He sat back down and took my face in his hands. Kissed me slow and deep. The feel of his lips pressed against mine while his tongue searched to soothe me made me forget every question I was about to ask. When he pulled back his eyes were locked on mine.
“I will always come back to you. Always.”
He left and the suite went quiet. I sat on the couch replaying the way he said it, trying to figure out why the word always sounded heavier than it should have.
• • •
I was about to shower when someone knocked on the door. I checked the peephole and saw Jason, one of our security guys, holding a small package.
“This was delivered to the front desk for Mr. Banks,” he said, handing it to me. “Figured I’d bring it up.”
“Thanks, Jason.”
I closed the door and looked at it. It was a small brown box in plain packaging, Quest’s name on the label. No logo, just a return address I didn’t recognize. I almost set it on the counter to wait for him.
Almost.
I opened it.
Inside was a smaller box that was white with blue text. I read the label. Wait. What the fuck?! I had to read it again because the first time my brain wouldn’t let the words connect to meaning.
Home DNA Paternity Test Kit.
Ordered by Quest Banks.
Everything stopped. The hotel room, the hum of the air conditioner, the sound of my own breathing. All of it just stopped while I stood there holding a box that told me my fiancé had looked at our daughter and questioned whether she was his.
This was it. This was what he’d been carrying. The distance, the closed-off look, the something I couldn’t name for days. It wasn’t just the war. He looked at Aziza’s eyes, those beautiful blue-green eyes, and instead of seeing a miracle he saw a question mark. Instead of trusting me, the woman who almost died on an operating table bringing his child into the world, he went online and ordered a test.
After the island. After the hurricane. After I lost my uterus giving him the only child I would ever carry.
The box sat in my hands and I couldn’t move.
44
Quest
“Everybody dies,” I said.
The warehouse was cold and smelled stale. It was one of Prime’s spots off Route 1 in Lorton, a storage facility he’d used for years that nobody could trace back to us. Creed had the drone footage pulled up on a laptop at the center table, thermal images of the Manassas compound glowing orange and red against black backgrounds. Thirteen heat signatures inside the property as of last night. Rodrigo, Gabriel, six or seven soldiers, a handful of family members including some cousins, and the grandmother.
“Even the grandmother?” Cannon asked.
I looked at him. Those blue-green eyes staring back at me, the same eyes my daughter had. When all of this was over I was going to confirm what I already knew in my gut, that Vivica lied about my paternity. Mehar didn’t cheat on me. She wasn’t those other bitches. She would never do that to me or to our daughter. I knew that. But I needed the proof about Vivica, so I could bury the doubt for good.
That was later though. Right now I had a compound to hit.
“The grandmother. The cousins. Everybody,” I said. “I don’t want a single person with that last name left alive to wake up one morning feeling vengeful. I tried playing nice. I let LaLa and Paco walk and look where that got me. I’m done leaving loose ends.”
“You cold. I like dis nigga!” Riot said, reaching over to dap me up.
“Playing nice is what got me here.” I could feel the heat building in my chest as I talked, that same pressure that hit me every time I thought about Aziza. “Me and Mehar had the perfect pregnancy going. She was eating clean, doing her breathing exercises, working out with a trainer. We were ready. And these people sabotaged our plane, stranded us on an island for three weeks, and forced my daughter into the world two months early hooked up to machines.” I paused because if I didn’t I was gonna put my fist through the table. “Every single person in that house is gonna feel what I’ve been feeling.”
“I ain’t mad at that,” Creed said from behind the laptop. He tapped a few keys, zoomed into the drone footage, and turned the screen so everyone could see. “So here’s how we execute.”
He pointed at the compound layout while everybody gathered around the table. Prime stood to my left with his arms crossed, already studying the entry points before Creed said a word. Justice was to my right taking mental notes. Cannon, Riot, and three of Prime’s mercenaries filled out the rest of the circle.
“Compound sits on four acres with tree cover on three sides,” Creed started. “Main house here at the center, detached garage to the east, guard station at the front gate. One road in, one road out. They got a perimeter patrol running two-man teams on ninety-minute rotations, but based on seventy-two hours of drone surveillance, these boys are sloppy. They smoke on patrol, they sit down, they check their phones. These ain’t trainedsoldiers. These are cartel employees who haven’t been paid in two weeks.”
