42. Asha
Asha
They moved me in the middle of the night.
Two men came into the Pacific Street room, told me to stand up, and walked me to a car parked in the alley behind the building.
The younger one went back and draped a jacket over the chair I'd been sitting in, arranging it like someone was still there.
Before we left he'd taken my phone too, asked for it with his hand out and his voice flat, then set it face-up on the table beside the water bottle.
Nobody explained where we were going. Nobody said a word during the drive.
The second location was in Crown Heights.
An apartment on the second floor of a building I didn't recognize, cleaner than the first place, with actual furniture instead of just a chair and a table.
A couch against the wall, a television that wasn't turned on, a kitchen area with a counter and a sink.
The windows were covered with heavy curtains that blocked the streetlight.
The lock on the front door was a deadbolt that only opened from the outside.
Supreme was already there when they brought me in.
He was sitting at the kitchen counter with his phone in front of him, scrolling through messages, his face tight.
The man who'd accused me of being the leak at Pacific Street looked worse now.
Whatever calls had come in since then had taken more out of him.
His operation wasn't just damaged. It was collapsing.
He looked up when they walked me in. "Sit down, baby."
I sat on the couch. The two men who'd moved me took positions by the door.
One of them was new, someone I hadn't seen before.
Younger, quieter, his eyes moving between me and Supreme like he was waiting for instructions.
The other was one of Supreme's regulars, a man called Bolo who I knew from the apartment.
He was older, heavier, and he carried two weapons because he thought it made him look important.
Supreme went back to his phone. His fingers were moving fast, typing messages, reading replies, typing again. Every few minutes his phone would ring and he'd answer in a low voice, turning away from me, his responses clipped. "Yeah... I know... handled... don't call this number again."
He wasn't giving orders anymore. He was putting out fires. Every call that came in was another piece of his operation breaking off.
I sat on the couch and listened.
"Bolo," Supreme called to the guard by the door. "Nobody comes in unless I say. