“No. I don’t. Would you mind if I did?”
“No. As long as they were cool. Like, Matteo is cool.”
“Matteo is cool. I’ll make sure if I get a boyfriend, they’re cool like that. Do you have other questions? Because I’m happy to answer them.”
“Are you going to tell the people on New York 1?”
“At some point, I’m going to tell everybody.”
* * *
ONE OF THE primary perks of being a congressman was that you could get a meeting with pretty much anyone you wanted. Yet Reggie—who really had always been a prick, Prieto now thought to himself—would not even return his calls. He had been trying to reach him since his trip to the compound, both to get some answers and to tell him to keep his sister out of this shit. This took on a new degree of urgency for Prieto as the days went by and his sister failed to return his text messages or phone calls, until finally she sent a message telling him to fuck off and leave her alone. He knew Reggie was somehow in the mix and he was determined to talk to him.
After the second week of being dodged and ignored via text, through assistants, DMs, and tweets, Prieto felt forced to play hardball. He called his buddy Bonilla with the FBI and asked him to pay a visit with his partner to Reggie’s office; Prieto thought he might have some information on the juvenile detention center break after Maria.
“Really now? What gives you that idea?” Bonilla asked.
“Did you see that article I sent you?”
“The Independistas distributing water in the mountain towns?”
“Yeah well, there’s a lot of chatter down in P.R. that they were behind that prison break and King’s name keeps coming up.”
“Interesting.”
This information, Prieto knew, carried the risk of leading the FBI directly to his mother, a step that Prieto had seriously considered since his trip. He’d left not only stripped of his ideal mother, but somehow also stripped of his motherland. When Blanca told him he had no place there, he’d felt ashamed. But why? He felt Puerto Rico in his veins, and yet a part of him heard what she said as true. How was him, even being of Puerto Rican descent, telling the islanders how to govern themselves any different from any other mainland American butting in? Benevolent colonialism is still colonialism. Still, he refused to let her take this place—his cultural inheritance—away from him. His first trip to the island, back when he was in college, had been life affirming. Just as he felt his world—his family—was washing away, he found a place that made him feel rooted. Anchored. He was a part of a larger something. A part of a people. He would go back. He would not let people forget. He would not let the people suffer from government neglect.
Despite all that he knew, he found it hard to believe that she would harm her own son.
Yet even as he thought this, he was unsure. Her threat to him was barely veiled. And so, he considered telling Bonilla everything.
But, remembering the fate of Ojeda Ríos gave him pause. He could not, in a serious way, compromise his mother without talking to Olga first. Ultimately, for now, it was strictly a ploy to get to Reggie. Prieto knew he’d play dumb; Reggie was far too street smart to get spooked by a visit from a cop. But it would be a nuisance. One that Prieto would offer to make go away on the condition he and Reggie have a face-to-face.
* * *
IT IRKED PRIETO, as he sat in the reception area of Reggie’s lavish office suite in Tribeca, that Reggie King had more personal security than he, an elected official, did. A massive bodyguard stood outside the closed office door of Reggie’s tenth-floor private office suite, meanwhile Prieto, who walked the streets like a regular Joe, was getting death threats to his Twitter account right as he sat there, all for just doing his job. But, no matter. There was nothing Reggie could dish out that Prieto couldn’t take, and he wasn’t leaving until he gave Reggie a piece of his own damn mind. He felt strong. Invincible. Somehow the meeting with his mother had unleashed a burden from him, one he had not even known was strapped to his back. There was nothing for him to be ashamed of anymore. No more secrets for him to keep.
Prieto was struck by how, despite having long since expanded his empire beyond music, Reggie’s office still retained the air of an early aughts record label. His assistants—there were three of them—looked like the girls from Danity Kane, but old. Prieto suspected they’d been with Reggie for a while.
“Mr. Acevedo?” the one who looked like Aubrey O’Day said.
“Congressman,” he corrected. Why did he fucking care?