“Already done. Sample from each container. Everything’s clean.” Priest handed me the tablet. “Numbers match what we paid for. No substitutions, no bullshit.”
I scrolled through the inventory list without really seeing it. My mind was somewhere else. Somewhere in the Seventh Ward, in a shotgun house where Truth was probably asleep right now. Or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was awake, texting someone who made her smile. Maybe she was?—
“Boss.”
I looked up. Priest was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“You good?”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure? Because you’ve been staring at that screen for three minutes, and I don’t think you’ve read a single line.”
I handed the tablet back to him. “I said I’m fine.”
Priest didn’t push. He knew better. Instead, he gestured toward the containers. “You want to do a walk-through, or you trust my assessment?”
“I trust your assessment.” I pulled out my phone and checked it for the hundredth time tonight. No new messages. No missed calls. Nothing. “But I’ll do the walk-through anyway.”
We moved through the shipyard in silence, my shoes crunching on gravel, the sound of machinery and shouted instructions echoing off metal walls. The containers were stacked three high, each one marked with codes that meant nothing to customs officials and everything to the people who knew how to read them.
Priest opened the first container. I stepped inside, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. Rows of wooden crates, each onestamped with shipping labels from a furniture company in Malaysia that didn’t exist. I pulled a crowbar from the wall mount and pried open the nearest crate.
Electronics. High-end components that would be worth triple on the black market what they cost to acquire. Clean, undamaged, exactly what we’d paid for.
I moved to the next crate. Then the next. Checking serial numbers, looking for damage, making sure nobody had tried to fuck us over somewhere between the port in Kuala Lumpur and this shipyard in Houston.
Everything was perfect.
Everything was exactly as it should be.
And I couldn’t stop thinking about Truth’s face when Alexis kissed me at the bistro. The way her expression had shuttered. The way she’d gone cold and distant and unreachable.
The way I’d claimed her like property and then defended my relationship with another woman in the same breath.
“Boss,” Priest said from the container entrance. “We’re good here. You want to check the others, or you want to call it?”
I looked at the crates surrounding me. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in merchandise. A shipment that had taken three months to coordinate and cost enough in bribes to buy a house. The kind of operation that required precision, focus, and attention to detail.
And all I could think about was Truth’s silence.
“Call it,” I said, my voice rough. “Get it distributed. I want everything moved by morning.”
“Copy that.”
I climbed out of the container and walked back toward my car without looking back. Behind me, I could hear Priest giving orders, the crew moving with practiced efficiency. They didn’t need me here. They never did. I’d come because I needed thedistraction. Needed something to do with my hands that wasn’t texting Truth again like a desperate fool.
It hadn’t worked.
Nothing worked.
I drove back to New Orleans with the windows down and the radio off, letting the highway noise fill the silence. Three hours of nothing but asphalt and darkness and the weight of my own thoughts pressing on my chest like a physical thing.
By the time I pulled into my driveway, it was almost four in the morning. The house was dark except for the porch light I’d left on. I sat in the car for a long moment, my hands still gripping the steering wheel, trying to find the energy to move.
My phone buzzed.
I grabbed it so fast I nearly dropped it.
