CHAPTER 16
RETALIATION
Chucky J resurfaced two days after the news coverage peaked, showing up at the house without warning, thinner around the eyes than Varnell remembered, offering no real explanation beyond a tired "told you I'd be back" that closed the subject before it could open further.
Varnell let it go, relief outweighing the lingering sting of having been shut out, though something in him filed the silence away all the same, a small debt not yet forgiven so much as postponed.
The first sign came quiet, easy to miss if you weren't looking for it — unfamiliar faces posted on blocks that should've been empty of anyone but their own people, cars idling too long outside spots that didn't usually draw attention.
Hamid clocked it before anyone else did, pulling Varnell and Chucky J aside with the same militant urgency he brought to every serious threat.
"They coming for us," Hamid said, flat. "Not testing no more. Coming."
He wasn't wrong. Two nights later, gunfire erupted on a block that had stayed quiet for years, the four of them — Hamid, Varnell, Rico, Chucky J — caught together in a rare moment of overlap, coordinating logistics in the wake of Moose's continued silence, when the first shots shattered the calm without warning.
They scattered on instinct, years of readiness kicking in faster than conscious thought, Hamid barking directions even as bullets chewed into brick and metal around them.
What followed felt less like a firefight and more like a chase through a maze none of them had built — cutting through alleys, vaulting fences, doubling back on streets that all started to blur together under the adrenaline and the dark, pursuers matching their every turn with unnerving precision, like this had been planned meticulously rather than improvised in the moment.
Rico took the fatal shot rounding a corner too tight, too fast, a decision that would've worked in any other circumstance suddenly costing him everything when the pursuit anticipated exactly that turn.
He went down hard, and Varnell, closest to him, dropped beside him on instinct even as Chucky J screamed at him to keep moving.
"Rico—"
There was nothing to be done. Varnell had seen enough in his years around Ellis's gym, around every hard lesson the streets had taught him since, to recognize immediately that this wasn't survivable, the light already fading from Rico's eyes before Varnell could even finish saying his name.
Whatever resentment Rico had carried toward him since that first schoolyard beef felt suddenly, achingly irrelevant, washed away by the raw fact of a life ending in the gutter of a block he'd claimed as his own for years.
"Move!" Chucky J's hand closed around his arm, hauling him back to his feet, urgency overriding grief in the only way that could keep them both alive in that moment. "He's gone, Varnell, we gotta go, now!"
They ran. Hamid took a hit somewhere in the chaos that followed, a graze along his side that slowed him but didn't stop him, cursing through gritted teeth as he kept pace, refusing to let the injury become the reason any more of them didn't make it out.
The pursuit finally broke off blocks later, whoever had orchestrated the ambush apparently satisfied with the damage already done, content to let the survivors scatter rather than press an advantage that risked exposing them further.
They regrouped in a stripped-down safehouse on the edge of the block, adrenaline crashing hard into grief and fear in the sudden quiet, Hamid pressing a torn shirt against his own wound with shaking hands, Chucky J pacing tight circles, unable to sit still with the weight of what had just happened.
"Rico's dead," Varnell said, the words feeling unreal even as he spoke them, like saying it plainly might make the whole night retroactively true in a way it still didn't feel like standing there breathing hard in a stranger's abandoned apartment.
"I know," Chucky J said, voice tight. "I know, man. I know."
Hamid said nothing at all, jaw clenched hard enough that Varnell could see the muscle working even in the dim light, some private grief or fury or both sitting too deep to voice yet.
? ? ?
There was no time to properly mourn, no space carved out for grief in the immediate aftermath — only the cold calculation of survival, Chucky J already working the phone, arranging something, voice low and urgent in a way that left no room for argument.
"We can't stay here," he told Varnell once he hung up. "Whoever hit us, they know our patterns now, know our blocks. We need distance while we figure out who and why."
"Where."
"NY. I still got people there, still got the shop we built. Safer than sitting here waiting for round two."
Varnell thought of Vanessa, of Angellisa, of Demarcus, of everyone he was about to leave behind without explanation in the interest of staying alive long enough to protect them properly later.
He thought of Rico's body somewhere behind them, of Hamid's wound still seeping through a makeshift bandage, of Moose's continued, inexplicable silence through all of it.
"Okay," Varnell said finally, exhaustion and grief and fear compressing into the only decision that made sense. "NY. Let's go."
They left before sunrise, the city they'd spent years building an empire inside of suddenly feeling less like home and more like a battlefield they'd narrowly survived, one they weren't at all certain they'd get the chance to return to on their own terms.