1
Quest
It starts off small. First, you notice how pretty she is, because by nature you just can’t help it. Her smile brightens every room it appears in, even though her eyes are always holding back tears. Then your eyes wander beyond her face. I’ve spent so much time controlling myself in every other aspect of my life that I never stop myself from acknowledging a woman’s full beauty. I saw that she was thick within the first twenty seconds of us meeting. But the small shit snowballs into something massive, and now I’m about ready to kill every mothafucka in my path to get her smile back in the room with me.
I was out of that hotel room before the business card hit the floor.
Silk and Sin was twenty-two minutes from the hotel on a good night and I made it in fourteen. I don’t remember the drive. I remember my hands on the wheel and Peanut’s name running a loop in my skull and a coldness settling into my chest that had nothing to do with the AC because my gut had already solved the equation and my brain was still showing its work.
Justice met me at the door. I’d called him from the car and told him to get there, didn’t explain why, didn’t need to.When I said come, Justice came. That was twenty years of trust compressed into a phone call.
“Mekhi’s on one,” he said, falling into step beside me. “You need to know that before you go down there.”
“When is he not?”
The basement at Silk and Sin had seen a lot of dark nights. This was about to be another one, but not for the reason Mekhi thought. The kid he had tied up wasn’t even there the night the casino got shot up. I didn’t need to rush handling him. He could wait. What couldn’t wait was the woman I loved being out there somewhere with a woman I hated.
Mekhi was standing in the center of the room with his arms crossed and his jaw locked into something past anger. I knew that look. I’d watched it sit in a hospital hallway for six hours while surgeons tried to remove a bullet from his brother’s spine. It was the version of Mekhi Black who had already made his decision and was waiting on permission he had no intention of asking for.
Bryce was zip-tied to a chair against the far wall. Chin up, back straight, refusing to fold. I respected it, even though it wasn’t going to matter.
“We need to handle this nigga tonight,” Mekhi said the second my foot hit the bottom stair. “His crew put Zephyr in that chair, and I am done sitting on my hands while my brother learns how to live in a wheelchair.”
“I wasn’t even there,” Bryce said from the chair. Quick and sharp, rehearsed. “At the casino. I wasn’t there.”
“I hear you and we will,” I said. I wasn’t looking at Bryce. I was looking at Mekhi and every second I spent looking at him was a second Mehar didn’t have. “But where the fuck is your sister?”
His head pulled back. “What?”
“Janelle. Where is she?”
I watched three things cross his face in the span of two seconds: confusion, then recognition, then a steel door slamming shut behind his eyes before I could read what was on the other side. “You drove over here to ask me about Janelle? Quest, this nigga’s crew shot up our casino on opening night. Zephyr is in a hospital bed right now learning how to brush his teeth from a wheelchair, and the first thing out your mouth when you walk in this room is where’s my sister?”
“She kidnapped Mehar.”
The room went dead. Every sound stopped like somebody had pulled a plug.
“She…” Mekhi started, stopped, rebuilt the sentence from scratch. “What the fuck are you talking about, Quest?”
“There’s blood on Mehar’s car and her phone is smashed on the garage floor. And your sister’s business card was in her hotel room. Janelle’s been her therapist for months. So I need you to tell me where she is.”
He looked at me for a long time. And I could see it happening behind his face, the math he didn’t want to do. Because Mekhi was smart. He was one of the smartest men I’d ever known. And smart men don’t need you to spell things out for them. They just need a second to let themselves believe what they already suspected.
But he didn’t go where I needed him to go. He went somewhere else entirely.
“Man, fuck Mehar.”
I hit him before the second syllable of her name finished leaving his mouth.
It wasn’t calculated. Wasn’t clean. Twenty years of brotherhood and a night of watching everything I built catch fire turned my fist into something that had its own agenda. The punch caught him flush on the jaw and snapped his head sideways, and I followed it with another one before he couldreset, cracking him across the mouth so hard I felt his teeth through my knuckles. He grabbed my collar with both hands and yanked me forward and we crashed into the wall together. A shelf unit came down, bottles exploding on concrete, glass everywhere. I drove my knee into his ribs, got on top of him, and put two more into his face, short and vicious, blood on my hands now, blood on his lips, and there was more where that came from because every time I blinked I saw that parking garage and the smear on Mehar’s car door.
Mekhi bucked and caught me with a right hand to the ribs that rang through my whole torso. It was a good shot. That shit hit hard. But I was back on him before he could throw another, and then Justice was behind me with both arms locked around my chest, dragging me backward with his full weight.
“Yo chill! What the fuck are y’all doing?”
He walked me back three steps by force and I let him because I needed every ounce of energy I had left for finding Mehar and I couldn’t afford to spend it beating sense into a man who didn’t want to receive it. Mekhi stayed on the concrete with one hand pressed to his jaw and his chest heaving, surrounded by broken glass and blood that was coming from his lip and possibly his nose.
“That’s my brother in that hospital.” His voice broke on the word brother, split clean open in a place I’d never heard crack in all the years I’d known him. “That’s Zeph. You hear what I’m saying? My little brother is never walking again. Never. He got a baby he ain’t ever gon play with again, and you want me to worry about your girl?”
