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“Cardez.” I could hear her smiling over the other end. “Pocket watching is tacky as hell. What exactly are you trying to insinuate?”

I dropped it because there was no way to ask her what I really wanted to know without sounding like an elitist asshole. I would just have to get the answers my way.

I waltzed into her building like I belonged there and got her door open in under two minutes.

Her condo was nice as hell. It was a nice sized one bedroom in Tribeca with high ceilings. She had good taste, judging by the art on the gallery wall she put together. I recognized a few pieces from some Black artists that I had in my own home. These weren’t cheap pieces either. Her living room bookshelf was packed with thrillers and cookbooks.

I took my time as I walked through her place. Her bathroom was filled with expensive skincare and hair products, including a whole bag of braiding hair and wigs.

The bedroom is where things got interesting. She had a king-sized bed topped with hella pillows. I checked the nightstand drawers and found a Glock 19. It was loaded with the safety off. Made sense. She was a single woman in the city and worked a job that had her walking to her car at odd hours of the morning.

The drawer underneath gave me pause. There were three phones, one was on but locked. Burners? Why would she need those?

I went back out to the dining room table where she had a stack of financial statements weighted down under a candle. I couldn’t resist looking. Her portfolio was impressive—a little under two million in diversified assets. That was a lot for somebody who only managed bottle girls. But it explained how she was able to afford her apartment. She wasn’t reckless with her money. She was patient and invested, letting it grow over the years.

“What you got going on, Belle?” I muttered to myself. I put everything back exactly how I found it, checking her bedroom one more time to make sure I hadn’t moved anything and left.

The gun, I understood. The money, I could try and rationalize a dozen different ways—an inheritance maybe or she learned the importance of investing young. The burners killed all that though. Those meant that she had a whole other life she kept from whatever she was showing me.

I sat with that in my car for a minute before I called Marco.

“I need you to run a background check on somebody.”

It wasn’t personal. I did it with everyone I let get close to me. When your last name carried the kind of weight mine did, you couldn’t afford to be reckless about who you spent your time with.

“Full name: La’Belle Mafia Evans,” Marco said, handing me a manila folder. We were in my office two days after I’d gone through her apartment. “She had a wire fraud charge when she was twenty-one and had three years probation.”

“That all?”

“All I could find. No other arrests or cases. She probably paid good money to have her record cleaned up.”

I rubbed my jaw. “What else you got?”

“Her moms is Regina Evans. She’s had a few petty charges—writing bad checks, petty larceny, shit like that. She’s on her fourth husband—a retired dentist out in Sleepy Hollow.”

Like mother, like daughter?

“Thanks, Marco,” I said, opening a drawer to put the file in.

“You want somebody to watch her?” he asked.

“No. I got it.”

“You sure? Wire fraud…”

“I said I got it.”

He put his hand up. “You the boss.”

Belle kept her word and called me a few days after I ran into her.

We spent the next two weeks in a space that didn’t have a label. She’d call me on her drive home from work, venting about the girls or whatever drunk nigga had gotten out of pocket in VIP that night. Some days, I’d call her in between meetings.

She let me take her out. We had dinner at a Dominican spot she loved in Washington Heights where the staff knew her by name. Next, a rooftop bar in Dumbo where we went through two bottles of wine and argued about movies and music. One random Sunday, we spent the whole afternoon people watching on the High Line, making up stories about the strangers that passed us.

⁠1We learned more about each other on each date. She’d never graduated college, hated rom-coms, but loved sci-fi and horror movies. And somewhere along the way, she figured out I was a workout head who was type A about damn near everything.

The physical shit was getting harder to manage though. Every time we were together, we ended up with our tongues down each other's throats. It took longer and longer to stop—the line between self-control and stupidity was quickly disappearing.