Shaw casually flashed a badge. Her voice was slow as ever, and to the uninitiated it would've sounded like deliberate mockery.
"Read it and weep. LAPD. Dominic Toretto, you are under arrest for theft, endangering public safety, illegal driving, illegal vehicle modification, illegal possession of firearms, aggravated assault..." She rattled off the charges without pause. "...fifteen counts total."
With a forest of pistols aimed at his skull, Dominic had no room to resist. He was a swaggering king, not the Mad Titan—his head wasn't harder than a bullet. The handcuffs clicked shut. Brian, the FBI agent, hadn't even processed what was happening before his best friend and future brother-in-law was in LAPD custody.
Charlie's recent streak of cracked cases had turbo-charged the DA's office in turn.
Dominic Toretto, king of the world, biggest fish in any room, didn't bother to explain himself. He confessed to every charge without a shred of remorse and was sentenced on the spot to twenty-five years, no possibility of parole.
Brian—who was both Dominic's ride-or-die and sleeping with his sister—desperately wanted to intervene, but Charlie's office shut him down. The FBI outranked the LAPD on paper, but a police commissioner versus a field agent wasn't even a contest.
Dominic's arrest was a side benefit. The real objective was building a case against the drug lord.
Frenzy's digital sweep came up disappointingly short. Braga was old-school and paranoid. He had zero trust in computers, less in the internet. Every transaction was logged in physical ledgers, and nobody but Braga himself knew where those ledgers were kept.
Shaw had only managed to make contact with the race organizer—a Mexican man named Campos, allegedly Braga's loyal lieutenant.
Shaw proposed snatching Campos and squeezing him for information. Bella vetoed it. Shaw was a living person now, and living people left traces. If anyone was going to conduct an interrogation, it shouldn't be someone whose existence was on the record.
Technology was no help. Bella turned to the supernatural.
She deployed the Demon Nun.
The entry point was the Mexican runt called Campos.
There was no drug lord named Braga. That was precisely why the FBI and the LAPD had hit nothing but dead ends. "Braga" was a fabricated identity. The short race organizer, Campos, stared at his reflection in the mirror. Nobody knew who Braga really was. Only he knew the truth—because he was Braga.
Mexicans occupied a perpetually low rung in the Western social hierarchy. Braga was short, dark-skinned, and unremarkable. He had the face of a man whose subordinates would feel embarrassed to follow—the kind of mug that screamed "comedy actor," not "drug lord."
So the little Mexican had invented a persona named Braga and hidden himself in the shadows, posing as just another small-time race organizer.
He'd always fantasized about having a commanding face, a tall and powerful physique. But those things were genetic. The man in the mirror was still short, curly-haired, big-nosed, and broad-faced. Forget commanding—he looked at himself and thought he belonged on a sitcom, not at the head of a cartel.
Then, mid-inspection, he noticed something.
A dark figure drifted across the mirror behind him.
He whipped around. His eyes swept the room. Nothing.
He drew his pistol and pressed the emergency button on his phone. He kept up the act in public, but he wasn't a fool. A handful of trusted men knew his real identity, and three of them—all built like tanks—burst through the door within seconds.
"Boss?"
"Hostiles?"
They scanned the room and found nothing unusual. They figured their boss was being paranoid.
Campos disagreed. He hadn't survived the overlapping jurisdictions of Mexican and American law enforcement, rival cartels, and years of being hunted by staying calm when his gut screamed danger. He felt a threat in this room, and he trusted that instinct without question.
"We're leaving. Now." If the gut said danger, he obeyed the gut.
He positioned one man in front and two behind—a tight, secure formation—and moved toward the exit.
A scream from behind. He spun around. One of his rear guards was gone.
Two gunshots from the front. He looked ahead. The point man had vanished too.
"What the hell?!" This time he'd caught a glimpse—a shadow, something dark, seizing his man and dragging him through the wall.
Through the wall?
He walked over and pressed his palm against the surface. The plaster was damp. In the dim light, he examined his hand. His fingers were smeared with blood. Fresh, crimson blood was oozing from inside the wall, as if his bodyguard had been bricked in alive.
That was impossible. How did a full-grown man end up inside a wall?
"Boss... Boss! There! THERE!" His last remaining guard pointed at the mirror, voice cracking with terror.
In the glass, a figure had appeared: a nun in black robes and a black veil, her face twisted into something inhuman. She was staring directly at them.
Campos had more nerve than his man. He raised his pistol and fired. The mirror shattered into a thousand pieces.
"What happened?!"
"What's going on?!"
"Campos, what the hell are you doing?!"
The men outside—the ones who didn't know his real identity, who thought he was just a minor race organizer—heard the gunfire and came rushing in. Gisele, the woman who'd warned Bella earlier that evening, was among them.
Everything about tonight reeked of wrong. Campos made his decision.
"Move! We're leaving LA tonight. I'll explain to the boss." He invoked Braga's name—his own alter ego—to cow the crowd. With the situation unclear, more bodies around him was better.
Twenty-odd people, all armed, charged for the exit.
The foot soldiers had no idea what was going on. They followed like headless flies.
As they ran, things started feeling off.
"Campos, where the hell are we going? Why is this street so deserted?"
"Yeah... is it just me, or is it getting cold?"
"Hey—who are you? I've never seen you before."
Campos turned around and felt his scalp nearly peel off his skull.
He'd left with just over twenty people. Now there were at least fifty trailing behind him. Many of the faces looked vaguely familiar, but when he actually tried to place them, he realized he didn't know them at all. And many of his actual men were wearing smiles that didn't belong on human faces.
Even Campos's iron composure cracked.
They should have been running out of the nightclub and into the underground parking garage to grab their cars and flee the city.
Instead, they were standing in the middle of a barren field. Nothing but graves stretched in every direction, each one crowned with a cross. A cold night wind bored straight into his collar, and the chill that crawled from the soles of his feet to the top of his skull locked every joint in his body rigid.
Absolute terror. He couldn't move.