Clemente talks.
He talks the way he talked that afternoon, expansively, confidently, with the energy of a man who has never once been told that what he is saying is too much. But there is something different about him at this table, in this room, with this woman beside him.
He is looser. More himself, somehow, than he had been in the formal room with the chairs, the test, and the gun. At his own table with the ocean behind him and Riley’s hand occasionally finding his on the white linen cloth, Clemente becomes something that surprises me more than the gun had.
Human.
Not in a way that changes anything or makes what he is or what he’s done any different. But human in the way that all genuinely dangerous people are human, capable of warmth, capable of something that looks remarkably like love, capable of sitting at a dinner table, laughing and touching a woman’s face with something that in another life on another man might have been tenderness.
And then he talks business.
That is what shocks me most.
In front of her, openly, with the complete lack of concern of a man who either doesn’t care or trusts absolutely, he talks aboutthe New York operation, the distribution gaps, what he needs from Marco Reyes, and when… names, numbers, routes. It’s the kind of operational detail that any competent agent would be cataloging as fast as it comes.
Which Riley is.
I see it beneath the ease, beneath Ava, beneath the hand in his, the smile at the right moments, and the glass raised at the right times. Riley working, filing it away. The quality of attention of someone absorbing everything while appearing to be absorbed in nothing.
She is remarkable at this.
She has always been remarkable at this.
And Clemente has no idea.
The trust in his face when he looks at her, the openness of a man who has let someone through every wall he’s ever built, tells me that whatever Riley has done to get here, whatever it has cost her, she has done it completely.
She hasn’t just gotten inside his operation.
She’s gotten inside him.
Keeping my face attentive, engaged, and neutral, I think about what that has required of her and feel something cold and complicated move through me that I don’t have a name for and am not going to examine at a dinner table in Clemente’s house.
“The El Pasos were useful,” Clemente says, refilling his glass with the ease of a man who drinks expensive wine the way other men drink water. “For a long time, they were very useful. But they became careless.” He sets the bottle down. “Careless men make mistakes. Mistakes create exposure. Exposure…” a pause, and he smiles. “Exposure ends things.”
“How did they go?” Keeping it casual. Curious without being invested.
Clemente’s expression shifts, something darker moving briefly across it. “The Blood Brothers,” he says. The name carriesa weight. “They have been a problem for some time. Tracker…” he stops. Something in his jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. “One of their men caused considerable disruption to my operation. He is dead now. But the club… they are angry. They took the El Pasos as revenge.”
I sit with that.
Tracker.My road name, spoken at this table by the man responsible for everything, said with the casual certainty of someone reporting a problem that has been handled.
I am the disruption.
I am the dead man.
Picking up my wine glass, I drink and keep every single thing I am feeling locked somewhere so deep that Marco Reyes couldn’t find it even if he’d been looking.
“The Blood Brothers are dangerous?”
“Every club is dangerous,” Clemente says. “But angry clubs are predictable. Predictable things can be managed.” He looks at me across the table. “You had no issues with them in New York?”
“Our paths didn’t cross directly. I know of them. I know their territory. We stayed out of each other’s way.”
Satisfied, Clemente nods.
And across the table, Riley lifts her wine glass to her lips and looks at me over the rim.
