Pushing me.
Daring me to break.
The stale warehouse air brought me back to the present. The whole place was quiet except forthe low hum of the fluorescent lights as me and Slim followed Jelani through rows of stacked crates.
We’d just gotten a shipment of guns from the Reapers. So far, the alliance we’d made with them for helping Cash get Jasmine back had been working well for us.
I popped open the latch on one of the crates and pulled it open. Inside, brand new weapons were tightly packed.
I glanced at Jelani. “How many are we keeping?”
“Half,” he said as he flipped through the manifest. “The rest are going down to Miami.”
Slim peeled back some bubble wrap on a second crate. “Rocket launchers? Since when we needed these?”
“They threw it in as a bonus for the last shipment,” Jelani replied, not looking up. “Something about appreciation for the last drop.”
I grunted. CJ had been on my shit list since I first met him in New York. The nigga was too cocky and the fact that he was the one Nairobi chose to keep her bed warm while she was gone? Shit sat in my chest like lead. I kept telling myself it wasn’t personal—she wasn’t mine. And once she left, I realized she’d never really been. But that didn’t stop my jaw from clenching every time I thought about them together.
“Yo,” Jelani said, slamming the crate shut. “I heard your girl’s back.”
“Who?” I asked, knowing damn well who he was talking about.
It’d been a week since I pulled up outside her condo like a lovesick teenager. I knew she wouldn’t let me up, but I couldn’t help myself. She hadn’t reached out to me since, and I’d been keeping my distance.
Didn’t mean I wasn’t keeping tabs though.
Slim sucked his teeth. “So you actin’ brand new now?”
“I’m single,” I muttered.
“Yeah aight,” he snorted.
“I don’t know what the fuck y’all are goin’ on about.” I pulled out my phone to check her location again. She was still at her mom’s.
“Mmhm,” Jelani grinned, leaning against a crate. “Slim, how much you wanna bet this nigga already seen her? Mr. Hack-the-Planet probably got her geotagged like endangered wildlife or some shit.”
I cut my eyes at him. “Whatever, nigga.”
She wasn’t geotagged exactly—but it wasn’t that difficult to hack The Agency’s servers after she disappeared in New York. I didn’t do anything too wild, just enough to see what cities she was working in and who her marks were. I wasn’t trying to interfere. I just needed to know she was okay.
And maybe… maybe I’d flown out once or twice.
Miami was the first time when I thought I could convince her to come back. I watched her lure Hunter Barlowe in with that smile—made him feel like he was the one pulling her when she was building this web around him. A year later I did it again in Morocco. It was a mercenary this time, a real big motherfucker. But the result was the same. She was art in motion, and I was the idiot standing outside the exhibit, obsessed.
I stopped after Morocco after I started noticing a pattern in her movements. Every time she had a job in New York, she’d stay longer than necessary. A few extra days here and there. It didn’t take long to figure out why. She was spending time with CJ. Once I saw that, I deleted the back door I’d built into The Agency’s servers and told myself I was done. Watching her move on was something I wasn’t built for.
I’d never say that shit out loud though.
I slipped the phone back in my pocket and glanced at the two of them. “We done here or y’all still got more jokes?”
Slim shook his head. “You been scowling all tense like youfinna punch a hole in the wall. What happened when you went to Miami?”
I rubbed a hand over my head. “Ain’t shit to say. She obviously didn’t want to come back.”
Slim squinted. “But you checking her location, though.”
“I wasn’t checking her location.”
