“I know what happened to Zephyr. That’s my fam too. And we will handle it, trust.” I let a breath out slow and held my voice where I needed it. It was low, level, controlled, because if I matched his volume we’d be back on that floor. “And Meharis mine. Your sister has her somewhere, and I need to know where.”
Mekhi wiped the blood off his lip with the back of his hand and looked at it, then looked at me. “Go find your girl, Quest. Go figure out where Janelle is, do whatever you gotta do. But this?” He nodded toward Bryce without taking his eyes off me. “This is mine. I’m handling this lil nigga right now. Tonight.”
He reached behind his back, pulled out a Glock, walked toward Bryce, and pressed the barrel against his forehead. Bryce’s chin-up tough-guy shit evaporated. His whole body went rigid, his breathing changed and I watched him do the math that every man does when he feels steel against his skull. The math that tells you in about two seconds whether the person holding the gun has done this before. And Mekhi had. Many times.
“Mekhi—” I started.
“Nah. His crew put Zephyr in a wheelchair. Somebody’s paying for that tonight and it’s gonna be him.”
“Mehar Ali,” Bryce said.
The words came out fast and desperate, shoved through his teeth like those of a man throwing his last chip on the table because the alternative was a bullet. Mekhi didn’t move the gun. I didn’t move at all.
“What did you just say?” My voice came out quieter than I intended.
“Mehar Ali.” His eyes were locked on mine now, not Mekhi’s, because he understood in that moment that I was the one who could save his life. “That’s my sister, bro. Me, Mehar, and Zainab, we got the same father. She and Zainab just came to my birthday party like two weeks ago. You talking about finding her? I can help you find her. But I can’t help nobody if I’m dead.”
Mekhi still had the gun pressed to his head but his eyes had shifted to me. Waiting.
The room rearranged itself. The lil nigga zip-tied to a chair with a gun to his skull, the one whose crew shot up my casino, whose motorcycle matched the warehouse fire footage, who I’d been hunting for months, was Mehar’s brother. Her blood.
I pulled out my phone, opened the camera, took his picture, and sent it to Prime. Four words:Does Zainab know him?
Within forty seconds Zainab’s name lit up the screen instead of Prime’s.
Oh my God that’s my brother. Let him go. Why do you have my brother?
“Put the gun down, Mekhi.”
“Give me one reason.”
“Because he’s Mehar’s brother. And Zainab’s. And if you kill him, you gon’ have to deal with me and Prime.”
Mekhi looked at me for a long second, then pulled the gun back from Bryce’s forehead. He didn’t holster it. Just let it hang at his side.
“Your beef is with Mega,” Bryce said, and his voice was steadier now that the barrel wasn’t kissing his skull. “I already told you I wasn’t at the casino. The warehouse was my job, yeah, but all of it came from Mega. He hired us. He pointed us at your family. That’s who you need, not me.”
Mega was the nigga my sister Serenity had been living with. It fucked me up to know this was really who I’d been tracking for months. He was the muscle behind every Viper attack on my family. And now I had a direct line to him through a nineteen-year-old with a gun print still on his forehead who happened to be the half-brother of the woman Peanut had snatched out of a parking garage less than two hours ago. Every thread I’d been pulling for the past few months was the same thread. I’d been working it from the wrong end the entire time.
I looked at Justice. He was already looking at me. He’d absorbed everything, filed it, and was waiting.
“Nothing happens to him,” I said. “Not tonight. Not while I’m gone. Not until I say. You hear me?”
I looked at Mekhi when I said it. He looked back at me with the gun still in his hand.
“I got him,” Justice said.
I picked my jacket off the floor, shook a piece of broken glass off the sleeve, and looked at Mekhi one last time. His arms were crossed now, gun tucked back, face shut tight, the grief for Zephyr, the insult of being asked to care about anything else when his brother couldn’t feel his legs, and underneath all of it, something he wasn’t saying about Janelle. Something he’d been carrying long before tonight.
“Where is she, Mekhi?”
He held my eyes without blinking. “I don’t know where Janelle is. And I want you to hear me when I say this, even if I did, I wouldn’t give her up. That’s my blood. Same way Zephyr is my blood and I would burn this whole city down behind him, Janelle is my blood and I don’t give up my family. Not for you. Not for nobody.”
I stood there and looked at this man I’d known since we were teenagers running product through Banks Reserve trucks just trying to keep the company alive, and I understood exactly what he was telling me and exactly why, and it changed absolutely nothing about what came next.
I went up the stairs and out into the night and sat in the Maybach with the engine off long enough to let the control come back down over everything that was trying to crack through underneath it. Then I started the car.
Mehar was out there somewhere with a woman who had been building toward tonight for fourteen years, and every second I sat still was a second she didn’t have. Mega, the Vipers, Bryce, all of it could wait. Right now there was only one name onmy list, and I was going to handle it the way I’d always handled anything that came for something I loved.
