Where We Belong: Entangled in the Elite's Web

CHAPTER SIX Undertow

At nine that same Friday morning, three floors up in the Reyes Holdings tower, Ava sat at the head of a boardroom table watching a man named Desmond Alcaraz — no relation to the beach house's butler, a coincidence Ava found mildly irritating every time his name came up — push, for the third quarter running, for the company to divest from its remaining hospitality holdings in favor of "faster-moving assets."

"The board respects your instincts, Ava," Alcaraz said smoothly, "but sentiment isn't a line item."

"Neither is recklessness," Ava said, without raising her voice, and George, beside her, hid the beginning of a smile behind his coffee cup. Alcaraz backed down, as he always did, but not before his eyes flicked toward Ava with something colder than professional disagreement — something George noticed and filed away without comment, the way he'd been quietly filing away small, strange things about Alcaraz for the better part of a year.

Neither of them knew that forty minutes later, in a black Range Rover three blocks from the tower, Alcaraz would place a call to a woman in sunglasses and say only, "The Cruz girl is at the beach house this weekend. Alone, mostly, with the boyfriend and the ex-friend group. Perfect window if we're moving on the father's old case files."

"We're not ready," the woman said. "Not until we know exactly how much George already suspects."

"He suspects something," Alcaraz said. "I saw it in his face today."

"Then we accelerate the timeline," she said, and hung up first.

The morning had started, for the other three, with an hour of chicken fights in the pool — Estefe perched shrieking on Mason's shoulders, nearly toppling twice before finally sending Sara and a reluctant Nick crashing into the water in a tangle of limbs neither of them fully forgave the other for.

"You elbowed me on purpose," Nick accused, wiping water from his eyes.

"You weigh a ton and you still nearly drowned me," Sara shot back, and even Nick, dripping and irritated, had to fight down something suspiciously close to a laugh before he remembered he wasn't supposed to enjoy her company.

By late afternoon the beach house smelled like charcoal smoke and citrus, and Sara stood in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, thoroughly unable to reconcile the sight in front of her: Nick Beltrán, sleeves rolled to the elbow, flipping skewers over the grill with the unhurried competence of someone who'd done this a hundred times.

"You cook," she said, delighted despite herself.

"I do a lot of things you don't know about." He didn't look up, but there was the ghost of something almost like warmth around his mouth.

"Mr. I-Own-Three-Blazers-But-No-Personality can also grill a chicken skewer. Groundbreaking."

"Careful," Mason called from the other side of the grill, grinning. "Compliment him twice in one sentence and he might actually smile."

"I smile plenty," Nick said, deadpan, and did not smile, and Sara laughed before she could stop herself — a real laugh, unguarded, the kind that made Mason glance between the two of them with open, delighted curiosity.

Dinner was loud and easy — Mason doing impressions of Professor Fenwick, Estefe nearly crying laughing, Sara trading barbs with Nick that had, for the first time, almost no venom in them at all — until an hour later, over dishes, Sara made an offhand comment about Nick's driving that reignited the entire war from scratch.

"You almost got us killed on the way here."

"I was doing the speed limit."

"You were doing a number, and it wasn't the speed limit."

"I don't need commentary from someone who's never owned a car."

That landed exactly as cruelly as he meant it to, and Sara went quiet, jaw tight, and walked out to find Estefe on the porch.

"I don't understand how one person can be that awful," she said, dropping into the chair beside her.

"He's not awful," Estefe said carefully. "He's guarded. There's a difference, even if it doesn't feel like it when he's aiming it at you." She squeezed Sara's hand. "Give him time. I promise there's more underneath it."

Inside, Mason found Nick scrubbing a pan far harder than it required.

"You've got to ease up on her, man."

"She started it."

"You always say that." Mason leaned against the counter. "You like her. That's the whole problem, and you're too stubborn to admit it, so instead you're just going to keep being cruel to her until one of you actually gets hurt."

"I don't like her," Nick said flatly, and Mason only raised an eyebrow and said nothing at all, which was somehow worse.

Later, on the deck, Sara watched Mason pull Estefe in by the waist under the string lights, tipping her chin up, kissing her slow and unhurried while she laughed against his mouth between kisses. He murmured something against her temple that made her blush and swat his chest before pulling him back in for a second kiss, longer than the first, and Estefe's laughter afterward was the kind that came from somewhere real, somewhere Sara recognized because she'd once imagined, quietly and privately, exactly what it might feel like to be on the receiving end of it.

It was, Sara admitted to herself, exactly the kind of moment she used to picture herself in the center of, back before she'd known Mason's name belonged to someone else's girlfriend. She let the thought surface, acknowledged it honestly the way she'd learned to do with feelings she couldn't afford to keep, and let it pass. Estefe was her friend now — a real one, a good one, kinder to her than almost anyone in her entire life had ever bothered to be, someone who'd given her a necklace and a pair of shoes and an introduction to a family Sara still hadn't fully recovered from meeting. Whatever small ember of that old crush still existed somewhere in Sara's chest, she had made her peace with banking it permanently months ago, and she meant to keep that promise to herself no matter how warm the porch lights made everything look tonight.

Nick, a few feet away, watched the same kiss with an expression far harder to disguise.

Truth or dare started an hour later, tequila already half gone. Mason drew a dare and ended up doing a fully clothed cannonball that soaked half the deck. When it came to Sara, she chose truth and was asked, mercifully, only to name her most embarrassing childhood memory — a question about a middle school talent show gone wrong that had everyone in tears laughing, nothing deeper required.

When Nick's turn came, Mason asked if he'd ever really loved anyone. Nick considered the bottle in his hand a long moment. "Once," he said, calm, almost amused, giving nothing else away. "Smartest thing I ever did was not make it everyone's business." He raised the bottle slightly, like a toast to himself, and moved the game along before anyone could push further — cool, unreadable, exactly the kind of answer that made three different people at that table wonder, for entirely different reasons, exactly who he meant.

By midnight, Mason and Estefe were both asleep on the deck furniture, and Nick, several drinks past his usual limit, wandered down to the water. Sara followed, mostly out of habit, and found him sitting in the sand.

"I was going to tell her once," he said, before she'd even sat down, voice low and unguarded in a way sobriety never allowed. "Estefe. Years ago. I had the whole thing planned out." He laughed, hollow. "Then Mason happened, and now I just have to sit there and watch, and smile, and be the best friend, because if I say anything I lose both of them at once."

"You don't have to carry that alone," Sara said quietly, sitting beside him.

"I really wasn't going to say any of this to you." He looked over, something raw and unguarded in his face she'd never seen before. "You're the last person I—"

He didn't finish. His head dropped, heavy, onto her shoulder, and Sara, without entirely deciding to, wrapped an arm around him and held on while he went still against her, the tide sliding closer with every wave.

She didn't see the figure in the tree line lowering a long lens, capturing every second of it — or hear, from a phone pressed to an ear thirty feet further back, a woman's voice saying quietly, "Send that one to Alcaraz. Tell him the timeline just moved up by a week."

Up at the house, the porch lights clicked off one by one on a timer, and the beach house went dark and quiet around three sleeping figures and one wide-awake girl who couldn't, for the life of her, understand why her chest still ached long after Nick's breathing had gone slow and even against her shoulder.