PROLOGUE
Mehar
I wokeup in somebody’s trunk.
I didn’t knowthat immediately. My brain took its sweet time catching up to my body, which honestly felt like it had been slammed by a bus and then folded in half for good measure. Everything was dark. Not nighttime dark, not close-your-eyes dark, but sealed-in, no-air-getting-through, pitch-black dark that pressed against my face and made me feel like I’d been buried alive. My cheek was flat against rough carpet, the kind they line cheap trunks with, and I could smell exhaust fumes and something chemical that was burning the back of my throat before I even got my eyes all the way open.
I tried to move. That’s when the situation really introduced itself, because my wrists were zip-tied behind my back and the plastic cut into my skin the second I shifted. My knees were jammed up against my chest, my legs folded underneath me at an angle that was already making my calves go numb, and the space was so tight that my shoulder blades pressed againstone side while my knees pressed against the other. There was nowhere to go. No room to stretch, to adjust, to do anything but lie there and accept that whoever had put me here knew exactly how to make a person feel small.
And I’d spent a long time making sure I never felt small again.
The car was moving. I could feel the rumble of tires beneath me and the low vibration of the engine rattling through the floor, the sound of Usher and Alicia Key’s “My Boo” playing, and my stomach lurched with every turn because lying sideways in a moving vehicle will do that to you, especially when you can’t brace yourself and your body is just rolling with whatever the road decides to do. I tried to focus. Tried to pull up the last thing I could remember before this, but my head was full of static—just flashes that didn’t connect to anything. A light that was too bright. The feeling of hands gripping me. A sound I couldn’t place. All of it scattered, none of it useful.
The car hit something in the road. It felt like a pothole, a speed bump, I don’t know, but my body bounced off the floor and came back down hard on my shoulder. The pain was sharp and immediate and I clenched my teeth so hard my jaw ached, because I was absolutely not about to scream. Whoever was driving this car did not need to know I was awake. That was the only advantage I had right now, and I was holding onto it.
What I couldn’t hold onto was the panic, because it was rising fast and I was running out of ways to keep it down. Not because of the trunk. Not because of the zip ties or the drugs or the dark—I’d lived through things that should’ve killed me and didn’t, so physical discomfort was not the thing that was going to break me. What was breaking me was the math. The cold, honest math of how many people in my life had a reason to put me here.
Because that number was not small.
When you keep a man locked in a cage in a storage unit, people notice when he stops showing up. When you run a business that deals in domination and the secrets of powerful men, eventually one of those men gets nervous about what you know.
I knew all of that. Had known it for a while, if I was being honest with myself. But knowing the risks and actually being zip-tied in the dark because of them are two very different things, and the second one does not care how tough you think you are.
The tires changed. The smooth sound of asphalt shifted to the rough crunch of gravel, and the sound was so loud inside the trunk that I could feel it in my teeth. We’d left the main road. That realization hit me like cold water because main roads have traffic and streetlights and witnesses, and wherever gravel leads at this time of night is the kind of place people go when they don’t want what they’re doing to be seen.
My heart was going so fast it felt less like beating and more like rattling. Then there was this constant drum like an 808 in my chest and my throat and behind my eyes. The car was slowing down. The gravel was getting louder. And whatever was going to happen next was going to happen whether I was ready for it or not.
I told myself to breathe. Told myself to think. Told myself that I had survived Ahmad’s fists and my father’s cruelty and the slow, systematic destruction of everything I used to be. That I’d come out the other side of all of it sharper and meaner and harder to break. And whoever was on the other side of this trunk had no idea what they were dealing with.
The car stopped. Engine still running. A door opened, then closed. Footsteps on gravel, coming around the side of the vehicle in no particular hurry, like this was a regular day forwhoever it was. Like dragging a woman to a gravel road in the middle of the night was just another item on the to-do list.
I let my body go slack. Slowed my breathing to almost nothing, made my muscles heavy, kept my eyes closed. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to thrash, to kick, to fight my way out before that trunk opened—but instinct gets people killed when they don’t have information, and I had none. So I waited. The way I waited in Ahmad’s house before I finally left. The way I waited in front of Thad before I swung that bat. The person who moves first usually loses. That was a lesson I’d learned the hard way, and I had the scars to prove it.
The key turned in the lock. The trunk popped open, and cool air rushed over my skin. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Whoever had opened the trunk was just standing there, and even with my eyes closed I could feel them looking at me. There was a weight to their attention, a stillness that didn’t feel angry or rushed but felt patient in a way that turned my stomach. Like they’d been thinking about this for a while. Like this moment was the payoff for something that started long before tonight.
My eyes opened before I told them to.
The face looking down at me was half-lit by the moon and half-hidden in shadow, and for about three full seconds my brain simply refused to process it. It just stalled, like a computer hitting a glitch, because this face was not on my list. This face wasn’t on any list I would have made, not in a million scenarios, not if I’d spent the entire drive trying to guess.
And that face was staring back at me with an expression I had never seen before. Something quiet and settled and eerily calm, like a mask I didn’t know existed had finally come off, and what was underneath it had been there the whole time.
My mouth opened but my body had no sound to offer, because there is nothing in you that prepares for this. Nothing that teaches you what to do when the person you trusted mostturns out to be the person you should’ve been running from, and the only thing that registered before the trunk slammed shut and swallowed me back into the dark was the understanding—clear and cold and absolute—that I had never been safe at all.
1
QUEST
The Baoding balls made a low, metallic chime as I rotated them in my palm. Slow, steady circles. The chrome caught what little light came through the boarded-up windows of the row house. I’d taken my jacket off about twenty minutes ago and draped it over the arm of the couch. This wasn’t the kind of place you wore Brioni. But the shirt underneath was still crisp. The cufflinks were still in. The Tom Ford shoes were still on my feet. There are certain standards I refuse to lower regardless of the setting.
Besides, I wasn’t planning on being here long.
Dimonte was on his knees in front of me. Had been talking for about six minutes straight without saying a single useful thing. Crying, too. Which I found personally offensive because the boy had a whole beard and visible abs and was really out here producing tears like a Disney princess who just lost her glass slipper. I remembered when Mekhi first brought him around. Young boy was hungry. Focused. Good driver. Good under pressure. Didn’t ask questions that weren’t his business. You don’t find that combination easily, and when you do, you invest in it. We paid him well. Gave him a route. Gave him structure. Gave him an opportunity most twenty-year-olds in Southeast would’ve killed for.
And this is what he did with it.
“I swear on my mama, Quest, I ain’t have nothing to do with it,” he was saying, snot running down his lip, his hands clasped together like he was at the altar begging Jesus for a miracle that wasn’t coming. “On my dead grandmama, bro, I would never?—”
“Dimonte.” I said his name the way I say most things when I’m running out of patience. Quiet. Calm. With enough weight behind it to make the room shift. He stopped talking immediately. “I’m going to need you to stop invoking dead relatives. It’s not helping your case and it’s starting to irritate the fuck out of me. You’ve sworn on your mama, your grandmama, and I think you threw God in there at some point too. That’s a lot of celestial witnesses for a man in Amiri jeans.”
