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I finished packing after I got off the phone with Marco. By the time Belle came out of the shower, I was mostly done getting ready to go. She dressed quickly in yoga pants and a tank top and went to work to quickly pack her things.

“Thank you for this,” she said as we handed our luggage to the bellman.

“It was nothing.” I pulled her to me and kissed her.

She smiled against my mouth and gave me another quick peck.

I grabbed our carry-ons and followed her out.

This trip had been exactly what I needed. But what would happen once we got back to New York was a different story. Belle was unpredictable. She’d ghosted me once already, and for all the progress we made this weekend, her stubborn ass was still fighting this attraction. Especially now that we’d slept together.

If I was being honest, I wasn’t that much better. A month in and she already had me acting out of character.

Those burners and that old wire fraud charge nagged at me though. I wasn’t reckless and didn’t leave myself exposed—I knew better than that. Still, I didn’t have the full picture on her, and I’d let her get closer to me than most women ever had.

I kept telling myself there was an explanation. Everyone had a past. Maybe the burners were remnants from a former life. Maybe the charge was a reckless mistake she made when she was younger and hadn’t repeated since.

Maybe.

If I was wrong, I’d find out eventually. That’s how this always went.

The part that fucked with me was realizing that I didn’t want to be right.

12 LA’BELLE EVANS

I needed to lock in and get on my zoom. Falling for this man was not an option.

This is what I told myself even though the weekend in the Bahamas was playing on a constant loop in my head. The villa, the food, the yacht, the dick. I shook it off and pulled up Jody’s last message.

She’d found three shell companies that were low on his radar, the kind of accounts that got funded and forgotten. There were no automated alerts, and the accounts were reconciled about once a quarter. We agreed to fifty thousand out of each, staggered over four weeks so nothing would hit at the same time. After Jody’s fifteen percent, I had a nice chunk sitting in my account, and I’d already decided where the next hundred was going.

That was the whole point of this.

A hundred and fifty thousand dollars didn’t mean anything to a nigga who owned a resort and a yacht. He’d spent almost a quarter of that flying me to Nassau on a whim. That was the part that should’ve made me feel some type of way. But it didn’t.

This was money for my future. Every dollar got invested, stacked, and worked quietly for me in the background. No man would ever hold money over my head.

That’s what made it fucked up. Cardez spent on me freely, never asking for anything in return that I wasn’t already willing to give. There was no reason for this anymore. But the moment I stopped running game on him, I became a woman falling for a nigga she had no business catching feelings for, and I refused to be her. The thrill was never only about the money. It was the control. And that control was starting to slip out of my hands.

It’d been a week since the trip, and I hadn’t seen Cardez, though we talked every day. I tried to keep our conversations brief, but he was so easy to talk to. That only made the sinking feeling in my stomach worse.

So tonight, I was going out with my girls. Siani, Jody, and my other friend Bianca were going to a lounge in Brooklyn. I was looking forward to getting drunk and taking my mind off of him.

Siani looked me up and down as I met her in front of her building. “Okay, Ms. Island Gyal,” she teased.

“Shut up,” I said, hugging her.

“You look good though.” She linked her arm through mine. “All glowing an’ shit.”

“Yeah, a tan will do that to you.”

“And some good dick.” She squeezed me to her side.

I laughed. “That too.”

“Oop!” she exclaimed as our Uber pulled up.

Jody and Bianca were already at Premiere when we got there. We found them in a section on the first floor in the back, drinks already in hand.