Page 31 of South of Justice

Something else.

He said, “They’re holding a kid. They need somewhere secure. Low visibility, but accessible. Somewhere they already control.”

She nodded. “If that upload rattled the right cages, I might be able to see who’s moving money or scrambling to cover their tracks. That might give us a location, or at least a chain of names.” She got to her feet. “If I can get us to a connection point, somewhere quiet, I can try to trace who moved after the upload.”

He stood up too. “Then let’s move before they beat us to it.”

The air was heavy with adrenaline. He could feel her heat as she brushed past him, walking toward the bed where her pack was laying.

They didn’t have a plan yet. Not really.

But they had a pact. And sometimes, that was enough to start a war.

TWENTY-ONE

NINE YEARS AGO

“Tellme that line doesn’t look off,” Mateo muttered, pointing at the screen. “Right there. That transfer loop.”

Lucía leaned closer, squinting. “It’s a recursive shell.”

He nodded. “Exactly.”

“It’s not an error. It’s a masking sequence.”

“Yeah. But why would a customs brokerage in Veracruz need that much masking?”

Lucía didn’t answer. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, then withdrew.

Mateo sat back and folded his arms. “I don’t like it.”

“Then don’t poke at it.”

“Seriously?”

Lucía finally met his eyes. “You want to stay employed?”

“I want to know what the hell we’re actually working on.”

“This isn’t new, Mateo. Every intern here knows the game. We tidy the fronts. We make things pretty on paper.”

“Pretty’s not the word I’d use for this.”

Lucía looked away.

He softened his tone. “I know you see it, too.”

“It’s none of our business,” she said quietly. “We have contracts.”

Mateo leaned in. “You think contracts matter to people like Esquivel?”

That caught her attention.

He tilted his head. “You really think he doesn’t know what we’ve seen in those logs? The redundancies? The offshore payouts? Come on. It’s a washing machine. Just a fancy one.”

Lucía’s silence said enough.

Mateo reached out and gently closed the laptop. “You’re scared.”