“But hear one thing before we end today,” Janelle said. “You are not too much. You have been through too much. And until you learn that difference in your body and not just your mind?” The corner of her mouth lifted. “We got work to do.”
I grabbed my bag. My keys. My phone. Put all the pieces of Mehar back in place the way I did every time I left this room.
“Janelle? Thank you. For…”
“I know,” she said.
And I believed her.
In the hallway, a man in a suit stepped off the elevator. It was completely normal, completely harmless, and my body tensed anyway. My shoulders went up and my jaw tightened. Just being in his presence sent rage into my chest. I felt like he was disrupting my personal space. This was so not normal.
I made it to my car before the second wave hit and cried until my head throbbed. Not because I was sad, but because my soul was tired. An exhaustion that runs so deep that sleep can’t touch it because it ain’t in your muscles, it’s in your spirit.
Twenty-six years of survival.And I was just now learning that surviving and living were not the same thing.
My phone buzzed. Text from Zainab.
Zainab:You good? You’ve been quiet since the recital.
I checked the rearview. Swollen. Red. A whole mess. Nothing concealer and sunglasses couldn’t handle. I’d been hiding damage behind beauty products since I was fourteen. At least now I knew why.
Me:I’m good. Just processing. Therapy was heavy today.
Zainab:Want me to come over? I can bring the babies. Idris learned how to blow raspberries and it’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.
I almost smiled. Almost.
Me:Tomorrow. I need a night to sit with this.
Zainab:Okay. Love you, sis. I’m here whenever you’re ready.
I wiped my face. Fixed my lashes. Reached for the ignition.
Then my phone buzzed again. Not Zainab.
A booking notification from my website.
Dame CoCo—SessionRequest
Client: SenatorDC_55
Service: Full submission, 3 hours
Rate: $4,500
I confirmed the booking. I needed the release of domming someone.
Then I startedthe car and merged into the nightmarish DC traffic. So I had C-PTSD. I was injured, not broken. Living behind walls that protected me and imprisoned me at the same time. And somewhere in the middle of all that, a man whose hand on my thigh had made my nervous system do something it had never done before. And a booking tomorrow night that would put all those walls right back up where they belonged.
6
QUEST
I’d been staring at security footage for three hours and my eyes were starting to feel like they’d been marinated in hot sauce.
The penthouse had a full office setup in the second bedroom with three monitors, a secure server, and enough processing power to run a small country. I had every surviving camera feed from the warehouse district pulled up, scrubbing through timestamps frame by frame, looking for anything that would tell me who torched my shit. But whoever did this knew exactly where the cameras were and exactly how to avoid them. Half the feeds were corrupted from the fire itself, and the ones that survived showed a whole lot of nothing useful. Empty loading dock. Empty parking lot. A stray cat at 1:47 AM that damn near gave me a heart attack because I thought it was a person crouching.
It was a cat. A regular degular cat. And I had rewound and zoomed in on it three times before I accepted that.
