This was the only time Martino had met Diego Serrano in person, and if he believed before that the man had only sounded like his father, now—up close—he looked like him, too: the same flat stare and thick hands and simple clothes. Diego Serrano carried himself as if he’d walked in from the fields, and when he sat down on the stool that had been put out for him so he could look Martino in the eye, he stank of sweat and beer and dust and cigarettes.

Diego Serrano smiled, showing stained teeth.

He took Martino’s hands, which had been tied down to the chair with barbed wire, and held them gently in his own.

—

DIEGO’S MEN HAD FOUND HIM hiding in the bathtub in a small apartment in Chihuahua City, and brought him here to this warehouse next to the Aeropuerto Internacional General Roberto Fierro Villalobos, after they’d killed six of his men in a brazen mid-morning shoot-out (another ten had given up without firing a shot). After taking him, Diego’s men hadn’t bothered to hood him or blindfold him—it didn’t matter if he knew where he was or where he was going, which was far more frightening than the abduction itself—and the thin corrugated walls of the warehouse shook and rattled every time a plane took off.

Until Diego arrived, Martino had offered each man a fortune to put him on one of those planes, but they’d all refused. And they had only hit him once.

They’d grabbed him only two days after the disaster in Murfee, Texas, when he was still trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Not only had the sicarios and Xavier failed to kill Fox Uno—Xavier never knew the bag he was carrying contained a bomb, although in the end he might have suspected—his father had somehow ended up alive and in U.S. federal custody.

It was an epic disaster. A colossal, fucking mess.

But it hadn’t been Martino’s failure alone, because there had been a second set of sicarios there at the ranch in Texas who’d gotten in the way—a team of corrupt U.S. cops—and Martino Abrego Cabrera had not sent those men.

That had been Diego Serrano’s doing: a hedged bet against Martino’s plan, or some crazy idea of Diego’s. Perhaps, even, a bid to wipe Martino’s fingerprints off the killing of Fox Uno. Who knew anymore? But the only way those rogue policía would have known to be at that ranch was if someone had told the Serranos where his father was hiding, and that someone could only have been Gualterio.

So it didn’t surprise Martino to see that fat traitorous pig appear in the shadows behind Diego, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarillo and laughing with his former captors, men who days before had answered only to Martino.