Jah and Steph nodded fast. Bryce just looked at me.
“I need to talk to you about something else,” Bryce said.
“What.”
“My payment. For the warehouse. You said the rest was coming two weeks ago and I still ain’t seen it. That was a fifty-thousand-dollar job and I only got twenty. I got a baby on the way, man. I need that money.”
I looked at him and kept my face flat because the truth was I didn’t have it. The fifty thousand Vivica had wired me for the warehouse job was supposed to go to Bryce minus my cut. But my cut had turned into the whole pie because the BCC was struggling in ways I wasn’t about to admit to a nineteen-year-old. Since Rashid died, the plugs didn’t trust us. Our supply chain was fractured. Revenue was down to a trickle, and the overhead—the house, the cars, the coke, Serenity’s shopping habits before she vanished, had eaten through reserves I didn’t have in the first place.
I’d spent Bryce’s money. Most of it went up my nose, and the rest went to keeping up appearances because in this game the moment people think you’re broke is the moment they stop respecting you.
“I got it,” I said. “It’s coming this week. I had to move some things around, but you’ll have it by Friday.”
“You said that last Friday.”
“And I’m saying it again. Friday. You got my word.”
Bryce didn’t look convinced, but he also didn’t push it, because pushing the man who signs your checks is a good way tostop getting checks. He stood up, dapped me, and headed for the door with Elijah and Stephen behind him.
“Lay low,” I called after them. “I mean it.”
The door closed, and I was alone in the house that used to have Serenity in it and now just had coke residue on the coffee table and the faint smell of her perfume on the couch pillows that was fading more every day.
I cut another line and thought about how I’d gotten here.
Vivica Banks had reached out to me eight months ago through a mutual contact on the inside. She’d heard the BCC was struggling after Rashid went down and she had a proposition. She needed someone on the outside to run operations against her own family. Targeted hits designed to destabilize Banks Reserve and weaken her sons’ grip on the company. In exchange, she’d fund the BCC’s resurrection with product connects, cash infusions, and a path back to relevance.
All I had to do was follow her directives. The warehouse fire was her idea. Hiring the Vipers to do the torch job was her idea. And getting close to Serenity was her idea, too.
“Get in her bed and get in her phone,” Vivica had told me during one of our calls. “Serenity knows everything about that family. She’s the weak link. Use her.”
So I did. Got Serenity high, got her comfortable, got her trusting me. And when she’d pass out after a night of coke and champagne, I’d go through her phone like a filing cabinet. Calendar entries, text threads, family group chats, financial documents she had access to as the family’s former bookkeeper. Everything I found went straight to Vivica, who used it to plan her next move from a prison cell with the precision of a general running a war from exile.
Rita’s birthday party. The guest list. The timing. The casino opening date. All of it came from Serenity’s phone. Allof it passed through me. And Vivica turned every piece of information into a weapon.
My phone rang. Speak of the devil.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“What happened at the casino?” Vivica’s voice was flat and cold and didn’t sound like a question even though it was shaped like one.
“Two of the Viper boys went rogue. Shot up the grand opening. I didn’t sanction it. They were acting on their own, trying to get revenge for Dimonte.”
“And now two of them are in the hospital, where police will be asking questions.”
“They won’t talk.”
“You better hope they don’t. Because if this blows back on you, it blows back on me. And you cannot afford for it to blow back on you, Mega. Not with how thin your operation is right now.”
She knew. Of course she knew. Vivica knew everything, even from behind bars, because knowing things was her oxygen and she’d suffocate without it.
“Where is Serenity?” she asked.
“She’s been missing for about two weeks now. Won’t answer my calls. Her apartment is empty.”
“Sounds like her brothers got to her.” Vivica said it matter-of-factly, like it was a chess move she’d anticipated but couldn’t prevent. “Which means your access to the family’s information is gone.”
“I know.”
