“I got you.”
I caught Mehar watching from a few feet away. Arms crossed. Face unreadable. But her eyes were on the Rolex, then on Yusef’s face, then on mine. And something in her expression shifted. Just barely. Just enough to tell me that whatever she thought of me in that hallway, this moment complicated it.
Good. I liked complicated.
Rita materialized from nowhere—her signature move—and pulled Yusef into her chest. “Baby, you played so beautiful. Your mama would’ve been so proud. Zahara is smiling right now, I know she is.”
Zainab’s face tightened at the mention of her sister’s name. Mehar’s did too. But they both smiled through it. They always did.
I stepped back from the group. Checked my phone.
Two missed calls from Mekhi. One text.
Yo. Call me NOW.
Then a second text. A photo. And when I opened it, the blood left my face.
One of our main Banks Reserve warehouses was on fire. It wasn’t the warehouse where we kept our stash. This one only held barrels of liquor. But it was the amount of liquor that could harm our business for months. This wasn’t a coincidence.
I pocketed my phone. Fixed my face.
“Justice. We got a problem.”
“How bad?”
“Real bad.”
He looked back at his family. At Yusef showing Prime his new Rolex. At Zainab and Mehar laughing about something while Idris tried to eat his mother’s earring. At Rita’s hat bobbing through the crowd like a lavender lighthouse.
Then he looked at me.
“Let’s go.”
I kissed Rita’s cheek. Told her something came up at the office. She gave me that look—the one that said she knew “the office” was code for something she’d rather not think about.
“You be careful,” she said. Same thing she’d been saying to Banks men for sixty years.
“Always, Grandma.”
I walked out of that building the same way I’d walked out of the row house two hours earlier. Suit clean. Face composed. Hands steady.
But this time, something was different. Warehouse fires don’t just happen. Banks Reserve had state-of-the-art suppression systems, twenty-four-hour monitoring, and security protocols I personally designed. This wasn’t an accident.
First the truck. Now the warehouse.
Somebody was coming for us. And they wanted me to know it.
I got in the Maybach. Started the engine. Pulled up Mekhi’s number.
And drove toward the fire.
4
QUEST
Every time I turned around there was some shit to be handled. This felt like the longest day I’ve ever had. Dimonte, the recital, and now a damn fire.
I could see the glow from six blocks away. The sky was orange and hazy, and glowed like the end of a cigarette. I pressed the gas harder than I should have, pushing the Maybach down 495 to Indian Head Highway while Justice sat in the passenger seat already on the phone with Will, our warehouse manager.
