Chapter 21 #2
Someone with expensive taste is hosting this party.
She feels out of place immediately in her old sweatshirt and jeans.
No wonder Nick told her to avoid the main entrance; as she enters through the side door he specified, she keeps her head down, catching only flashes of scenes through doorways—chandeliers, glass tables, tiled floors, strappy shoes.
The indistinct noise of chatter and music.
Nick’s waiting at the bottom of the stairwell, looking impatient. As soon as he sees her, he strides forward and grabs her arm. “Let’s go.”
He more or less drags her up the stairs, and she stumbles trying to keep pace. “Where are we going?”
He doesn’t answer. Up the first flight, things are quieter. The air is hazy. A pair in formalwear sit on the carpet, heads leaned together, staring off into space and giggling at nothing.
Oh. It’s this kind of party up here.
Nick releases Simran when they round a corner and come across a smoke-filled living room. And on the couch...Rajan and Zohra.
Simran stops short. Rajan’s sprawled on the cushion, although she can’t see his face because Zohra’s in his lap.
They’re kissing. In such a clearly involved way that Simran’s face heats.
But she can’t look away. His hand is on Zohra’s mid-back, the other tangled up in her straw-coloured hair. Zohra’s practically glued to him.
Nick makes a gagging sound. “I thought we left this behind in Surrey?”
They wrench apart immediately. Simran blinks out of her trance. Now she notices what’s on the table in front of them: a fine dusting of powder, a crumpled up five-dollar bill, rolled-up paper. More important, the euphoric haze clouding Rajan’s expression. Chemically carefree.
His eyes land on her, and immediately sharpen.
“The fuck?” His voice is hoarse, head swinging toward Nick. “You brought her here?”
Nick shrugs. “She came here herself.”
Rajan pushes Zohra off. She settles beside him instead and picks up a joint from the tray. Simran can’t help but notice how rumpled the front of her dress is. Rajan, meanwhile, glares at Nick. “I know what you’re doing, asshole.”
“What, showing Simran the ledgers?” Nick raises his eyebrows. “Yeah. Come on, Simran, they’re this way.”
He continues down the hall, and Simran mechanically turns to follow, still reeling—
A hand lands on her shoulder. “Wait.”
She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to look at Rajan and feel disappointed again. She stares down the hall, at the doorway Nick’s disappeared into, until Rajan speaks.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s none of my business.”
His hand falls away. “Right.” His laugh sounds bitter. “Of course not.”
Simran suddenly isn’t sure what they’re talking about. The drugs? Or Zohra? She has to draw the line. Fast. “What if they find out?” She turns to face him. Up close, his pupils are dilated. “They could send you to jail for this.”
“Then I guess you’re finally rid of me.”
“Don’t joke about that!” she shouts. He balks. The pair who were giggling near the wall fall silent to watch, as if this argument is now more entertaining than their hallucinations. “I can’t watch you throw it all away. What were you thinking?”
Rajan’s eyes flash, and she knows she’s hit a sore spot, because he draws closer, into her space. “What was I thinking?” he repeats. “Why’re you here off duty? You working for free now?”
She’s suddenly on defense. “I’m getting ahead on work.”
“Oh, really?” He laughs again. “What about the rest of your life, you on top of all that?”
Now he’s hit a sore spot. Without answering, she wheels around and into the room Nick went into. Rajan doesn’t follow.
It’s a home office, the ledgers stacked neatly on the wide desk. Nick raises his eyebrows—he clearly heard everything—but she ignores him to sit behind the desk.
“Need help?” Nick asks.
She opens a ledger. “No.”
Nick seems to take the hint. He leaves, but Zohra drifts in. To babysit as usual, probably.
Simran glares down at the new Aces ledger. The coded math in it would normally intrigue her, but she can’t focus. She’s angry at Rajan. But more so, she’s...sad for him.
Neetu and the others at the breakfast kitchen would call her naive for that.
They’d question whether Rajan was ever sober, or if he’s been hiding it this whole time.
She doesn’t want to believe that, but she forces herself to turn that possibility over in her mind now.
Has she been seeing what she wants to see?
There’s a sudden pain in her thumb, and she looks down to realize the hangnail she’s been biting is now bleeding. While she’s wrapping it with a tissue, Zohra hops up on the desk beside her. “Back there, with Rajan, it wasn’t what it looked like. I swear I’m not playing jealous ex.”
“We’re not together.”
Zohra continues like she hadn’t spoken. “I was trying to distract him. He was losing control. Dangerous place to be in, when you don’t have the tolerance anymore. He hasn’t done any of this stuff in months.”
So it’s his first relapse. Relief floods her, mixed with another emotion that urges her to ask if Zohra kisses everyone in danger of overdosing. She wrestles it down. “You sound like you know from experience.”
“I’ve seen my fair share of bad things happen.”
Her voice is dark. Simran’s curiosity finally overpowers her. “How did you even end up here?”
Zohra lifts a dark brow. “As in, with the Lions?”
“It’s just...”
“I’m a girl? And you don’t see girls on the news being arrested at shootouts?” She shrugs. “That’s exactly why I’m useful. People don’t expect me.” A flash of teeth. “You definitely didn’t.”
Simran would rather not reminisce about that. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“It’s not that interesting. I dated someone in the LS.
” Zohra pauses. Hesitation, Simran might almost call it, but Zohra doesn’t seem the type.
“He was older, and gave me all the attention I wanted. Plus, he was loaded. I was shopping seven days a week, driving luxury cars...first time in my life I had money.”
