I stood on that sidewalk with my Chinese food getting cold and understood, with a clarity that felt almost holy, that I had never been over this man. I’d just gotten better at pretending.
After that night, I couldn’t stop. I started following her between sessions. Not every day, but enough. I learned her routines, her schedule, the places she went when she thought nobody was paying attention. I stuck nails in her tire. And Ifound the things she’d never told me on my couch. The storage unit. The man inside it. The cage, the destroyed knees, the water bottle mounted to the bars. Her little dungeon in Dupont Circle where powerful men paid her to make them crawl. The gun she carried. The brother she’d reconnected with.
And the more I learned, the more I understood why Quest was drawn to her. He’d always loved women with something dark underneath the surface. That was what pulled him to me when we were teenagers. He saw something dangerous in me and it excited him. Mehar had that same darkness but deeper, wilder, less controlled. She was everything I’d been at nineteen except she wasn’t pretending. She was the real thing. And Quest could tell the difference.
That made it worse. Because it meant he hadn’t just moved on. He’d upgraded.
I went to the cemetery on Quindon’s birthday because I knew he’d be there. He went every year. I thought maybe after fourteen years, after all the time and distance, something in him had softened. That maybe seeing me at our son’s grave would remind him of what we had before the lie broke it. That he’d look at me and see the girl he loved at seventeen instead of the woman who betrayed him at nineteen.
He didn’t. He looked at me like I was a stranger he wanted gone. There was no softness. No hesitation. Just cold fury and a warning that if I showed up again, his respect for Mekhi wouldn’t be enough to protect me. I left that cemetery knowing two things: Quest would never forgive me, and he was falling in love with somebody else. Real love. The kind he’d been refusing to feel for fourteen years. And he was giving it to her.
My jealousy grew into something I stopped trying to name. I didn’t want to get him back anymore. I wanted her out of the picture. I wanted to take from her what she’d taken from me, which was the possibility of being loved by the only man I’d everwanted. If I couldn’t have him, she wasn’t going to either. Not peacefully. Not without paying for it.
“Janelle? Are you okay?”
Amber was looking at me with concern, which was ironic because she was paying me to look at her with concern and somehow we’d switched. I blinked and reset my face and checked the clock. Forty-one minutes. We had four minutes left and I hadn’t heard a word she’d said for the last ten.
“I’m fine, Amber. I was just sitting with something you said a moment ago. It resonated with me.” I smiled. “Let’s pick this up next week. I think you’re making really beautiful progress.”
She beamed. They always beam when you tell them they’re progressing. People will believe anything if you say it with enough warmth and a tilted head.
Amber gathered her bag and her jacket and thanked me twice on the way out. I waited until the door closed. I checked the time. I had exactly one hour before my next client, which was more than enough to get to the warehouse, check on things, and get back. I grabbed my bag, locked my office, and took the elevator down to the parking garage.
I was putting my bag in the passenger seat when I saw the Maybach pull into the garage.
My body knew before my brain caught up. I dropped into my driver’s seat and stayed low. Through my window I watched Quest park near the elevator, get out, and walk toward the building entrance. His jaw was tight. His stride was fast and deliberate. This wasn’t a casual visit. He was looking for something. Looking for someone.
Looking for me.
He disappeared through the glass doors and into the lobby and I didn’t waste a second. I started the engine, threw it in reverse, and pulled out of my spot. I kept my headlights off until I cleared the garage exit and hit the street, then I flooredit heading east. My heart was slamming against my ribs but my hands were steady on the wheel because I didn’t do panic. I assessed, I adjusted, and I moved forward. I’d been doing it since I was nineteen.
By the time I hit the first red light my phone was ringing. It was Mekhi.
I hadn’t talked to my brother in weeks. I’d been dodging his calls, letting the silence grow because silence was easier than lying to someone who knew me too well. But he was calling now. Right now. While Quest was inside my building going through God knows what, and Mehar was in my warehouse, and everything I’d been carefully constructing was one wrong move from collapsing.
I answered.
“What the fuck did you do?”
4
Quest
“Where is Janelle Black?” I barked at the assistant in the lobby area of Janelle’s office. I had never been here before because for the fuck what?
After we ended years ago, I put so much distance between us it would’ve taken the Earth folding in on itself to bring me around her again, and here I was.
Harming Mehar was enough to close the gap, and finally give Janelle what she wanted most. My hands on her. But not the way she envisioned it. Whenever I got to her, and I was going to get to her, I was choking the living daylights out of that bitch.
“Um, you just missed her,” the young woman responded. My tone and demeanor had her shaken, because her breath was shallow and her eyes were as wide as saucers.
“How long ago?”
“Like five minutes. She left out of the garage.”
“Fuck,” I scoffed as I headed back into the garage.
I didn’t even know what she was driving these days. I didn’t know shit about her anymore. She was dead to me after the hurtful shit she pulled. Seeing her at the cemetery was the first time I’d seen her in years.
