Chapter 11
SOFIA
We're supposed to leave at dawn. That was the plan: grab the duffle with the notes inside, get in the van, drive to Manhattan, walk into the FBI field office, and end this.
We don't make it to dawn.
I'm dozing at the kitchen table at four in the morning, my cheek pressed against a napkin covered in my own handwriting, when Mateo's hand closes on my shoulder and every nerve in my body fires at once.
"Get up," he says. His voice is wrong, low and clipped and stripped of everything except urgency. "Now."
I'm on my feet before I'm fully awake, adrenaline doing the work that consciousness hasn't caught up to. The kitchen is dark except for the glow of the space heater. Mateo is listening and looking up at the window.
"What is it?"
"Headlights. On the access road. Sounds like two vehicles."
My stomach drops. The access road is the only way in and out of the property, a single lane, unpaved, cutting through dense woods for almost a mile before it reaches the county road. No one drives it unless they mean to come here.
"Diego?"
"Or Salazar." In the dark, I can't see Mateo’s face clearly, but I can see his body, the way it's changed. The stillness that I've come to know as his default state has been replaced by something kinetic and coiled, the posture of a predator or a man who knows predators are coming.
He opens a cabinet under the sink, reaches behind the usual stuff that sits under sinks and pulls out a gun, a compact pistol with a suppressor already threaded onto the barrel. I didn't know it was there. He sees the look on my face and shakes his head.
"Stashed it when I prepped the farmhouse," he says.
"Later. Right now, listen." He checks the weapon with quick practiced movements.
"There's a back door off the bathroom. It leads to a wood line about twenty yards from the house.
If they come through the front, you go through the back.
Don't stop. Don't look back. Follow the tree line east until you hit the county road. It's about half a mile."
"I'm not leaving you."
"This isn't a negotiation, Sofia."
"You're right. It's not. Because I have every note, every name, every connection in my head, and if you die in this kitchen, the case dies with you because your testimony is what holds it together. So you don't get to play the martyr. We both leave or we both stay."
He stares at me through the dark. Outside, the sound of engines grows closer, tires on the access road, the same crunch of gravel that I hear every time he comes back from the city. Except this time it's not him.
"My shoes are in the van," I start.
"No time. And heels won't do you any good in the woods. We go now."
He grabs the duffel bag from under the table, the one I saw him pack hours ago with the notes, the newspaper margins, every piece of the case we've built.
He hands it to me. I sling it over my shoulder and check my pocket for the knife.
Still there. The weight of the bag, paper and napkins and the documented record of fifteen years of cartel violence, settles against my hip like a promise.
The headlights reach the clearing in front of the house. I hear engines stop; doors open and men getting out. moving with the coordinated efficiency of men who do this for a living.
Mateo takes my hand, not gently or romantically but functionally, the way you grab someone in a current to keep them from being swept away. His hand is dry and warm and his grip is iron.
We move through the house in the dark, down the hallway, past my room, past his, to the bathroom at the end.
The back door has the same keyed deadbolt as the front.
Mateo pulls the key from his pocket, turns it, and opens the door slowly, checking the sight lines.
Cold air rushes in carrying the scent of pine and frozen earth.
The tree line is exactly where he said it would be. Twenty yards of open ground between the house and the woods. Twenty yards of exposure under a sky full of stars that provides just enough light to see by and just enough light to be seen.
The front door of the farmhouse splinters.
The sound is enormous in the silent night, the crack of wood giving way under force, and it's followed by voices in fast commanding Spanish. They're inside.
"Run," Mateo says.
We run.
Twenty yards has never felt so long. My bare feet hit the ground and the cold is immediate and brutal, every step a small agony, but I don't slow down because the voices behind us are getting louder and someone has found the back hallway and someone is going to find the open bathroom door in seconds.
We reach the tree line and plunge into it. Branches claw at my face and arms. The duffel bag catches on something and I wrench it free. Behind us there is a shout, then another, then the sound of the back door being kicked wide open, and a flashlight beam sweeps the yard like a searchlight.
Mateo pulls me behind a thick oak and presses me against the trunk. His body covers mine, blocking the flashlight's sweep, and for a moment we're invisible, just two shadows among the trees, breathing hard, hearts hammering so loudly I'm sure they can hear us from the house.
The flashlight moves on. Voices confer. I hear boots on the porch steps as two or possibly three men fan out into the yard.
Mateo leans close, his mouth against my ear and his breath warm against the cold. "East. Stay in the trees. Don't make a sound."
We move. Mateo leads, navigating through the woods with the confidence of a man who scouted this terrain days ago and knows where the fallen branches are, where the ground dips, where the trees are dense enough to provide cover.
I follow his footsteps exactly, placing my feet where his feet were, trying to minimize the sound of our passage through the undergrowth.
Behind us, the search spreads. More flashlights sweep through the trees like the eyes of mechanical animals. Voices call to each other in Spanish. They've realized we're not in the house, and they're organizing a pursuit.
A branch cracks behind us, close and too close. A boot on deadfall, the sound amplified by the silence of the woods.
Mateo stops, turns, and pushes me down behind a fallen log. He crouches beside me with the gun in his hand and the barrel pointing toward the sound.
Silence follows, then footsteps that are careful and deliberate, someone moving through the trees with training and patience.
The flashlight beam appears between the trunks, sweeping left and right, probing the darkness.
It passes over the log we're hiding behind, catches the edge of the duffel bag, and stops.
The beam swings back and holds.
Mateo moves.
I've never seen a human being move that fast. He goes from crouching to vertical in a single fluid motion, and the gun in his hand coughs once, the suppressor reducing the shot to a sound like a hard cough.
