Page 44 of South of Justice

Are you coming in today? —J

The letters blurred as her vision swam. Javier. He wasn’t really asking her to come in. He was giving her a destination—one he controlled, one she wouldn’t walk out of.

She stared at the body one last time. The weight of guilt and grief pressed against her ribs, but survival screamed louder. She backed out of the apartment, slowly, silently. Yanked the door closed behind her.

In the hallway, she didn’t breathe until she’d made it to the stairwell. She pressed her hand to her chest. Counted to ten. Then again.

She could fall apart later. Right now, she had to disappear.

The bus terminal was loud with engines and shouting. A baby screamed somewhere near the long-distance kiosk. A man smoked beside the restroom sign, his eyes half-shut in the fluorescent light.

Lucía stood at the automated ticket machine, entering a fake name she’d memorized. She paid in cash. The bills were damp with her palm sweat.

Her stomach ached with hunger. She ignored it.

Javier’s USB was zipped into the lining of her coat. She hadn’t let it out of her sight since she left the apartment. Somehow, it still felt heavier than it should. Like it carried Mateo’s body inside it.

The screen blinked. Her ticket printed.

Puebla. Then south. Then gone.

She took the slip and moved like a sleepwalker into the crowd. No calls. No luggage except for her backpack. No goodbyes.

She’d destroyed her old phone in the sink of a public restroom, then flushed the SIM card. Her email was wiped. Her financial trail stopped cold the moment she withdrew the last of her pesos and converted it to anonymous cryptocurrency at a bitcoin ATM.

At the bottom of her pack, wrapped in an old dish towel, was her grandfather’s Colt 1911. It hadn’t been fired in decades, but it was clean, oiled, and loaded, her father had made sure of that. She hadn’t planned on taking it. But when she’d seen it in the drawer while she was hastily packing a few clothes into her backpack, she’d known she’d feel safer with it.

By the time they found Mateo’s body, if they even bothered reporting it, she would be a phantom.

But the hardest part wasn’t vanishing. It was staying vanished.

Over the next month, she moved like smoke. Veracruz. Tabasco. Campeche. Each place left behind as quickly as she arrived. She cut her hair. Learned to walk differently. She didn’t keep receipts. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t look anyone in the eye longer than two seconds.

She used burner laptops for everything. Air-gapped, always wiped. She never stayed anywhere more than five nights. Never visited the same café twice. Never let herself be photographed. She’d learned from the best. Javier had trained her to be precise and fastidious, in his way.

And now she was using every ounce of that education to disappear from him.

In one of her first safehouses, she stood before a cracked mirror, inspecting the lines around her eyes. The dark circles beneath them.

Her old self had died with Mateo. The woman staring back was someone else entirely.

Not Lucía Duarte. Not anyone. Just a shadow wearing human skin.

She lifted the drive to eye level. It was no longer a key, it was a curse. Proof. Power. And vengeance waiting to be unlocked.

One day, she would finish what Mateo had wanted to start. But not yet. Not until she was safe, and ready. Not until she could strike in a way that Javier would feel in the marrow of his bones. She slipped the drive back over her neck. Pulled the curtain closed.

And vanished.

TWENTY-NINE

Ryan clockedthe shadow within a few minutes of leaving the café. A man. Muscular build. Sunglasses, scruffy mustache, short sleeves. Walking slow. He didn’t look local: too pale and too polished. And he wasn’t sipping coffee or checking his phone. He was watching them.

Ryan adjusted his pace, letting Lucía move a step ahead. She hadn’t noticed; she was distracted, muttering something about offshore routing patterns.

They turned down a narrow side street lined with faded signs. The heat had pooled there, thick and slow. Laundry flapped from upper balconies.

The man turned too.