His power wasn’t muscle. It was memory.

Sol leaned back in his chair, the springs groaning. He remembered the father instantly: a small-time importer named Dario Parra, who’d borrowed eighty thousand dollars to buy a container of Venezuelan rum that never arrived. That was twelve years ago. Dario had paid back thirty-two thousand in dribs and drabs—cash in envelopes, money orders from Western Union—before disappearing into the Florida panhandle.

Elena didn’t know any of this. She only knew that her father had lived in fear, and that fear had a name: Sol Mazotti. Not because Sol was dangerous, but because Sol was the one person who could prove what really happened. And proving it would destroy three living men—one of them now a judge, one a senator, one a priest.

“My father owed you,” she said. “He died last week. I’m here to pay.”