Justice
Creed called at six in the morning while I was sitting in the hospital cafeteria in Grenada drinking the worst coffee I’d ever tasted and staring at a spreadsheet on my laptop that had nothing to do with Banks Reserve and everything to do with dismantling the Rios family from the ground up.
“I got something for you,” Creed said.
“Talk to me.”
Eight hundred kilos. At street value that was somewhere north of forty million dollars.
Forty million in one container moving through Baltimore like it was nothing.
That’s how the Rios family operated. Big, bold, and untouchable because nobody had ever been stupid enough or angry enough to touch them.
We were both.
“What’s the security?” I asked.
“Light on the dock side. Two guys watching the container once it’s offloaded, both Rios soldiers.
The real security is in the transport after it clears the port.
Three SUVs, armed drivers, a route that changes every shipment.
But that’s not your window. Your window is the container sitting on the dock between offload and pickup.
About a four-hour gap where it’s just two men and a metal box. ”
“That’s the window.”
“That’s the window,” Creed confirmed. “You need my people on the ground or you handling this in-house?”
“Prime’s flying back tonight. He’ll handle the execution. I just need your intel to be airtight.”
“It’s airtight. My guy has been watching Solana Import for three months. This isn’t the first shipment but it should be the last.”
“Good. I owe you, Creed.”
“Nah. Somebody tried to kill your brother’s pregnant fiancée. We don’t owe each other shit for handling that. Call me when it’s done.”
He hung up and I sat there in that cafeteria with cold coffee and a container number on a napkin.
I felt the machinery of war click into gear.
This was how it started. Not with gunshots or threats or dramatic declarations.
It started with a spreadsheet and a phone call and a man in a hospital cafeteria doing math on a napkin while his brother’s baby was fighting to breathe two floors above him.
· · ·
Prime met with me outside of the hospital where we got fresh air. The stale air of the hospital was starting to weigh on us while we waited for the best outcomes for Mehar and Babygirl.
I relayed to him all the info that Creed had just given me. And we agreed that he would blow that shit up.
“Prime, listen. Once that container blows up we’re officially at war.
There’s no taking it back. Rodrigo is going to retaliate and he’s going to start with the people closest to us.
You need to get Zainab and the twins somewhere safe before you touch that shipment.
Move them first, then handle the container. ”
Prime was quiet for a second. I could hear him processing, weighing the danger to his family against the necessity of the strike. He didn’t take long.
“I’ll move them to the safe house in upstate NY. Not too far from Riot.”
“Good. Do that tonight. Fly out, move your family, then handle the port. In that order.”
“And Quest?”
“Quest stays here with Mehar and the baby. He’s not leaving this hospital until they’re stable enough to fly. I’m setting up the medevac now. Once they’re stateside and secure, he can join the fight. But right now he needs to be a father, not a general.”
“Got you. Anything else?”
“Yeah. The Kings are working on locating Rodrigo’s family. He’s already moved LaLa and Paco into hiding so they’re off the board for now. But his younger brother Manny is a student at Georgetown. He’s still on campus. He doesn’t know we’re coming.”
“What you want to do with him?”
“I’ll handle Manny myself. He’s not a soldier, he’s a college kid. But he’s leverage and right now leverage is more valuable than another body.”
“You sure you want that on your hands?”
“I’m sure. Quest spared Mateo’s son. Showed mercy. And they answered that mercy by trying to kill a pregnant woman. So no, I’m not feeling charitable. Manny is a chess piece and I’m going to use him.”
“Aight. I’ll hit you when I’m stateside.”
I dapped him goodbye. He left the stairwell to say bye to Quest. In forty-eight hours, forty million dollars of Rios cocaine was going to blow up at a port in Baltimore.
Prime was going to move his family into hiding.
And I was going to pay a visit to a college kid at Georgetown who had no idea his last name was about to cost him everything.
The war was starting. And the Rios family didn’t know it yet, but they were already losing.
· · ·
The medevac was the easy part. I called three air medical transport companies before I found one that could handle a premature infant on a ventilator and a postpartum mother recovering from surgery simultaneously.
Global MedFlight out of Miami. Gulfstream IV configured as a flying ICU with a neonatal team and a surgical nurse on board.
They could be in Grenada within twenty-four hours of confirmation that Mehar and the baby were stable enough to fly.
I booked them for Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
Best NICU in the region and close enough to DC that the family could be nearby without anyone having to fly.
The cost was four hundred thousand dollars for the transport alone.
That wasn’t shit for their lives. My brother had been through too much and Mehar and their daughter had to survive.
It could’ve cost a billion dollars and we would’ve worked it out.
My phone buzzed while I was finishing the paperwork. Storie was FaceTiming me.
