Page 20 of You Can Run

He nodded, because there was no version of this where he didn't own at least a part of it. “I know.”

Silence stretched between them. He started the engine again, the decision already made whether she liked it or not. “We're going to Santiago's,” he said.

Her head turned sharply toward him. “No.”

“Yes.”

“It's not safe.”

She was right. Bringing this to Santiago's door went against every instinct he had, every line he'd drawn about keeping his brother out of the messes he'd made of his own life. But everywhere else was worse. At least at Santiago's, they'd see trouble coming. At least there, Dante could stand his ground.

“No, it's not,” he said, glancing at her. “But it buys us time. Right now, that's all I need.”

“He hates me.”

“He doesn't hate you,” Dante said, though even to his own ears it sounded like he was negotiating with something he didn't fully believe. After a beat, he added, “He just doesn't forgive you.”

“That's the same thing. Actually, it's worse.”

“Call it whatever you want,” Dante replied, pulling back onto the road. “He's my brother, and right now he's the only person I trust to keep you alive.”

She looked at him then, really looked, like she was trying to decide whether that was true.

He didn't look back.

TEN

The motel roomseemed to shrink the longer Ferrera stayed inside it, the walls pressing in by degrees. He moved from the bathroom door to the window and back again, barefoot on the thin, worn carpet, unable to settle.

He hated waiting. It scraped at him, left him with too much space to think, and thinking was what got men like him killed.

He stopped at the window and peeled the curtain back just enough to see out. A few pickup trucks sat baking in the early light, a soda machine humming beside the ice dispenser. A maid's cart parked two doors down, towels stacked on top like it was any other morning.

Behind him, the television murmured in low, repetitive loops—the same footage cycling every few minutes. The van. The bodies. The long stretch of desert road. And then his own face, caught in the blur of a still frame.

The phone vibrated on the nightstand.

He picked it up without speaking. The voice on the other end filled the space, quick and deferential, just a shade too eager—the way men sounded when they already knew the news was bad and were trying to outrun the blame. Ferrera listened, hispacing slowing, then stopping altogether as the details settled into place.

When the call ended, he didn't move right away. The phone hung loosely from his fingers.

“They got away,” he said at last.

Across the room, the Sicaria sat at the small table near the door, a strip of motel towel in one hand as she drew it slowly along the flat of a knife, wiping the blade with the kind of attention most people reserved for things they loved. She didn't look up.

Ferrera watched her for a moment, waiting for a reaction that didn't come, and the absence of it irritated him more than any response would have.

“You hear me?” he said.

“I heard you.”

His energy snapped back into motion. He resumed pacing, faster now, his hand dragging through his hair. For a moment he let himself imagine it—the door giving way under his weight, the gun already in his hand, the old instinct returning. No middlemen. No delays. No reliance on idiots who didn't understand what they were doing.

“Local idiots,” he muttered, more to the room than to her. “I gave them one thing to do. One. And they let a woman with no training put a bullet in one of them and walk out the front door.”

He stopped, bracing both hands on the dresser, his reflection staring back at him from the dark television screen between loops. He looked tired. He looked like his father, which was worse.

“I should have gone myself.”