered, the kind of observation that slips past the guards when the guards are too tired to hold their posts.
"I'm practical. There's a difference." But the word lands somewhere deep and lodges there, warm and unexpected, and I don't try to remove it because right now I need every warm thing I can get.
We sit in the dim kitchen and begin to plan, not as kidnapper and victim but as two people who have no more than a few days to outmaneuver a cartel that wants them both dead.
It's not enough time, but it's what we have.
And somewhere in the planning, in the back-and-forth of strategies considered and discarded, in the way his mind works alongside mine, fast and logical, seeing angles I miss while I see angles he misses, something changes between us.
Not trust, and not forgiveness, but something more primitive than both: the recognition that we are, in this moment, the only people in the world who can keep each other alive.
It's a thin thread to hang a partnership on, but it will have to be enough... for now.