I answered and her face filled the screen.
Hair done, nails done, lip gloss popping.
Fourteen years old and already looking at me like I was someone she tolerated rather than someone she loved.
Erika’s house in the background, decorated and tidy, and I could see Dream somewhere behind Storie playing with a doll on the couch.
“Hey baby girl.”
“Hey Daddy. So did they find Uncle Quest?”
“Yeah. They found him and Mehar. They’re alive. They’re in a hospital in Grenada. The baby came early and she’s in the NICU but she’s fighting. Mehar had emergency surgery but she’s stable.”
I paused, waiting for the reaction. For relief, for tears, for the emotions a teenager should have when she hears her uncle and his fiancée nearly died on a deserted island and their premature baby is breathing through a machine.
“Oh okay, that’s good,” Storie said. The words were right but the temperature was wrong.
They were flat and polished. Like she was acknowledging a weather report and not the near-death of her family.
She moved on before I could even process it.
“So listen, school starts in a few weeks and I saw this Celine bag online. It’s like three thousand but Daddy hear me out.
None of the other girls at school have one.
Like literally nobody. And I need to stand out this year because—”
“No.”
“Daddy, you didn’t even let me finish.”
“I said no, Storie. I just told you your uncle almost died and your response is to ask me for a three-thousand-dollar purse.”
“I said that’s good! What else am I supposed to say? I don’t even know what a NICU is. They’re fine, right? So can we talk about the bag?”
I looked at my daughter’s face on that screen and felt something I couldn’t name.
She was beautiful, sharp, confident, completely unbothered by information that should’ve shaken her.
I tried to tell myself she was fourteen, that teenagers were selfish by design, that her brain wasn’t finished developing and empathy was a skill she was still learning.
But Monica would’ve had something to say about this moment and Monica wasn’t here to say it and I was too tired and too deep in a war to parent the way this situation required.
“I’ll be home in about a week. We’ll talk then. Where’s your sister?”
“DREAM! Daddy wants you!”
The phone shifted and Dream’s face appeared, wide-eyed and open and everything her sister wasn’t. She was holding a piece of paper up to the camera.
“Daddy, look! I drew a picture for the baby. It’s a butterfly because butterflies are pretty and I want the baby to feel pretty even though she’s in the hospital. Can you give it to her?”
My throat tightened. “Yeah sweetheart. I’ll give it to her. That’s really beautiful.”
“Is Auntie Mehar okay? I’ve been praying for her every night like Grandma taught me.”
“She’s going to be okay, baby. And I know she’d love to hear that you’ve been praying. I’ll tell her.”
“Tell her I love her too. And tell Uncle Quest I love him. And tell the baby I love her. Tell everybody I love them, okay?”
“I will. I love you, Dream.”
“Love you more, Daddy!”
The FaceTime ended and I sat there holding my phone and staring at the blank screen.
Two daughters. Same parents, same household, same loss of their mother, same everything.
And they were becoming two completely different people.
Dream was sunshine in human form, a child whose first instinct was to draw a picture and pray.
Storie was something else. Something I didn’t have a word for yet and wasn’t sure I wanted to find one.
I put the phone in my pocket and went back to the spreadsheet. The shipment. The medevac. Georgetown. The war. I had too much in motion to sit in the stairwell worrying about a Celine bag and what my daughter’s lack of reaction meant about the person she was becoming.
But it stayed with me. The way she’d said “oh okay, that’s good” and moved straight to the purse. The way nothing I told her landed on her face. I filed it in the place I kept things I didn’t have time to deal with and told myself I’d come back to it later.
I always said that. Later. When things calmed down. When the crisis passed. When there was time to be a father instead of a fixer.
Later never came. And Storie wasn’t waiting for it.
· · ·
Prime texted me at eleven that night. Two words.
Wheels up.
He was on his way to DC. By tomorrow night, Zainab and the twins would be in the safe house in upstate NY. By Tuesday morning, eight hundred kilos of Rios cocaine would blow to smithereens at the Port of Baltimore. And by the time Rodrigo figured out what happened, I’d have Manny.
I closed the laptop and walked upstairs to check on Quest. He was asleep in the chair next to Mehar’s bed, his hand still holding hers, his head tilted at an angle that was going to wreck his neck in the morning.
Mehar was still sedated, still breathing through the monitors, still alive.
Their daughter was two floors up, three pounds and eleven ounces of stubbornness on a ventilator that was keeping her lungs going until they figured out how to work on their own.
I stood in the doorway admiring how far my brother had come. He came from swearing he would never be monogamous nor have children to being this guy. They fought to have this baby. And I was prepared to fight the people who tried to kill her.