Chapter 391: The Invitation

[Darius’s POV]

El Catrachito in Doral. The same restaurant where Darius had first met Salazar. But the table was different this time. The man across from it was different. The thing being discussed was different.

Tomas Garza arrived at noon. He came with one bodyguard — a short man with a neck tattoo who stood by the door and didn’t sit. Garza sat across from Darius, folded his hands on the table, and waited.

Younger than Darius expected. Forty-three, Nina had said, but he looked younger. Clean shirt. Trimmed beard. Eyes that moved the way Darius’s eyes moved — scanning, measuring, reading the room without seeming to read it.

"You’re Darius King," Garza said.

"You’re Tomas Garza."

"I am. Tito says you want to talk."

"I want to talk."

"Talk."

Darius leaned forward. He kept his hands on the table. Visible. Still. The way a man sits when he wants the other man to know he’s not reaching for anything.

"I’m not here to take your corners. I’m here because we’re in the same business and we’re both smart enough to know that war is bad for business."

Garza listened. His eyes didn’t change. His hands didn’t move. He received information like a wall received rain — it took it in and gave nothing back.

"I’m proposing a non-aggression pact. I stay in the northwest. You keep Hialeah. We don’t step on each other. In exchange, I can give you something you need."

"What do I need?"

"A direct supply line. Salazar skims fifteen percent off what he sells you. I can get you product at ten percent less. Same quality. Same reliability. Less cost."

"Why would you give me a better deal?"

"Because a stable Hialeah means a stable northwest. I don’t need your territory. I need your peace. You pay less for product, I’m left alone, everybody wins."

"Except Salazar."

"Salazar doesn’t need to know."

Garza was quiet. A long, heavy quiet — a man turning numbers over in his head, checking the math, looking for the error.

"Why would I trust you?" he said.

"You wouldn’t. Not yet. You’d watch me. You’d send your people to my corners and see if we touch yours. You’d check the product and see if it’s what I say it is. You’d take two weeks and verify everything I’ve said, and if any of it was a lie, you’d know. And then you’d decide."

"And if the answer is no?"

"Then I walk away. No conflict. No retaliation. I go back to the northwest and we stay neighbors and we don’t touch each other and we’re fine."

Garza looked at him. A long, thorough look — the kind a man gives when he’s been in this business long enough to know that the only thing worse than a bad deal is no deal at all.

"I need to clear it with my boss," Garza said.

Darius didn’t blink. "Take your time."

"My boss will want to know who you are. Where you came from. Why you’re here."

"I came from Liberty City. I’m here because I’m good at what I do and I don’t want to die doing it."

Garza stood. The bodyguard by the door straightened. Garza buttoned his shirt — a gesture so slight Darius almost missed it. But Darius didn’t miss exits. He didn’t miss hands. Garza’s hands had been on the table the entire time. Now they were at his shirt. That small shift marked the difference between a man sitting and a man leaving.

"I’ll get back to you in a week," Garza said. "If the answer is yes, we have a deal. If it’s no..."

He didn’t finish the sentence. Darius didn’t need him to.

Garza left. Darius sat at the table and drank the coffee that had gone cold. He looked at the chair where Garza had been and thought about what had just happened.

He’d made contact with Camila Rodriguez’s lieutenant. He’d offered a deal that would bring him into her network from the outside. And Jake, somewhere in the city, was inside that same network. The two halves of the operation were no longer separate. They were converging. The convergence could save them or kill them, and Darius couldn’t tell which because he couldn’t see the other half. He was blind to it. That blindness was the price of the arrangement.

He paid the bill. He walked to his car. He got in and checked the rearview mirror out of habit — clean, no tail, the parking lot empty except for a delivery truck and two sedans that belonged to the restaurant staff. He started the engine.

Before he pulled out, he ran the meeting back in his head. Garza’s posture. His breathing. The way his eyes had tracked Darius’s hands whenever they moved. The man was trained. Not street-trained — something more structured. Military, maybe. Or private security. That mattered because it meant the people above Garza invested in professionalism, and professional organizations were harder to read and harder to fight.

Darius drove north. The body shop waited — the safe, the ledger, the numbers that told the truth about a crew’s strength. He’d built his operation on numbers. Clean books. Accurate counts. Every dollar tracked, every product weighed, every corner mapped. That discipline had kept him alive for fourteen months without a single shot fired.

He texted Jake: Made contact with the Hialeah lieutenant. He’s professional. Wants to run it up the chain. This could go either way.

The reply came in forty seconds: Be careful. The chain goes higher than you think.

Darius read it twice. The chain goes higher than you think. He didn’t know what Jake meant. He didn’t know how high the chain went. He just knew that his half of the operation had touched the other half, and that contact changed everything. They were no longer two separate pieces. They were one piece now — stronger together, more dangerous together — and Darius couldn’t tell which one it was.

He drove home. He unlocked the body shop. He went to the office. He sat at the desk.

He opened the ledger. He logged the meeting — time, location, duration, subject, outcome pending. He noted Garza’s bodyguard, the restaurant’s layout, the exits, the sight lines. Everything went in the ledger. Everything stayed in the ledger. The ledger was the only record that mattered, because the ledger didn’t lie and men did.

He worked.