Where We Belong: Entangled in the Elite's Web

CHAPTER SEVEN. What the Morning Takes Back

Nick woke to a headache like a fist behind his eyes and, in pieces, over the course of a very long, very quiet drive back to Coral Bay, the entire memory of the night before — the sand, the tide, Sara's arm around him, his own voice saying things out loud he'd sworn to himself he'd carry silently to his grave. He replayed it twice, hoping the second pass might reveal it had been a dream, some tequila-soaked hallucination his brain had manufactured out of guilt and moonlight. It hadn't been. He remembered the exact weight of his own head on her shoulder, remembered saying Estefe's name out loud like it cost him something, remembered, worst of all, how much lighter he'd felt afterward — a lightness that frightened him more than the confession itself had.

He said nothing about it the entire ride. By the time he dropped Sara at her building, his jaw was set in a line so hard it looked carved, and when she said, carefully, "Hey — are you okay, about last night—" he cut her off before she could finish.

"I don't know what you're talking about." His voice was flat, final, colder than she'd ever heard it. "Whatever you think happened on that beach, forget it."

"Nick—"

"I mean it, Sara." He wouldn't look at her. "Nothing happened."

He was gone before she could argue, and over the following week he was, if anything, worse to her than before — sharper, more dismissive, finding new and creative ways to make it clear she barely registered as a person worth his patience. Sara told herself she didn't care. She told herself a lot of things that week.

"It's for the Fenwick project," Estefe said, breezing past the objection before Sara could fully voice it. "We're partners, we need six hours minimum, and I refuse to work at your place because your Wi-Fi is a war crime. Pack a bag. You're staying over."

The Reyes estate, in person, made every photo Sara had ever scrolled past look like a modest understatement. She stood in the marble foyer, bag clutched to her chest, and simply stared.

"You're doing the thing," Estefe said, delighted.

"What thing?"

"The wide-eyes thing. Everyone does it the first time." She looped an arm through Sara's and pulled her up the staircase. "Wait till you see my room."

Estefe's bedroom was, in fact, larger than the entire apartment Sara had grown up sharing with three other girls in the foster system, and the walk-in closet attached to it — an entire second room, racks upon racks, shoes arranged like museum pieces — made Sara actually laugh out loud, half in delight and half in disbelief.

"Estefe. You live like a princess."

"I mean." Estefe grinned, entirely unbothered by the accusation. "Kind of, yeah."

Dinner was a quieter affair. George arrived home first, loosening his tie, and lit up at the sight of Sara the way he always did — pulling out her chair himself, asking about her classes with a genuine, unhurried interest that made something in Sara's chest ache in a way she didn't have a name for.

"Tell me honestly," George said, passing her the bread basket before she'd even reached for it, "is Salgado still assigning that impossible reading load, or has he mellowed since my day?"

"You went to Bellamar?"

"Barely survived it. Whitfield taught me too, if you can believe it — different Whitfield, his father." George laughed, easy and warm. "Ava met me in that very building, actually. Business Law, second year. She corrected my citation format in front of the whole lecture hall and I decided on the spot I was going to marry her."

"That is not what happened," Ava said dryly, though something almost fond flickered at the corner of her mouth.

"It's exactly what happened." George winked at Sara, delighted with himself, and she found herself, halfway through the meal, watching him laugh at one of Estefe's stories and thinking, with a sudden, private intensity that embarrassed her the moment she noticed it: I wish you were mine.

Ava was different. She was unfailingly polite — asked Sara about her scholarship, her major, nodded at the right intervals — but there was a coolness underneath it Sara couldn't quite place, a watchfulness that made her sit up straighter, choose her words more carefully, laugh a half-second later than she meant to. Sara admired her enormously — the sharp intelligence in every answer, the effortless authority in her voice — and could not, for the life of her, figure out why Ava so plainly did not like her back.

She got her answer, unintentionally, later that night, catching a glimpse through Estefe's open door of Ava sitting on the edge of her daughter's bed, smoothing her hair back exactly the way a mother does when she thinks no one else is watching, murmuring something too quiet to hear that made Estefe laugh softly and lean into her shoulder. George appeared a moment later with two mugs of tea, kissed the top of Estefe's head, and said something that made both women laugh again.

Sara stood in the hallway a moment too long, watching a kind of love she'd spent her entire life only imagining from the outside, and felt something small and shameful twist in her chest — not resentment, exactly, but something close enough to it that she hated herself a little for feeling it at all.

Mason had, by then, been a fixture at both the Reyes and Beltrán dinner tables for weeks — George liked him enormously, Ava found him charming if a little too smooth, and Camila had told Nick more than once that Estefe's boyfriend had lovely manners for a boy his age. They all knew his mother's name, Renata Duarte, mentioned occasionally and pleasantly as a woman Mason described as "hardworking, keeps to herself." None of them — not George, not Ava, not Camila — had any reason to connect that name to the man convicted eighteen years earlier of corporate fraud against Reyes Holdings, the man Mason had spent his entire childhood visiting through prison glass until the state took even that away from him.

It was two nights after the Reyes family dinner that Mason found himself in a parking garage downtown, across from a man he'd spent three weeks quietly researching.

"Mr. Alcaraz." Mason slid into the passenger seat of the black Range Rover without being invited.

Alcaraz didn't look surprised. "Mr. Duarte. Or should I say — Salazar."

Mason's jaw tightened at his father's real name, spoken aloud for the first time in years by someone who wasn't his mother. "You've done your homework."

"So have you, clearly, or you wouldn't be here." Alcaraz studied him with something between amusement and respect. "Three weeks of quiet digging, a shell account tracing my consulting fees back further than they should go, and a very careful conversation with a retired paralegal who used to work Ava's outside counsel. You're patient. I like that in a young man with a grudge."

"I want the Reyes family to burn," Mason said, low and even. "Company, marriage, family — all of it, the way she took my father from me. I don't care what happens to the company afterward."

"And I care very much what happens to the company afterward," Alcaraz said. "I want the board seat Ava's been blocking me from for three years — the seat, and everything that comes with controlling a piece of Reyes Holdings from the inside once she's no longer fit to run it. It seems we have overlapping interests, even if our finish lines look nothing alike. You destabilize the family. I destabilize the boardroom. Neither of us needs to know more than that about the other's endgame."

Mason held out his hand. Alcaraz shook it once, firm and cold, his grip lingering a moment longer than a handshake required, like a man closing a deal he already suspected he'd win more of than his new partner realized.

"One condition," Mason said. "Sara Cruz doesn't get hurt in this. Whatever else happens."

Something flickered across Alcaraz's face — amusement, or perhaps pity. "That," he said, starting the engine, "may not be entirely up to either of us."

The Range Rover pulled out of the garage into the dark, and neither man saw the other's face clearly enough to notice that both of them were lying, in some fashion, about exactly how far they were willing to go.