“You didn’t question where that money came from?”
“Of course I did. I knew Jai was involved in the LS. But honestly, I liked it. Hard to resist the sexy bad-boy thing.” She shoots Simran a knowing look.
Simran pretends not to notice. “So when he started asking me to do things for them, I didn’t mind.
Like, I’d put his gun in my purse when we went out.
I’d drive him and his friends around because cops wouldn’t suspect a seventeen-year-old girl.
Things like that. I didn’t care. Especially because on top of everything else, Jai’s friends were offering to pay my university tuition.
Before that, I never thought I’d get to go. ”
Simran has to admire the Lions’ resourcefulness. Of course they’d invest in a future lawyer on their payroll. Of course an organization of their magnitude has people in high places. She waits for more, but Zohra doesn’t offer. “You’re using a lot of past tense.”
Zohra glances at the door, still slightly ajar. “Don’t you have work to do?”
Simran hears the signal loud and clear. She finally turns her attention to the transactions in the book, fixating on one in particular.
“Give me a pen,” she says after a moment. Her focus has returned.
Zohra does. “How’re you going to figure it out?”
“By context.” She taps the page. “Add up all the digits in the ones place. If B plus B plus B equals B, B has to be either zero, because zero times three is zero, or five, because five times three is fifteen. Right?”
Zohra frowns, seemingly doing the math. “I...guess so.”
Simran points at the tens place. “And here, B plus U plus U equals B. For that to work, B has to be zero. And U has to be five.”
Zohra nods slowly. “Because...if B were five, you’d have to carry a one to the tens place, and it would’ve fallen apart.”
“Exactly.” Simran smiles. “Now we have a foothold to figure out the rest.”
And so she does. Zohra’s silent at her side while she works, and several minutes later, she has the code: the numbers zero through nine are encrypted with the letters of the word BANKRUPTCY.
Zohra laughs softly when she writes it down. Then pulls up a chair to sit. “I wanna help.” Whatever she’s been using tonight has made her a gentler, warmer version of herself. Simran doesn’t object, just places the ledger between them.
“Holy shit,” Zohra says once they’ve decoded all the transactions. “That’s...a lot of money, right?”
Simran nods. “And a lot of drugs they’re keeping somewhere.”
Somewhere. She can’t help but think about the cipher in her notebook at home. Can’t help but wonder if it holds the key.
Zohra pushes the ledger away and stretches.
“Well, this was fun. I can see why you’re a good math tutor.
” At Simran’s expression, she shrugs. “What? We read up on you. Mathlete. A-plus student. Golden girl of your school, awards from the city, involved in apparently every nonprofit in town. Pretty impressive.”
“I like to keep busy.”
“Or you’re a people pleaser.”
Simran frowns. Zohra, meanwhile, glances again at the door. She appears to be warring with herself, but finally, she rises to close it. The sounds of the party fade.
Zohra turns to face her. “I didn’t tell you the full story with Jai.”
A chill runs down Simran’s spine. Where this is coming from, she doesn’t know, but when Zohra sits again, her voice is hushed.
“The older I got, the more Jai asked me to do. He’d rent properties and insure cars in my name.
He had me get my firearms license and buy guns, so his friends could break into my car and steal them.
It made me nervous. But when I started pushing back, Jai said I owed him.
That’s when I saw a new side of him.” She wraps her arms around herself.
“The only control I had was when I cheated on him. But he didn’t even seem to care.
In fact...” She takes a deep breath. “He was more than okay with me having sex with other people. Last fall, he tried to talk me into doing it with his friend.”
Simran stares. “Why?”
“For money. We’d split the profits, right? Except I knew it didn’t work like that. I’d seen some of those girls...they weren’t exactly on equal footing with their pimps.” Zohra smiles grimly. “I finally said no to him.”
“And?”
“He got mad.” A shadow crosses her face. “I ran out of the house. Rajan was there. I got in the car, Jai was waving his gun around, screaming that he was going to kill me, and...I didn’t think.”
Simran realizes, suddenly, where the story is going. “It was you,” she breathes. “You ran him over.”
Zohra’s eyes dart around, like someone might hear. “Listen, I was nineteen. I was freaking out. Murder? I could go to prison. And even if not, all my law school dreams would be over. But...Rajan was seventeen.”
Simran’s still processing this. “He took the fall.”
“I didn’t ask him to,” Zohra says defensively.
“He just...did. The cops bought it. So did the courts—Rajan pled guilty, it was an open-and-shut case. Jealous boyfriend, they see it all the time with the gangs. They’d kill each other over a parking space, you know?
Even the Lions thought Rajan did it. Everyone knew we were sleeping together.
Only Nick knows the truth.” Her eyes take on a faraway look.
“I guess I owe him for that. I always will.”
Simran is quiet. Rajan went to juvie, got all sorts of labels that will stick to him for life, for something he didn’t do. What if they’d tried him as an adult? Does his own life mean so little to him? Or does Zohra mean that much?
Zohra’s voice brings her back. “Being a people pleaser got me to the worst place of my life. I have a feeling you’re like me that way, so I have a question for you that would’ve saved me a lot of trouble: How far are you gonna take it?”
Simran raises her eyes to Zohra’s.
“Have you ever asked yourself that? Because you should. You need to find the point where doing what other people want makes you more sad for yourself than happy for them.” Zohra rises from her seat. “And you need to figure it out before it happens.”