Chapter 15
At seven PM sharp, the warehouse doors rolled open.
Dim industrial lights hung overhead, casting long shadows across the concrete floor while men lined the walls in silence.
Some sat on folding tables, cleaning guns.
Others leaned against stacks of crates or stood around talking quietly amongst themselves.
The second my heel clicked against the concrete, every conversation inside the warehouse died. Heads turned immediately, and guarded eyes followed me as I walked through the entrance.
Fear and uncertainty spread through the warehouse, and the tension in the room tightened with it. No one looked relaxed, not around me.
Word traveled fast in the streets, and I was sure the story everybody heard was the same. Koko Holiday came back from the dead, and bodies were about to start dropping.
I stopped in the center of the room and slowly looked around.
Faces started clicking into place now that my memory was returning.
I recognized men who used to stand outside our stash houses with rifles hanging off their shoulders.
Men who rode behind us during pickups and sat around counting money until three in the morning.
Men who celebrated with us, fought with us, and bled with us.
The memories came fast, but not fast enough for the emotional connections to click naturally. Some of them still felt strangely distant despite everything my mind was starting to remember. It was as if I was stepping back into someone else’s life and slowly realizing it had once belonged to me.
“Close the doors,” I ordered.
Nobody hesitated. The heavy warehouse doors slammed shut behind us a second later.
Three men were tied to chairs near the back wall, with blood running down their faces, and their hands secured behind them. One looked barely conscious, and another kept glancing toward the exit.
I walked toward them first.
“Koko…” the one in the middle started nervously.
“Don’t say my name like we cool,” I cut him off.
I stopped directly in front of them and folded my arms while studying each face carefully.
Memory was strange.
Some things stayed blurry for months, but now I could remember exactly who stood where during certain nights. I knew who handled money, who got nervous under pressure, who talked too much, and who disappeared when things went bad.
And I remembered these niggas.
“Seeing you tied up tells me one thing. You switched sides after I got hurt,” I said with disgust.
“It wasn’t even like that,” one of them rushed out. “Rich started taking over everything. Niggas were scared.”
“So y’all just rolled over and let that pussy ass nigga move into y’all town and take over your shit?”
“What were we supposed to do?” the one in the middle asked.
“Hold shit down,” I replied before glancing over my shoulder at another soldier standing nearby. “Who found them?”
“Me and Twan,” he answered quickly.
I nodded before looking back at the men tied to the chairs.
“I want to know everything you know about Rich now!”
“He got three spots,” the middleman blurted out. “One on the south side near the abandoned apartments. Another stash house off Miller. Then a spot near the highway where they been moving pills.”
“How many men be at the houses?”
He started naming names fast after that, locations, the trap that stayed busiest at night, and which ones he kept the money inside. Fear made people talk, especially when they knew death was standing directly in front of them.
When he finally stopped, I looked toward the others. “Anything to add?”
The second man shook his head vehemently. “That’s everything.”
The third started crying. Actually crying. Snot running down his face and everything.
“I swear I ain’t wanna switch up on y’all,” he choked out. “I thought you was dead, and I had to feed my family.”
A dark laugh almost escaped me. Everybody did.
I pulled my gun from my waistband.
The room went completely silent, and for a split second, I hesitated.
Not because I planned on sparing them, but because something about the familiarity of this moment unsettled me.
While I wanted to embrace these parts of me as Booda had told me, I still found it hard to believe I was this person.
Pulling a gun on people should’ve disturbed me after everything that happened.
Instead, it felt natural.
“Koko…” one of the soldiers said carefully from behind me.
I ignored him.
The man in the middle started shaking harder the second he saw the gun.
“Please,” he whispered.
I shot him in the head.
The sound exploded through the warehouse, and before the other two could react, I fired again.
Then again.
Three bodies slumped motionless in their chairs while gun smoke drifted through the air between us.
I lowered the weapon before turning around to face the room full of soldiers staring at me. “If anybody else switched sides, this is your chance to die honestly.”
Silence.
Not one person opened their mouth.
“Good,” I said as I glanced at the darkness near the back offices. “Booda. Come here.”
Every set of eyes shifted as Booda stepped beside me, and the tension inside the warehouse thickened instantly.
“Now that the team’s back together, we’re taking everything back.”
Nobody said anything. Not a single word. Some looked shocked. Some looked confused. Most looked terrified. But nobody challenged me.
I tucked the gun back into my waistband and walked toward the large table near the center of the warehouse.
“Everybody who still loyal, get over here.”
Chairs scraped loudly against concrete as people moved.
Maps, burner phones, weapons, and handwritten notes covered the tabletop.
