CHAPTER 17
UNRAVELING
Sleep stopped coming easy after Rico's death, and when it came at all, it came shallow and broken, Varnell jolting awake at sounds that turned out to be nothing more than the ordinary creak of an unfamiliar apartment settling around him.
He'd close his eyes and see the corner again, the too-tight turn, the way the light had already started leaving Rico's eyes before he could finish saying his name.
Some nights he didn't bother trying to sleep at all, just sat by the window watching the street below, convinced every idling car held the same precision that had found them that night.
Chucky J noticed, of course, though there was less patience in his concern now than there'd been back in Florida — less room, in the middle of an active war, for gentleness.
"You gotta rest," Chucky J told him, more than once, watching Varnell's hollowed eyes with a mixture of worry and something harder underneath it, an urgency that had no time to wait for anybody's healing.
"I'm fine."
"You ain't fine. You jumpy. Jumpy get people killed."
Varnell didn't have an answer for that, because some part of him knew it was true, and knowing it didn't make the jumping stop.
? ? ?
Angellisa called more than usual during that stretch, worry evident even through the distance of a phone line, sensing something had shifted without knowing the specifics of what.
"You've been different," she said one night, careful, like she was approaching something fragile. "Distant. You okay?"
"I'm handling some stuff."
"You can tell me, you know. Whatever it is."
But he couldn't, not really — couldn't explain the corner, the shot, the running, without unraveling every careful omission he'd built their entire relationship around, and something in him, exhausted and raw and unwilling to risk the one clean thing left in his life, chose distance over honesty instead.
"I need some space right now," he said finally, the words costing him more than he let his voice betray. "Not — not breaking up. Just space. Till I get through this thing."
The silence on her end lasted long enough that he almost took it back. "Okay," she said eventually, hurt clear beneath the careful evenness of her voice. "Call me when you're ready, then."
He hung up feeling like he'd cut away one more piece of himself in the interest of protecting whatever remained, uncertain whether that math would ever balance out the way he was telling himself it would.
? ? ?
The revenge planning consumed most of what waking hours he had left, him and Chucky J hunched over maps and names and half-confirmed intelligence, trying to piece together who exactly had orchestrated the ambush that killed Rico and nearly killed Hamid too.
"Gotta be somebody who knew our patterns," Chucky J said, tracing possible routes and timelines with the focus of a man who'd stopped sleeping properly himself. "Ambush that clean don't happen without inside knowledge."
"You thinking somebody close to us."
"I'm thinking we can't rule it out." Chucky J's jaw tightened at the implication of his own words. "And I don't like that thought no more than you do."
They worked through possibilities late into the night, plans forming and dissolving as new information trickled in through Hamid's contacts and whatever remained of their own network, a slow, methodical assembly of intent that Varnell recognized, somewhere beneath the numbness, as something darker than anything he'd done before — not defense anymore, not diplomacy.
Retribution, plain and simple, and the ease with which he found himself settling into planning it scared him more than he let Chucky J see.
? ? ?
He wrote to Rodney that week too, shorter than his previous letters, unable to muster the same warmth given everything sitting heavy on him.
Things got real bad, Rodney. Somebody came at us hard, and we lost somebody — Rico, you ain't know him, but he mattered to people I care about.
Might not hear from me for a minute. Ain't leaving you, just handling something that don't leave much room for anything else right now.
Stay safe in there. I'll be back when I can. — V
He mailed it with none of the hope his earlier letters had carried, just the flat necessity of keeping one promise intact even while everything else in his life felt like it was fraying past his ability to hold together.
? ? ?
Demarcus made the call about Vanessa without much room for argument, showing up at the house himself to explain it plainly, no attempt to soften what needed saying.
"She can't stay here," Demarcus said, Varnell and Vanessa both listening in tense silence. "Whoever came at y'all knows where we live now, probably. I got family upstate who'll take her in quiet till this settles. She goes tonight."
"I don't want to leave my son in the middle of a war," Vanessa said, voice tight, fear and anger both fighting for the same breath.
"I know," Demarcus said, gentler now, though no less firm. "But I need him focused on staying alive, not on protecting you at the same time. Let us handle this. Please."
Vanessa looked to Varnell, searching his face for some argument he didn't have the strength left to offer. "I need you safe, Ma," he said quietly. "I can't do none of this right if I'm worried about you too."
She held his face in her hands a long moment, memorizing something in his expression that Varnell couldn't quite name, before she nodded, slow and reluctant, packing what little she needed into a single bag within the hour.
He watched her drive off with Demarcus into the dark, one more piece of his life pulled away and placed carefully out of the blast radius of whatever was still coming, and stood alone afterward in a house that had briefly felt, for a handful of good nights, like it might actually belong to something whole.