I put my hand on my belly and felt the baby kick and promised her silently that I would be different. That I would be better. That the cycle of women in this family using love as a weapon and secrets as currency would end with me.
But even as I made the promise, I could feel the folder on the table between us, still warm from my father’s hands, and I knew that promises made in rooms like this had a shelf life that was shorter than anyone wanted to admit.
17
Justice
We boarded the charter at Manassas Regional just before dawn. Prime had called me at midnight saying he was coming too and I didn’t argue because arguing with Prime about protecting family was like arguing with weather. It was going to happen regardless of your opinion. So it was three of us now. Me, Prime, and Bryce, strapped into a Cessna Citation with a two-man crew and enough fuel to sweep the southern Caribbean for eight hours before we’d need to land.
Bryce took the seat behind the pilots. Prime sat across from me in the cabin. The engines spooled up and the runway lights blurred past the windows and within minutes we were climbing through the predawn dark over Virginia. Nobody spoke until we leveled off. Then Prime leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and asked the question I’d been building a case around for weeks.
“What makes you think it was Rodrigo?”
“He’s the one that has real beef with Quest. Quest killed his brother. And come on, let’s be real. If somebody killed you or Quest, I’d get revenge too. But it wouldn’t be on no covert shit. I’m putting a bullet right in their head. I want them to know itwas me. But the Rios family? They’re cowards. Tampering with the plane, sabotaging the GPS, sneaking onto the property at two in the morning on a motorcycle. Should’ve pulled up with the shits if that’s what it really was.”
“They knew better,” Bryce said from behind us.
“Yep,” Prime agreed. “Quest would’ve seen them coming a mile away and handled it. We all would’ve.”
“And we still will.” I looked at both of them. “Once we find them, and I know they’re alive, we’re going to war on the Rios family. All of them. Every single one. Even the lil kids.”
The cabin went quiet. Bryce’s eyebrows lifted slightly. Prime didn’t move. He sat there and looked at me with an expression I’d never seen him direct at me before. It was layered, complicated, and it sat on his face for a long time before he spoke.
“Damn,” he said slowly. “You usually the sensible one.”
“Not today.”
“Nah, I hear you. I hear you.” But his eyes stayed on me and I could feel him taking my measure, recalculating who his brother was in this moment. Prime had lived in the dark his whole life. He’d done things that most people only read about in court transcripts. Violence was a language he was fluent in and had spent years trying to unlearn. And now here I was, the brother who wore suits and balanced books and kept the family on the right side of reckless, sitting in a charter plane at five in the morning talking about killing children with the same steady voice I used to review quarterly earnings.
I watched something move behind Prime’s eyes. Part of it looked like recognition, the comfort of knowing he wasn’t the only Banks willing to go all the way when family was on the line. But there was something else underneath it, something that looked almost like worry, because Prime knew better than anyone what it cost to cross that line and he knew it wasn’t a lineyou crossed back over. He’d spent years trying to find his way home from the things he’d done. Watching his brother volunteer for that same trip wasn’t entirely a relief.
“They tried to kill an unborn Banks,” I said, because I needed him to understand this wasn’t posturing. “Quest spared Mateo’s son. He spared LaLa. He showed mercy and they answered it by trying to kill his girl and his unborn child. That disrespect warrants an all-out war. So everybody pays.”
Prime nodded once. Slowly. Then he sat back in his seat and looked out the window at the dark ocean below and I knew he was with me. Whatever reservations he had about watching his brother become something new, he was with me. Because at the end of the day, we were Banks men. And Banks men didn’t let things like this stand.
“You keep saying they’re alive.” Bryce’s voice was quieter now. The war talk had faded and what was left in its place was something more fragile. I turned around and looked at him. His hands were gripping his knees and I could see the fear written across his face, plain as a headline. The fear that his sister and his niece had died somewhere in the ocean and nobody would ever know exactly where. I carried that same fear. I just kept mine locked in a room I didn’t visit during daylight hours.
“You really think they survived?” he asked.
“Yeah, I do. It ain’t logical. It ain’t rational. I can’t point to a piece of evidence or a data set that supports it. But whatever happened out there, they survived. I can feel that shit in my bones. And I’m not giving up on them until somebody shows me proof that I’m wrong.”
Bryce looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded and his grip on the armrest loosened just enough to tell me that my faith, irrational as it was, had given him something to hold onto. Sometimes that’s all people needed. Not evidence or proof, just somebody willing to say “they’re alive” and mean it.
“Aight,” he said. “Let’s go find them.”
• • •
The Coast Guard had been searching near the ABCs for weeks and found nothing. That told me everything I needed to know. They were looking in the wrong place.
Quest’s flight plan had him heading south toward Curaçao, but the GPS was compromised. That meant the plane could’ve drifted off course for hours before the fuel lines gave out, pushing him further north and east, deeper into the Caribbean where the islands got smaller and the chances of being spotted got worse. I told Hargrove to skip the ABCs entirely and push north. If the Coast Guard already covered that grid and came up empty, I wasn’t wasting fuel repeating their homework. We were heading toward the Grenadines, the chain of islands between St. Vincent and Grenada. Dozens of cays and islets out there, most of them uninhabited, scattered across open water where nobody was looking.
Hargrove brought us down to a thousand feet and held the aircraft steady. Prime and Bryce pressed their faces against opposite windows, scanning the water. I sat in the cockpit behind Hargrove and his copilot, watching the ocean roll out beneath us in every direction. An endless sheet of blue and green that could’ve been hiding anything or nothing.
Three hours in, we’d seen nothing. Fishing boats, cargo ships, a cruise liner catching the morning sun. But no wreckage. No debris. No signal. The ocean was keeping its secrets and every mile of empty water that passed beneath us made the math worse.
Then Bryce yelled from the back.
“There. Two o’clock. Something in the water.”
