Page 59 of Hard Bargain

“Depends on the load,” Mendez said. “But Dominic doesn’t deal. By the time it hits the street, it’s at least three hands removed from him.”

Knox was quiet for a moment. The freight truck pulled away with the container, already just another truck on its way somewhere.

“This is bigger than I thought,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Dominic hadn’t brought him here to impress him. Knox understood that now. There was nothing showy about any of this—no theatrics, no demonstrations of force. He’d brought him here to see if Knox understood what it meant to operate on this level.

This wasn’t chaos; it was architecture.

He was a man who’d built himself into something so large that gates lifted, uniforms nodded, and millions passed through open hands as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

* * *

He knew something was wrong the second he opened the apartment door. The television was blaring, some commercial bouncing off the walls. Underneath, there was a sound he recognized instantly—his mother crying frantically.

The apartment felt overheated. Suffocating.

She stood in the middle of the living room, hair half out of its clip, eyes wild in a way that made his stomach drop every time he saw it.

“You were supposed to be here,” she said before he could speak.

“I was at work,” he answered automatically, closing the door behind him. His voice sounded distant to his own ears.

“No,” she snapped, her voice climbing. “No, you weren’t. Don’t lie to me. I know when you’re lying.”

The TV screamed behind her, speakers distorting from the volume.

“Mom,” he said carefully, setting his keys down with deliberate precision. “What happened?”

“They were here,” she said. “You think I don’t know what’s going on?”

His chest tightened. “No one was here, Mom.”

“You think I’m stupid?” She moved toward him too fast. The slap cracked across his face before he could process the shift. A flash burst across his vision as his head snapped sideways, heat exploding across his cheekbone.

His jaw locked, hands flexing at his sides. For the briefest moment, he wanted to hit her back. The thought died just as fast. He would never raise a hand to his mother. She wouldn’t be doing this if she were well. That truth cooled him faster than anything else could. It had been months since she’d spiraled like this. The last time had been right after his father died.

“You don’t get to lie to me,” she hissed.

He looked at her. Really looked—at the trembling hands, the unhinged shine in her eyes, the way fear had twisted her features. She was drowning. She was always drowning, and he was so tired of being the thing she grabbed for when the water rose.

Hours ago, he’d been standing in a port yard calculating millions of pills. And now here he was, getting slapped in a two-bedroom apartment that smelled like burned toast and panic.

Something inside him went very still. “I’m not lying,” he said.

She shoved him this time, fingers bunching in his shirt. “You’re disappearing,” she cried. “You think I don’t know when someone is taking my son away from me?”

His mind flashed to Dominic without permission.

He pried her hands off gently at first, more firmly when she started clawing.

“You’re scaring me,” she said, tears streaking down her face. The hysteria broke into something almost childlike. “Don’t leave me.”

He stepped back.

He didn’t know how to be two versions of himself. The one who stood in Dominic’s world—feeling more awake than he had in years. And this one. The exhausted son holding something together that kept breaking anyway.