I leaned over it, and routes, trap houses, and side streets surfaced in my head faster than I could fully process them.
Some memories still came in pieces, but instinct kept filling in the blanks, keeping me from becoming overwhelmed.
I pointed toward the map.
“Rich thinks we’re scattered. That’s why he’s being sloppy right now.”
Booda stepped beside me. “We hit every spot at the same time,” he added.
I nodded. “That’s smart. If we hit every spot at the same time, that’ll really throw Rich off his game and have his men spread thin. They can’t be everywhere at once.”
***
The stash house smelled like weed and copper. We had cleared it in under four minutes. Three of Rich's soldiers lay facedown on the kitchen tile while my people swept the bedrooms for product. I stood in the living room, rolling my shoulders, trying to shake the adrenaline loose.
Booda moved through the kitchen, looking around while I stood in the living room, rolling my shoulders, trying to shake the adrenaline loose.
“Koko.” City Boy walked over holding a black composition notebook, the kind kids used for school. “I found this in the ceiling. Looks like numbers, but I can't make sense of it.”
Booda glanced at the notebook when I took it from him.
Pages were filled with dates and figures, some crossed out, others circled in red. I stared at the handwriting, waiting for something to click, but nothing did. It was just ink on paper, as meaningless as a foreign language.
“You need me to tell you how to decode that, or you got it? I’m sure you don’t want everybody to know I’m the smart one.” He chuckled, and I rolled my eyes as I turned the page.
The format changed. Single letters paired with numbers, then more numbers, then locations abbreviated to two digits.
My thumb traced the pattern as I remembered being at Booda’s apartment at three in the morning, the one on Mercer before he moved to the loft.
We'd been sitting on his floor with Chinese food containers between us as he taught me his system.
He said I needed to know how the money moved if I was going to be his partner in truth.
“The first letter is the supplier,” he'd said, tapping my knee with his pen. “The second number is the week. Everything after that is quantity and location. You got it?”
I'd gotten it. I'd gotten it so well I'd teased him for two weeks about his terrible handwriting.
The memory hit complete, and I almost dropped the notebook.
“You good?” Twan asked, and when I looked up, I found Booda watching me from the kitchen doorway.
I could tell by his expression that he knew I’d figured it out.
“This is a secondary ledger,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. “It tracks re-ups and stash rotations. The circled entries are active locations.”
I flipped to the most recent page, fingers moving fast now, the code unlocking like a door I'd walked through a thousand times.
“He's got another house. Not on Miller, that's a decoy. Real spot is off Henderson, behind the old dry cleaner.”
City Boy stared at me. “How you know that?”
“I just know,” I replied, because there was no way I was explaining that Booda used to make me memorize this shit.
I closed the notebook and handed it back to him. “Take three cars. Leave now, before they know we have this. I'll send coordinates once we're moving.”
He nodded, turning to rally the others.
Booda waited until City Boy and the others had filtered out before crossing the living room toward me. He had that look on his face, the one that said he was about to say something I probably didn’t want to hear.
“You’re moving fast,” he said, stopping a few feet away.
“Fast is the only speed that matters right now,” I replied, moving toward the back bedroom where my people were loading duffel bags with product.
“That’s not what I meant.” His voice had that edge to it, the one that usually meant he was testing me. “I meant you’re remembering things. The ledger system, the safe houses, the way you move through operations like you never left. It’s all coming back.”
I paused at the bedroom doorway without turning around. He was right, and we both knew it. The memories weren’t just fragments anymore. They were solidifying into complete pictures, and with each one came the weight of who I used to be.
“Yeah,” I said finally, turning to face him. “They are.”
Booda stepped closer, and I could see the calculation behind his eyes. He was trying to read me, trying to figure out if getting my memories back would help me or hurt me.
That was Booda. He could never just let things be. He always had to be three steps ahead, always had to know the angle. That man would forever be protective of me.
“That’s good,” he said, but his tone suggested it was anything but simple. “I need you like you were before.”
“Before I got put in a coma?” I asked.
“Before you forgot what we built together.” He moved past me into the bedroom.
I watched him move past me, his shoulder brushing against mine. The move felt deliberate. Booda had always been territorial without making a scene about it unless somebody was stupid enough to disrespect him.
“What we built,” I repeated, the words tasting strange in my mouth. “You mean the operation.”
“I mean all of it,” he said, turning back to face me from inside the bedroom. His dark eyes held mine, and I could see the hunger, the possession, and the thing he wasn’t saying out loud. “You. Me. Us. That’s what we built, and that’s what I’ll forever hold on to.”