Martino had brokered a deal with the Serrano Brothers and those powerful men in Mexico City to destroy the very thing his father had built. He’d successfully staged the bus attack, an admittedly clumsy and hastily put-together affair that had not come without costs. In fact, he’d been scrambling ever since, the wheels now in motion turning faster than he’d anticipated or planned. But he always knew he had to first undermine Fox Uno’s support network—put a target on the man’s back before cutting off his head—and the opportunity in Ojinaga had been too good to let pass, despite the chaos afterward. Only his father, a former normalista himself, would ever appreciate and understand the attack’s true significance.

It had been an unfortunately emotional decision, though, and Martino didn’t have the luxury of such decisions anymore. Before the bus attack, he’d already begun the slow and systematic removal of many of those men most loyal to his father, those who could not be bought. He’d also made numerous changes to Nemesio’s operations and finances, some his father knew about, most he never would learn of, all in preparation for the right moment; all designed to demonstrate to the men in Mexico City his competency and usefulness. But the moment came too soon, before he was fully prepared, and the single most valuable thing he’d planned to offer to guarantee his own safety, his ascendancy in whatever came after, had been his father’s head.

The one thing he figuratively, and literally, did not have.

And the head of the man in the video, Abrahán Sierra, would not be enough.

If that butcher Diego Serrano had said it once, he’d said it a thousand times: Martino should have been at Manuel Benavides. Should have handled it personally. It all sounded so much like his father, yet it went against every instinct Martino had tried to cultivate. He’d wanted to avoid unnecessary exposure, the unexamined risk.

The emotion.

He believed then, and now, he could still get it done his way.

He wanted to start his leadership of the Nueva Generación—the name he’d chosen for the entity set to rise in Nemesio’s place—as a businessman. Professional, not personal. He planned to run it as the twenty-first-century multinational corporation it truly was, or could be, and not as a thuggish cartel mired in the history of the brutal men who’d made their fortunes as ignorant border smugglers.