CHAPTER 4 Protecting Reyna
1398 Words
Luca.
I don't make mistakes.
That's not arrogance, it's discipline. I built Harrington Capital's private investment division from a side operation into a two-billion-dollar portfolio by being the person in every room who had already accounted for every way things could go wrong. My father called it paranoia. My results called it a strategy.
Which is why sitting across from Gerald Harrington at seven in the morning, listening to him tell me he'd known about Vincent Reyes for three months and said nothing, felt like the floor dropping out from under me.
"You knew," I said.
My father had the decency to look uncomfortable. He was seventy-one, broad-shouldered, still sharp in the way old lions are sharp — not fast anymore, but accurate. He sat behind his desk in the Harrington Group's Austin headquarters and turned a pen over in his fingers the way he did when he was choosing words carefully.
"I suspected," he said. "There's a difference."
"There isn't. Not legally."
"Luca—"
"Three months." I stood. I couldn't sit still for this. "Vincent Reyes has been running a shadow structure through our partnership for fourteen months. I've spent four of those months tracing it. And you've known for three and didn't tell me."
"I was handling it."
"How? By doing nothing?"
His jaw tightened. "By making sure we weren't exposed before I understood the full picture."
"And now we're weeks away from a federal audit and you still don't have the full picture." I stopped at the window. Austin spread out below us, clean and indifferent. "Who approached you? When Dave Reyes first came to the table, who made the introduction?"
Silence.
I turned. "Dad."
"Walter Gaines," he said finally.
I knew that name. Everyone in Texas private equity knew that name. Walter Gaines had been a mid-level portfolio manager in Edmund Castillo's firm for fifteen years. Respectable and quiet. The kind of man you forgot was in the room.
"Gaines introduced Dave Reyes to you as a legitimate partner," I said slowly. "Which means Gaines is the leak inside Castillo's organization."
"That's a serious accusation."
"It's a serious situation." I came back to the desk. "Dad. I need you to understand what's about to happen. When this unravels and it will, the question isn't whether Harrington Group gets touched. It's whether we're standing on the right side when it does." I held his gaze. "I need everything. Every communication with Gaines, every document Dave's firm submitted, every transfer authorization you signed. Today."
My father looked at me for a long moment. Something moved across his face, not quite shame, but adjacent to it.
"You already have most of it," he said quietly.
"I need the rest."
He opened his desk drawer and slid a folder across to me. Thicker than I expected. I picked it up and didn't open it yet.
"The Castillo girl," he said. "You've been to see her."
"Her name is Reyna."
"Does she know what her father is planning?"
I stopped. "What do you mean, what her father is planning?"
Gerald leaned back. "Edmund called me this morning. He knows about Vincent Reyes. He's known longer than I have." A pause. "He's not going to the authorities, Luca. Edmund Castillo handles things privately. Always has."
"Define privately."
"He's coming to Austin."
The room was very quiet.
Edmund Castillo, who hadn't been seen publicly in eighteen months. Whose firm operated so far below the radar that most people in finance knew his name but had never seen his face. Coming to Austin.
Because someone had used his daughter.
"When?" I asked.
"Tomorrow."
I should have gone back to the office. I had the folder, I had calls to make, and I had a legal team to brief. Instead, I found myself driving to a street I had no professional reason to be on, parking outside a restaurant that was closed on Mondays, and sitting in my car for ten minutes trying to decide what I was doing.
I told myself it was a strategy. That Reyna needed the information about Walter Gaines before her father arrived so she wasn't walking into that conversation blind.
That was partially true.
The rest of it I wasn't ready to examine.
I had first seen Reyna Castillo fourteen months ago. Not at the hotel, not at Simone's office, before any of that. I'd been at a fundraiser dinner, the kind my father made obligatory, half-listening to a conversation about commercial real estate when a woman across the room said something that made the man beside her laugh so hard he spilled his drink. She didn't laugh with him. She just looked quietly pleased, like she'd known exactly what she was doing.
I asked someone who she was. They said, “That's Dave Reyes's wife, she owns that restaurant on Fifth.”
I didn't speak to her that night. She left before I could construct a reason to cross the room that wasn't entirely transparent.
After that, I noticed her the way you notice something you're trying not to. A mention in a food review. A glimpse at another event where she stood slightly apart from Dave's circle, watchful and self-contained. She moved like someone who had learned to take up exactly the right amount of space, not invisible, but not demanding attention either.
It was only when I started pulling on the threads of Dave's finances that her real name surfaced. Reyna Castillo, born Reyna Castillo-Edmund. Daughter of Edmund Castillo. Hidden in plain sight in a city that had no idea what it was looking at.
I hadn't led with that information when I called her. I should have. Instead, I'd given her pieces, watching to see how she assembled them, half-ashamed of how much I wanted to see how her mind worked.
She'd seen through it this morning. “You already knew before you called me.”
She was right. And the reason I'd given her: you deserved to decide what happened next. It was true. But it wasn't the whole truth.
I got out of the car.
Petra let me in through the back without a word, which told me Reyna had said something before I arrived. The kitchen smelled like garlic and something slow-cooking. Reyna was on the phone at the far end of the prep station, back to me, voice low.
I waited.
She turned, saw me, and held up one finger without breaking her call. Her face was different from this morning. Tighter. Whatever the call was, it wasn't good.
She hung up and looked at me. "That was Simone. Dave was picked up an hour ago for questioning. Voluntary, apparently, but his lawyer is already involved."
"Vincent moved," I said.
"What?"
"If Dave is being pulled in for questioning, someone triggered it. Vincent is cleaning house." I set my father's folder on her prep station. "Walter Gaines is the leak inside your father's firm. He made the introduction between Dave and my father fourteen months ago."
She stared at me. "Gaines has been with my father for fifteen years."
"I know."
"My father trusted him."
"I know."
She was quiet, pressing her fingers flat against the steel counter. Processing.
"There's something else," I said.
She looked up.
"Your father isn't going to the police. He's coming here. Tomorrow."
Every bit of composure she'd been holding since last night shifted, just for a second. Enough for me to see what was underneath it.
Not fear. Something more complicated than fear.
"He's never come to Austin," she said quietly. "In four years. We had an agreement."
"He's breaking it."
She looked at me for a long moment. "Why are you here, Luca? Really."
The question landed exactly where she intended it to.
I could have said strategy. Information. Professional obligation. All of it technically true.
Instead, I said nothing.
And the silence answered for me.
Her expression didn't change, but something in her eyes did.
"You should go," she said. Not unkindly.
I picked up my keys. Got to the back door.
"Luca." Her voice stopped me.
I turned.
"When my father gets here," she said, "whose side are you on?"
I held her gaze across the length of that kitchen, the hum of refrigerators between us, the smell of something good cooking on a low flame.
"Yours," I said.
I left before she could decide whether to believe me.
- Writer
