Three days after the restaurant meeting, Tomas Reyes sat in his car outside a pharmacy in the city's east district and made the second call of his life that he would spend the rest of it regretting.
Aria did not know any of this as it happened. She learned the shape of it only afterward, in fragments, from a Marco who delivered the information with the flat, controlled grief of a man describing a wound he had not yet finished bleeding from. But she would think about it often in the years that followed, the way a single desperate choice, made by a man who loved his sister more than he feared consequence, had nearly unmade everything.
Tomas had been let go from the Rossi organization with severance, with his sister's treatment still quietly funded through an intermediary Damien had arrange
