Silence for about five seconds. Then footsteps from the far hallway. Rodrigo came around the corner with his left arm hooked around Justice’s neck and a pistol pressed to his temple. My brother’s hands were empty. His gun was gone. There was blood on his forehead from a gash above his eye and his jaw was clenched tight but his eyes were clear and locked on mine.
“Shoot him, Quest,” Justice said. “Just shoot him.”
“Shut up,” Rodrigo barked, jamming the barrel harder against Justice’s temple. He looked at me and then at his mother and his face crumbled for a fraction of a second before he rebuilt it. “You got my mother. I got your brother. So what now?”
“Let him go and I let her go.”
“Bullshit. You’re going to kill us all anyway. You killed LaLa. You killed Paco. You killed a nine-year-old boy on camera, Quest. You think I believe you’re going to let my mother walk out of here?”
His mother was sobbing next to me, pulling against my grip, reaching toward her son. “Rodrigo, please! Please, mi hijo, just let him go! Let him go and we can leave! We can go home!”
“There is no home, Mamá!” Rodrigo’s voice cracked for the first time. “They burned the restaurant. They killed Manny. They killed Fosso. They killed LaLa and Paco. There is nothing left to go home to!”
The standoff hung there. His mother crying. Justice with a gun to his head. Rodrigo’s hand trembling just enough for me to notice. And me standing in a living room full of dead men holding an old woman’s arm and doing the math on whether I could put a bullet in Rodrigo before he put one in my brother.
“You’re gonna kill us all anyway,” Rodrigo said again, quieter this time. He pressed the gun tighter against Justice’s skull. “So let’s just end this.”
I saw Justice’s right hand move. Slow, deliberate, reaching toward the back of his waistband where he kept a blade I didn’t even know he was carrying. Rodrigo was locked on me, his eyes drilling into mine, his focus entirely on the man holding his mother. He never looked at Justice’s hands.
Justice drove the knife into Rodrigo’s side.
Rodrigo screamed. His arm jerked, the gun went off, but the shot went wide, punching into the ceiling. Justice spun away from him, hit the floor. I fired twice. The first bullet hit his mother in the chest and she went down beside me. The second caught Rodrigo in the stomach and he staggered backward into the wall, sliding down it with his hand pressed over the wound and blood seeping through his fingers.
I walked over to him. He was sitting against the wall, breathing in short, wet gasps, looking up at me with eyes that were fading but still holding onto something. Defiance. Or maybe satisfaction. Something that told me he had one more card to play.
“It was someone from your camp,” he said, blood running from the corner of his mouth. He laughed and it turned into a cough that sprayed red across his chin. “Someone close to you gave us everything. That’s how we got to your plane. Your people betrayed you, Quest. And I’ll die before I tell you who.”
“You’re right about that,” I said, and put a bullet through his forehead.
He slumped sideways against the wall. The room went quiet except for Justice breathing hard on the floor behind me and the distant sound of Riot’s voice on the radio confirming the property was clear.
I stood over Rodrigo’s body for a long time. Someone from my camp. Someone close to me. The words sat in my chest like acid because I knew they were true. The Rios family didn’t have the intel to sabotage my plane without inside help. Somebody gave them the gate code. Somebody who’d been to my home, who knew the camera layout, who knew when we were leaving for the babymoon.
I reached down and pulled Rodrigo’s phone from his pocket. The screen was cracked but it powered on. No passcode. I opened his call log and started scrolling.
Most of the numbers were unsaved. Burner phones, temporary contacts, the disposable communication of a cartel operation. But one number appeared over and over. Calls and texts going back months, clustering heavily around the week my plane went down. I tapped the contact name.
Zephyr.
I stared at that name on a dead man’s phone and felt something shift inside me that was deeper than rage, deeper than betrayal, deeper than anything the Rios family had ever made me feel. I’d known this man for twenty years. He sat at my table and ate Rita’s cooking. I considered him family.
He handed the cartel the blueprint to kill my pregnant fiancée and our unborn child because he blamed me for a bullet that was never my fault.
Justice got to his feet behind me. “What is it?”
I turned the phone around and showed him the screen. Justice read the name and his face changed the same way mine had. Disbelief first, then recognition, then something dark settling into place behind his eyes.
“We gotta find that motherfucka,” Justice said.
47
Mehar
I hadn’t slept all night. I was worried about him but also that damn test.
The paternity test box was on the counter where I’d left it and I’d spent the entire night staring at it from the bed, replaying every moment of distance Quest had given me over the last two weeks. The deflections, the vague answers, the door behind his eyes that I kept knocking on and he kept locking. I thought it was the war. I thought it was stress. I thought it was a man carrying too much on his back and not knowing how to put it down.
It was none of those things. My fiancé looked at our daughter and wasn’t sure she was his.
