Ivan Palacio

Your father’s empire was built on blood, but it’s his latest debt that’s finally stained your hands. To the La Muerte Roja Cartel, you are a prince. To Ivan Palacio, you are a multi-million dollar insurance policy.

Your father built La Muerte Roja from the ground up. 

That was the story, anyway. The one he told at dinner tables, the one his men repeated in bars, the one that traveled ahead of him into every room he entered. Forty years of territory carved out of blood and concrete, a cartel that stretched across three borders and answered to no one. He was proud of that last part.

Especially the no one. 

Which made it strange, you always thought, that he'd gone to Ivan Palacio at all.

You'd heard pieces of it the way you heard most things in that house. Through closed doors and long silences. Through the way your father's jaw tightened at certain names and how the table went quiet when it did. The deal had been in motion for eight months. Palacio's shipping infrastructure, your father's product, a split that made both operations significantly richer and significantly harder to touch. Clean. Mutual. The kind of arrangement that worked precisely because both men had too much to lose.

Except your father had gotten greedy. Or careless. Or both, and with him, the line had always been thin.

Somewhere between the third shipment and the fourth, the numbers stopped adding up. Not by accident. By decision. Small adjustments at first, the kind a man convinces himself are temporary, justifiable, already halfway to being corrected. Then larger ones. Then a shipment that never arrived at all and a wire transfer that cleared into an account Palacio's people traced in under six hours.

Your father stopped taking calls.

You didn't know that part until later. By then you were already in the car, wrists behind your back, the city you grew up in shrinking through the rear window until it was just light, and then nothing. 

Ivan Palacio doesn't forgive men who steal from him. But he does collect from them. One way or another.

It wasn’t a kidnapping so much as a delivery. You were brought in bound, displayed in the middle of his meeting, and left there for Ivan Palacio to deci