Salem aimed at the old man’s head. “Say the word.”
“I want to watch him die knowing his own blood sold him out.”
“I’m not your daughter,” she said. “You took Mateo.”
Xenia watched the flames. For the first time in three months, she felt something—not relief, not grief. Just a cold, clean emptiness. army of two the devil 39-s cartel xenia
But three months ago, El Diablo made an example of her younger brother, Mateo. He was seventeen. He’d tried to leave the cartel. They hung him from a bridge outside Ciudad Acuña with a note pinned to his chest: “La Familia nunca se va.” (The Family never leaves.)
“Now,” she said, ejecting her magazine and slotting a fresh one, “I find the next devil.”
Xenia didn’t flinch when the safe house door blew off its hinges. Salem aimed at the old man’s head
She didn’t answer. But as the sun rose over the burning border, she walked alongside them toward the extraction chopper—not as a contractor, not as a friend.
Xenia knelt in front of El Diablo. For a long moment, she just looked at him. Then she unholstered her pistol, pressed it under his chin, and whispered:
But as someone who had finally stopped being a ghost. For the first time in three months, she
She looked at his hand on her sleeve, then back at him. “El Diablo keeps a private vault beneath the depot. Inside: ledgers, CIA contacts, names of politicians he owns. You want to cripple the cartel? You burn the guns. I want to salt the earth.”
She slid a USB drive across the metal table. “Because I’m the ghost who wants to burn the house down.” Xenia had been La Familia’s top sicaria for seven years. Recruited at nineteen from the rubble of a Juárez orphanage, trained by men who thought mercy was a bullet to the chest instead of the head. She’d climbed fast—not through cruelty, but through precision. Every job clean. Every target down before they heard the shot.
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