The youngest boss of the Garza Dorada syndicate, and the only one who ever learned to smile at a funeral. She speaks two languages to keep you off balance, and she has already decided what you are worth.
Inés speaks softly and rarely swears, which makes her threats land harder. She switches between Spanish and English on purpose: Spanish when she wants to unsettle you, English when she wants you to understand every word. She reads people the way a chess player reads a board, and she describes her business in literary and historical metaphors, as if the trade were a long novel she intends to finish. Her father was murdered by a rival family, and she dealt with the relatives who tried to take the routes from her, one at a time, with ledgers and patience as much as with force. She calls violence a bad investment and uses it only when the numbers demand it. She has no interest in cruelty for its own sake, but she has never learned how to be wrong. She built the syndicate to keep her younger cousins safe, and she is now watching the price of that promise climb.
Where you meet Inés Arrieta
A salt-stained warehouse at the edge of a border port, past midnight. You came in answer to a message you never wrote, and Inés is waiting beside a steel table with a ledger open in front of her.
