Page 6 of Omar

His eyes closed.

"Goddamn, baby," he breathed.

"Mmm."

"Goddamn. You see what you did to me there?"

"I see," I told him.

He sighed deeply. His hand stayed where it was and didn't reach for the tissues as his breathing slowed against the pillow. Within thirty seconds the rhythm of it had evened out. Within sixty he was snoring, his chin tipped back, his mouth still hanging open, his soft dick still resting in his loose hand on his belly with his nut drying on his stomach.

I lay next to him in the gold light and looked at the ceiling before I rolled away from him and turned onto my side.

I closed my eyes and in the dark behind my eyelids I told myself I wasn't going to open that forbidden door in my head.

But I caved, and for one dangerous moment, I pictured Omar's face and saw the look in his eyes when he saw me.

A tear slipped out before I could catch it, and it ran sideways across the bridge of my nose before disappearing into the pillow.

I lay there in Supreme's bed listening to him snore behind me, and with every fibre of my being, I knew I had a problem.

Chapter 3

Omar

Devon was already at his desk when I came up.

The intel office at APEX took up half the second floor, set back from the club side of the building behind two locked doors. Devon ran it. Three monitors, a long table he kept covered in paper, a window with the blinds always half down looking out across the rooftops toward the BQE. He had two laptops open and a stack of folders next to his coffee, his glasses pushed up on his head where he'd forgotten them, papers spread out in the rough geometry he worked in. Devon had been with Kadeem since before I'd come up. He knew every corner of the operation, kept it all in his head and on his screens, and the only person who ever surprised him was Stone, who occasionally turned up with something Devon hadn't seen yet.

"Mornin'."

"Sup, O. Pull up."

I poured a cup of coffee from the pot he'd made and pulled a chair out across from him. The office was quiet at this hour. Kadeem wouldn't be in for another twenty minutes. Stone, if he was coming through today, hadn't shown.

"Last night went how I expected?" Devon asked.

"Pretty much. Supreme talked. Kadeem listened. We agreed to share the corridor."

"Stone do his thing?"

"Yeah. Named an old intermediary. Said he'd want everything you had on him."

Devon nodded and pulled one of the folders out of the stack and slid it toward me. "Then you wanna look at this. Came in late."

I opened it.

Devon's data on the Flatbush corridor had been building for weeks. New plates kept coming through his salon contact, faces matched against vehicle records, the pattern slowly tightening. What he was showing me now was the next layer. Two of TK's confirmed plates had crossed paths with a third vehicle in the corridor twice in the last week. Same parking lot, both times, an hour apart. The third vehicle had been pulled by Devon's contact independently because of a back-and-forth between Crown Heights and Flatbush that had no obvious purpose.

I turned the page.

The third vehicle had a registration that came back to a small import-export company in East Flatbush. Devon had pulled the corporate filings. The directors were two names neither of us recognized, but Devon had run the addresses and one of them tracked back to a mailbox on Atlantic that had been used in the past for a money operation that had been part of Supreme's network seven years ago.

"This connects them," I said.

"Yeah." Devon closed his laptop and rubbed his eye. "If TK's running supply through this company and this company's connected back to old Supreme paper, that's not just a coincidence in a corridor. That's an actual link."

"A link Supreme either knows about or doesn't."