Page 29 of South of Justice

TWENTY

Lucía sat stifflyin the wooden chair, painfully aware that her gun was now in Ryan Inglis’s possession. He held it calmly at his side, not pointed at her, but its absence from her own lap left her feeling exposed in a way that had nothing to do with weapons.

Across from her, he leaned forward, forearms braced on his knees. Still as stone. Watching her like a man waiting for a verdict. The burner phone sat between them, screen black now, as if the message had never existed.

Clock’s ticking. Find Lucía Duarte or the boy dies.

She ran the words again in her head. They hadn’t said it to her. They’d said it about her. To him.

“Start from the beginning,” she said.

Ryan nodded once. Then he started to talk.

He told her about the first video. The surveillance footage. The boy playing soccer in a Tennessee yard. The woman—his ex-wife’s mother—in the background.

Lucía didn’t interrupt. But she watched him closely. The tight line of his jaw. The way he said the nameNoahlike it hurt.

“He’s your son?” she asked quietly.

Ryan shook his head. “Not mine. I barely know him. Kylie and I, we had a complicated relationship. We were kids when we got married. Things went sideways fast. After she died… I thought he was safe. With her mother.”

“And now he’s not.”

He exhaled through his nose. “No.”

Lucía leaned back. The chair creaked beneath her. “So they want me. And they’re using the boy as leverage.”

“Looks that way.”

“Why not just come for me directly?”

He shrugged. “Maybe they couldn’t find you. Maybe they want something from you and they don’t want to risk killing you by accident.”

She stared at him. “They want the ledger.”

“What ledger?”

She hesitated. Then shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Point is, they want it. And they think I still have it.”

“Do you?”

She looked away. “I had pieces. The last of them was uploaded yesterday. There’s nothing left.” The lie rolled off her tongue with surprising ease.

He leaned back now too, letting the silence stretch. “They think you’re still valuable. That makes you bait.”

She nodded slowly. “And you’re the hook.”

“More like the line,” he said dryly. “I don’t think they care what happens to me once I’ve done my job.”

Lucía laced her fingers together and rested her hands on the table. For a long moment, she didn’t speak. But her mind raced. He was waiting for instructions from kidnappers, men she could only assume were cartel. And she was the package to be delivered. The leverage was obvious: if he turned her over, he might get the boy back.

So she had to make herself more useful than the ransom.

“You said they’ll contact you again,” she said, voice careful. “But you don’t know what they’ll say. What if they want proof? What if they want you to bring me in?”

He didn’t flinch. But his silence told her enough.

“I might be able to find the boy,” she added quickly. “Faster than they can.”