Fuck her. That’s what I told myself because the alternative was admitting that I was destroying the only person who hadn’t given up on me yet.
• • •
Ever since Mekhi told me that Quest and Mehar survived, I’d been in an even worse mood than usual. And my usual mood was already toxic enough to clear a room.
Quest wasn’tthe direct cause of me being shot. I was shot protecting his casino, his investment, his legacy. A bullet meantfor his world hit my spine and Mekhi dealt with the shooters because that’s what Mekhi did. But Quest refused to. He didn’t lift a finger. Didn’t pull a trigger. Didn’t lose a minute of sleep over the fact that Zephyr Black, the man who’d been by his side for twenty years, was sitting in a wheelchair because of a party Quest threw. He went right back to building his empire while I learned how to use a catheter.
That’s why I called Rodrigo. That’s why I gave him the gate code, the camera layout, the departure schedule, the hangar location. I didn’t need money and I didn’t need the cartel’s approval. I needed Quest to feel what I felt. I needed him to lose something he couldn’t get back. The way I lost my legs. The way I lost my dignity. The way I lost the version of myself that my daughter deserved to have as a father.
And it didn’t work. The nigga survived a plane crash, kept his girl alive on a deserted island for three weeks, and was probably sitting in a hospital room right now holding a newborn while I was sitting in a wet shower chair screaming at the woman who wiped my ass every morning.
The buzzer rang at two o’clock. I wheeled myself to the intercom and checked the camera. Rodrigo was standing outside in a black jacket with his hands in his pockets looking calm in that way cartel men looked calm when everything underneath was controlled violence.
I buzzed him up.
He walked in without greeting me. Took a seat on my couch, crossed his ankle over his knee, and looked at me with eyes that held about as much warmth as a freezer.
“You called me because you’re worried,” he said. Not a question.
“I called you because we have a problem. They survived. Your people didn’t finish the job.”
“My people did exactly what they were paid to do. They compromised the fuel system and the GPS. The plane should have gone down over deep water with no chance of recovery. The fact that he made it to an island is not a failure of execution. He’s just that determined to live. That nigga is almost supernatural.”
I cringed at this non-black dude calling Quest a nigga but didn’t care enough to check him. Besides, he held all the power.
“Quest ain’t supernatural but we got a problem on our hands.”
“Yes we do have a huge problem. Quest is a formidable opponent. I’ll give him that. My brother underestimated him and it cost him his life. I will not make the same mistake. But I’m curious about something.” He leaned forward slightly. “You gave me the information. The gate code, the camera blind spots, the hangar, the departure time. You were very thorough. Very precise. And now you’re sitting in front of me looking nervous. What changed?”
“What changed is that he’s alive and eventually he’s going to figure out who did this. Quest isn’t stupid. Justice isn’t stupid. They’re going to investigate. They’re going to start pulling threads. And when they do, how long before somebody connects the dots between you and me?”
“Nobody connects us. We’ve never been seen together. We communicate through burners. There’s no digital trail.”
“You showed up at my apartment in broad daylight.”
Rodrigo’s expression didn’t change. “I’m aware. Because this is the last time I’ll be doing it.” He stood up and straightened his jacket. “If Quest comes for us, and I believe he will, I’m prepared for that war. The Rios family has resources he hasn’t seen yet. We’ve been patient because patience was strategic. If patience no longer serves us, we have other tools.”
“You should be worried, Rodrigo. You don’t know Quest like I do. I’ve watched this man operate for twenty years. He doesn’tcome at you loud. He doesn’t threaten. He doesn’t announce himself. He just shows up one day and you realize you’ve already lost. By the time you see him coming, he’s already behind you.”
“I’ve dealt with dangerous men before.”
“You dealt with your brother’s enemies. Quest is different. Quest is the kind of man who will sit across from you at dinner and smile and pour your drink and go home and plan your funeral. And you won’t see it coming because you’ll be too busy thinking the dinner went well.”
Rodrigo looked at me for a long moment. Something shifted behind his eyes, not fear exactly, but a recalculation. A slight adjustment in the math he’d been running. Then he turned and walked to the door.
“If you’re that afraid of him,” Rodrigo said over his shoulder, “perhaps you should have considered that before you gave me his gate code.”
The door closed behind him and I sat in my chair and felt the silence of the apartment settle over me like a weight. Bella was gone. Amara was gone. Rodrigo was gone. And what was left was just me and the truth I’d been circling for days.
Quest was going to figure it out. That wasn’t a question. It was a timeline.
I knew Quest. I’d known him for twenty years. That man didn’t let things go. He didn’t forgive and he didn’t forget and once he decided to find an answer, he found it. It might take him a week or it might take him a year but he would pull at every thread until the whole thing unraveled. And when that thread led from Rodrigo back to me, and it would, there would be no conversation. No truce. No Mekhi stepping in to negotiate peace.
Quest will kill me. He would do it slowly and he would do it personally and he would make sure I felt every second of it because I had tried to kill his woman and his unborn child. There was no version of this story where I survived if I stayed.
I wheeled myself to the bedroom and looked at the closet. Passport in the lockbox on the top shelf. Cash in the safe behind the shoes. Mekhi had set up accounts in Belize years ago for emergencies, money that existed nowhere on paper, money that could fund a quiet life in a country with no extradition.
I told myself I was being strategic. That leaving wasn’t running, it was regrouping. That I’d come back when the heat died down, when Quest’s attention shifted elsewhere, when the trail went cold. I told myself a lot of things sitting in that bedroom doorway looking at a closet I couldn’t reach without help.