The flashlight drops and a body follows it, crumpling into the underbrush with a rustling finality.
There is no hesitation, no remorse, no wasted movement.
He picked up the man's position from the flashlight angle, calculated the trajectory, and fired before I could draw a breath.
This is what he is. Not the man who cooks breakfast, not the man who hands me knives and looks at me like I matter.
This is the weapon underneath, the thing the cartel built, the thing his brother exploited, the thing that exists at his core.
I should be horrified. Part of me is. The part that went to law school, that believes in due process and the rule of law, that part is screaming.
The rest of me, the part that wants to live, the part that is lying behind a log in the woods with cartel killers hunting us and a duffel bag full of evidence that could bring down an empire, is grateful.
"Move," Mateo says. His voice hasn't changed, still calm and controlled. The kill was a task completed and nothing more, and he's already past it, already scanning the trees for the next threat.
We move faster now, because the shot, suppressed or not, has changed the calculus. The men behind us know we're armed. They'll be more careful, which slows them down, but they'll also be more lethal, which speeds up the timeline.
The woods thin as we approach the county road. I can see it through the trees, a strip of dark asphalt running east-west, empty, with no headlights in either direction. Mateo stops at the edge of the tree line and scans.
"East," he says. "There's a gas station a couple of miles up. We can call from there."
"Call who?"
"Your FBI agent. Baker."
"In the middle of the night?"
"I'm guessing he's not sleeping either. Not since your call."
He's right. Jon Baker, whatever else he might be, is a man who takes threats seriously, and my call from the farmhouse will have triggered every alarm in his professional repertoire. He's probably been working through the night, mobilizing resources, trying to trace the call, trying to find me.
We step onto the road. The asphalt is marginally warmer than the ground, but my feet are numb beyond feeling at this point.
I've been running barefoot through winter woods for what feels like hours and is probably fifteen minutes, and the damage to my feet is something I'll deal with later, when later is a thing I'm confident exists.
Behind us, in the direction of the farmhouse, I hear vehicles starting and engines growling. They've found the body and they're mobilizing, widening the search radius.
Mateo takes my hand again. We run east along the county road, staying close to the shoulder where we can dive into the trees if headlights appear.
The stars wheel above us, indifferent, and the cold wind cuts through my clothes like they aren't there, and my feet are bleeding and my lungs are burning and the duffel bag feels like it weighs a hundred pounds.
But I'm alive. I'm alive and the case is on my shoulder and the man running beside me just killed a man to keep me breathing, and somewhere behind us the cartel is learning that Mateo Reyes is no longer their weapon.
He's mine.
The thought arrives without invitation and refuses to leave.
It isn't possessive or romantic or anything as simple as those words suggest but something more fundamental, a recognition that whatever he is, whatever terrible things he has done and will answer for, in this moment he has chosen to point himself in my direction, and I have chosen to let him.
The gas station appears ahead, a single fluorescent island in the darkness, closed but with the exterior lights on and a bench against the side of the building, shielded from the road by a dumpster.
"Phone," I say to Mateo. He grabbed it during the escape, the same phone the cartel sent the photo to, the same phone I used to call Jon from the farmhouse.
He hands it over. There's one bar of signal, but it's enough.
I dial Jon's direct line. My fingers are so numb I can barely feel the screen.
He answers on the first ring.
"It's Sofia." My voice comes out ragged, shredded by cold and exertion. "I need extraction. I'm at a gas station on County Road 42, about two miles east of..." I look at Mateo.
"Brewster," he says.
"Two miles east of Brewster. Putnam County. There are armed cartel operatives in the area pursuing us. I have a cooperating witness and a full evidentiary package for the Vega cartel."
Jon doesn't waste time on questions. I hear him shift into operational mode, the clipped efficiency of a man who has done this before. He barks orders to someone in the background. A vehicle is being dispatched.
"Forty minutes," he says. "Stay out of sight. Sofia, who's the cooperating witness?"
I look at Mateo. He's standing at the edge of the fluorescent light with the gun at his side and his eyes on the road, watching for headlights, watching for the men who want to kill us.
His face is sharp-planed in the harsh light, all shadows and angles, and the scar along his jaw catches the fluorescence like a mark on a map.
"His name is Mateo Reyes," I say. "And he's going to need a very good lawyer."
I hang up and hand the phone back. Mateo looks at me.
"Forty minutes," I say.
He nods, takes off his jacket, and wraps it around my shoulders. It's warm from his body heat and it smells like him, like coffee and cold air and the woods we just ran through.
"Your feet," he says, looking down.
I look down too. In the fluorescent light, I can see the damage: cuts from branches and rocks, raw patches from the ground, blood that has smeared across the asphalt. I can't feel any of it.
"I'll deal with it later."
"You'll deal with it now." He picks me up, one arm under my knees and one behind my back, and carries me to the side of the building where there's a bench and a windbreak. He sets me down and kneels in front of me and examines my feet with the focused attention of a man who knows wounds intimately.
"You need a hospital," he says.
"I need forty minutes and an FBI extraction team. The hospital can wait."
He looks up at me from his knees. In this position, with the fluorescent light behind me and the darkness around us and his hands cradling my damaged feet, the tableau is so absurd, so impossibly wrong and impossibly right, that I almost laugh.
"Thank you," I say. "For getting me out."
"Don't thank me. We're not out of this yet, and I'm the reason you were there."
"Both things can be true." I use his words from the first morning, the same phrase he used when I accused him of pretending to care. He kidnapped me and he saved me. He's my captor and my protector. He's the worst thing that's ever happened to me and the only reason I'm still alive.