“I remember what I said, Quest.”
He was quiet for a second. Then he set his glass down and turned to face me.
“I’m not bringing it up to be right. I’m bringing it up because I need you to hear something.” He paused. “Letting somebody help you isn’t the same as letting somebody control you. I know those two things look the same from where you’ve been standing your whole life. Every man who’s ever helped you had strings attached. So I understand why you hear me say ‘let me help you’ and your brain translates it to ‘let me own you.’ But that’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying trust me. That’s it. Trust that I want to help because I care about you, not because I want to control you. Trust that I’m not going to hold it over your head or use it as leverage or throw it back in your face when things get hard. Just trust me.”
I took a sip of cognac and let the burn settle in my chest. Trust. The word that kept coming up between us like a testneither of us could study for because the curriculum kept changing.
“I’m trying,” I said. “That’s the best I can give you right now.”
“That’s enough.” He put his hand on my thigh, casual and possessive and warm the way it always was. “For now, that’s enough.”
We sat there for a while longer. Two people in a hotel room, both displaced from their lives for different reasons. Him because his mother detonated his identity. Me because someone detonated my home. Both of us sitting on the edge of a bed trying to figure out if the person beside us was safe enough to fall into.
I leaned my head against his shoulder. He let me.
And for a few minutes, that was enough.
44
GUESS WHO
I know her secrets now. Every single one of them.
The men. The money. The things she does in the dark that she thinks nobody sees. I see all of it. I’ve seen it for a while now. And I’ve been sitting with it, holding it, turning it over in my hands like a grenade with the pin still in.
The pin is coming out.
She thinks she’s safe. She thinks the new hotel and the new man and the new version of her life she’s building brick by brick is going to protect her from what’s coming. It won’t. Because the thing about secrets is they don’t belong to the person keeping them. They belong to whoever finds them first.
And I found them first.
45
QUEST
I kissed Mehar’s inner thigh one last time before pulling the sheets over her. She was breathing heavy, eyes half-closed, legs still trembling from what I’d just done to her. My Peach. I could taste her on my lips and I wasn’t in a rush to wash it off, but I had somewhere to be.
“I’ll be back,” I said.
“Mmhmm.” She didn’t open her eyes. Couldn’t. I’d made sure of that.
I took a shower, got dressed, and left her in my bed, then headed to the hospital.
The drive gave me too much time to think and not enough time to stop. Zephyr had been in spinal surgery for six hours after the shooting. The bullet that hit his back had lodged near his vertebrae and the surgeons had to go in to remove it and the damage was already done before they opened him up. Mekhi had called me from the waiting room at 4 AM sounding like a man who was holding himself together with nothing but adrenaline and the promise that somebody was going to pay for this.
I parked at MedStar and took the elevator to the fourth floor. Mekhi was in the hallway outside Zephyr’s room, leaning against the wall with a coffee in his hand that he probably hadn’t takena sip of. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. His eyes were bloodshot, his jaw was covered in stubble, and he was wearing the same clothes from the grand opening with Zephyr’s blood still on his cuffs.
“How is he?” I asked.
“They put him in a medically induced coma after the surgery. His body was under too much stress.” Mekhi’s voice was flat in that way voices get when the emotion behind them is too big to let through. “The surgeon came out about an hour ago and told us the bullet damaged his spinal cord. T-12 vertebra.” He paused. “He’s not gonna walk again, Quest.”
I stood there and let that land. Zephyr Black, the man who’d been by my side since I was eighteen years old, who’d helped me build Banks Reserve from the ashes of my father’s debt. He was man was never going to stand up again. Never going to walk into a room and command it the way he always did. Never going to ride with us the way he’d been riding for twenty years.
“Where are those two little niggas?” I asked. My voice was quiet because the louder version of it was going to get me arrested.
