Page 53 of Enzo

“You got pulled in?” Rio asked. He wasn’t judging—I didn’t know his backstory in full, but he knew what the streets were like.

I sighed. “I had no choice.”

“And?”

“It was run by Sonny Delgado, all swagger and chaos. He’s dead, two years back, so we’ll be talking to his son Mateo.”

“And what do you know about Mateo?”

How much did I tell Rio? He was driving into this with me, but none of us ex-cons at Redcars sat around talking about our histories. We’d all done time, knew what we’d been into, but we’d forged a new family of friends who didn’t dig into this shit. But Rio should know what he was walking into.

“He was my best friend before we killed a man.”

“‘We’?”

“I had the knife—Mateo held him still. He was threatening Mateo, I snapped. Mateo had his hand on the knife. He ran when I told him, and I ended up locked away. I had a deal with his dad. I did time for murder, and kept my mouth shut about his son being anywhere near what went down, and he agreed to release me and leave me, and then Redcars when I got here, alone.”

“You think the deal is over now Sonny’s dead? That maybe Mateo’s the one pulling strings with Vinnie?”

“Fuck knows.”

“We’llend it,” Rio said evenly.

But I didn’t look at him in a moment of buddy solidarity, instead, I focused on cutting across a cracked parking lot, steering toward the far corner. The bar up front used to be a dive with loud music that made your teeth hum, but now it was shuttered. The neon sign that had once screamedOPEN 24/7hung crooked, and the windows were boarded up. I killed the engine and sat there for a second, the silence thick in the car. What if they’d moved on from here? Fuck. If I had to start on the streets asking questions…

“You should stay in the car,” I said, eyes still fixed on the shell of the bar.

Rio snorted, reaching into the glove compartment and pulling out a set of brass knuckles he’d never admit to owning. “Fuck that,” he said. “If you’re walking into this, I’m not letting you do it alone. You don’t get to play the lone-wolf act today, my friend.”

His voice didn’t waver. That was how I knew he was serious.

“They’ll be armed,” I murmured, watching the entrance as if it might sprout teeth.

“I assumed,” Rio said, voice clipped, his fingers brushing the inside of his jacket where he’d put his knife. No gun, but he didn’t need one. Rio was the kind of guy who turned a wrench into a weapon at half a second’s notice.

I side-eyed him. He was ready, jaw tight, eyes sharp. He’d seen what I’d seen. Maybe more.

“Last chance to back out,” I said, keeping my voice low.

He didn’t flinch. Just opened his door, climbed out, and met me in front of the car. Unzipped his jacket with one quick jerk, hooked his thumbs in his belt like he was showing he had nothing to hide. Like that made him less dangerous.

The one thing we’d all sworn to Tudor when we got out was no more heat, no more cops, no more crawling back into the shadows we’d clawed our way free from. Stay clean. Stay smart. But look at Tudor now, tellingusto stop the shadows creeping closer? Trouble had found us anyway and standing still wasn’t peace—it was surrender. We weren’t chasing trouble, but we needed to draw a line in the sand. We weren’t the threat. We were the stop sign.

I walked with purpose, cutting between shadows and old dumpsters, bypassing the front door and heading around back. The place was cleaner than I remembered—no smoke in the air, no trash in the alley and no one was standing guard, which hit me as being all kinds of wrong.

It was too clean. As if someone had scrubbed the history out of it.

The side door opened with a creak. The hallway inside was more like an office building now than a gang HQ. Painted walls, flickering fluorescent lights, cameras tucked into the corners. Legit. On paper, maybe. Not in reality. Rio nodded once at the nearest camera, and we kept walking. Past the empty rooms. Past the silence. Past the ghost of who my brother had once been.

We stopped at a steel door at the end of the hall. I stared at the camera above it and waited.

The lock clicked, and I pushed the door open.

The room beyond was quiet. A long table sat at the center, surrounded by chairs.

“Lor.”

The voice dragged me out of my thoughts. Mateo stood from the table with a grin that hadn’t changed in ten years. He was tall and wiry, with dark hair buzzed close to his scalp and pale silver eyes that missed nothing. Dressed down in jeans and a faded black T-shirt that readLos Angelesin bold block letters, he didn’t look like someone who ran most of the west side with a grip of steel. But then there wasn’t much left of my childhood friend ether. A mix of Italian and Puerto Rican blood, with a healthy overdose of swagger, Mateo was dangerous in any language.

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