Page 66 of Omar

"If the connect is the same person who built Supreme's financial setup," she said slowly, "then my father didn't just trade me to clear a debt. He traded me to the people who might have taken your dad."

I didn't answer. She didn't need me to.

She checked her phone. "I gotta go. Nene's waiting."

I started the car, pulled out of the lot, locked the gate behind us, and drove back toward the salon. She was quiet beside me, her hands in her lap, her eyes on the windshield. I could tell the gears were turning but I gave her the space to work through it.

I stopped two blocks from where Nene was waiting. Asha sat there for a moment without reaching for the door handle.

"If it's the same person," she said quietly, looking straight ahead. "If the connect who brokered the deal between Ray and Supreme is the same person who built Supreme's financial pipeline. Then the man who sat at my kitchen table and drank my mama's coffee and arranged my life... that man also had something to do with what happened to your father."

"That's what I'm trying to find out."

"And I've been living inside his work the whole time." She turned to look at me. "I've been sleeping in the house that his money built, eating food his pipeline paid for, sitting next to a man his infrastructure keeps in power. The whole time, the operation I was trapped in might be the same one that took your father."

"Asha..."

"Three years, Omar." Her voice was steady but her hands were pressing hard into her thighs. "I was inside the machine. I was sleeping next to the man at the center of it. If I'd known, if I'd been looking for it, maybe I could have found something. Some piece of evidence, some document, some name that would have led you to Pops sooner."

"You didn't know. Nobody knew."

"Ray knew." Her fingers curled into fists against her legs. "Ray sat across from this man and shook his hand and handed me over, and he never once asked who he was really dealing with. He never looked past the debt and the deal to see what was underneath it."

She exhaled slowly, uncurled her hands, pressed them flat against her knees.

"I'll find out the name," she said. "I'll call him. He's still my dad at the end of the day, even if I hate him for what he's done."

The idea of her calling the man who'd traded her away sat wrong in my chest but I didn't argue. She knew what she was doing.

"Be careful," I said.

"Always am." She kissed me once, fast, then got out and walked toward the corner where Nene was standing with her phone out looking impatient.

She walked quickly, her jacket pulled tight around her, her head down. I knew what was happening inside her because I'd seen it happen to Kadeem when Devon first showed us the financial trail. The moment when the pieces connect and the picture gets bigger and uglier than you were prepared for. When you realize the thing that hurt you wasn't random or isolated. It was part of something larger, something that touched other people, other families, other lives.

Asha had just learned that her captivity and my father's disappearance might share the same architect. The man who'd brokered her sale to Supreme might be the same man who'd set up the financial infrastructure that funded whatever happened to Pops. Her time inside Supreme's operation wasn't just her tragedy. They were a thread in a web that connected to mine.

She fell into step with Nene, who was talking immediately, gesturing with her hands, covering the gap. They walked back toward the salon together. From the car I could see Asha nodding along, responding, playing the part. But her stride was different. Tighter, faster, her shoulders carrying something new.

I drove back to APEX and sat at the desk with Devon's files open in front of me. The connect. The middleman. The fixer who'd introduced Ray Cole to Supreme's people and put Asha inside the operation.

If that person was Leonard Pryce, then the same man who'd set up Greyline Holdings and booked the conference room at the Hampton Royal had also been the one to hand Asha to Supreme.

Asha's three years of captivity and Pops' disappearance, connected by the same hand.

I needed that name.

Chapter 26

Asha

Icalled Ray from the bathroom with the tap running and Supreme's TV loud enough through the door that he wouldn't hear me.

He picked up on the fourth ring. "Hey, baby girl."

"Don't call me that."

He sighed. "Asha, what you need?"