“I showed mercy,” Quest said. “I let her and the boy live because the boy didn’t have anything to do with his father’s bullshit. That was a mistake I don’t plan on making twice.”
“Both of them?” Prime asked from across the room. His voice was even but I could hear the weight underneath the question. Prime had done a lot of dark things in his life but children were a different conversation.
“Both,” Quest said without hesitation. “I can’t leave that boy out there to grow up knowing the Banks family killed his father, his uncles, and his cousin. You give a kid that kind of origin story and in fifteen years he shows up at your front door with a gun and a grudge. I’m not passing that problem down to my daughter.”
Riot nodded and dapped him up. “I’d do the same. You don’t leave loose threads when the thread is gonna grow up to be a rope.”
“If any of us had lost one of our brothers when we were kids,” I said, “we’d spend our whole lives trying to get even. Every single one of us in this room would. So every Rios has to go. The plane crash alone makes this unforgivable. They tried to kill anunborn baby. You don’t come back from that. There’s no treaty, no truce, no negotiation that fixes what they did.”
The room was quiet for a second. Six men sitting with the decision they’d just made. Fathers, all of them, planning to wipe out another family down to the children. The moral weight of it should’ve bent us. Maybe it did. But nobody in that room was bending far enough to change their mind.
“Creed,” Quest said. “The drones. When can you have them over the compound?”
“They’re being shipped to a location in Fairfax tonight. I’ll have them airborne over Manassas by tomorrow night. Give me twenty-four hours of surveillance footage and I’ll have a full tactical picture. Patrol rotations, heat signatures, entry and exit points, all of it.”
“Do it.”
“One more thing,” Creed said. “This compound is rural but it’s not remote. There are properties within a mile radius. Whatever we do, it needs to be contained. No explosions, no fire, nothing that draws attention from a distance. This has to be surgical.”
“Surgical is what we do,” Prime said.
Quest stood up and looked around the room at each of us, knowing he had a solid team.
“Tomorrow night we get the intel. The night after that, we finish this.” He looked at me. “Call Rita. Tell her to stay in Hartford and keep her head down. Call Serenity and tell her the same. Nobody moves, nobody travels, nobody does anything that puts them in a position to be touched. We go dark until this is done. As a matter of fact, get security on them. I don’t want no mishaps with our grandmother and sister. We gotta protect them and that baby.”
“I’m on it,” I said.
“And Justice?” He paused at the door. “Thank you. For everything you did while I was gone. The search, the plane, the boat, the war. I know what you did to Manny. I know what it cost you. And I need you to know that I see it.”
I nodded because that was all I could do. My brother just told me he saw me. After thirty-something years of being the background brother, the quiet one, the one who kept the lights on while Quest and Prime got the glory and the headlines. He saw me. And that meant more than he probably realized.
“That’s what brothers are for,” I said.
He gave me a look that said everything his words didn’t. Then he walked out with the Kings behind him and I sat in that hotel suite alone and pulled out my phone to make the calls he’d asked me to make.
Rita and Serenity first. Then I called for security for both of them. Then the security team at Hopkins. Then the casino. Lockdown protocol across the board. Nobody in, nobody out, nobody exposed.
Tomorrow night, the drones would fly over the compound in Manassas. Twenty-four hours after that, the Rios family would cease to exist.
I thought about Dream’s goodnight text. Sweet dreams, Daddy. And I thought about LaLa’s son Paco, who was roughly the same age as Dream, living in Colombia with no idea that a room full of men in a Baltimore hotel suite had just decided he didn’t get to grow up.
I pushed that thought down and dialed Rita’s number. Some thoughts don’t deserve airtime. Not tonight.
39
Zephyr
Word had come down about the war and every detail made my stomach tighten. The Banks brothers had blown up the shipment at the port, killed Manny, and burned Casa Rios to the ground with him inside it. Forty million in product gone. A twenty-one-year-old kid dead. A restaurant that Rodrigo’s mother gave her recipes to, reduced to rubble. And all of it traced back to the intel I gave Rodrigo a while ago while sitting in my wheelchair feeling sorry for myself.
I started this. Every bit of it. And now I was running from the consequences in the passenger seat of my brother’s Escalade doing ninety on I-85 toward a safe house in North Carolina.
“You better pray to God that Rodrigo doesn’t tell Quest that you’re the one who gave him the intel,” Mekhi said without looking at me. His hands gripped the steering wheel tight enough to turn his knuckles pale and his jaw hadn’t unclenched since we left Maryland. “Because if Rodrigo talks, I can’t protect you. Nobody can.”
“But won’t it be suspicious if I’m just MIA?” I asked. “People are going to notice I’m gone.”
“If Rodrigo keeps his mouth shut, I’ll tell Quest you went out of town for a specialized rehab program. Spinal cord therapy at some facility down south. He won’t question it because he doesn’t think about you enough to question it.” That last part stung but Mekhi didn’t care. He was past caring about my feelings. “You stay in North Carolina, you keep your head down, and you don’t contact anybody. Not Rodrigo, not Bella, not anyone connected to DC. You disappear.”
Bella. The mention of her name sat heavy between us. We’d tried to get her to come. Mekhi had even called her himself, told her it wasn’t safe to stay in DC, that she should bring Amara and come to the safe house until things cooled down. She said no. Said there was no point in being with a man who beat her, couldn’t walk, and had endangered their daughter’s life by conspiring with a cartel. Then she hung up.
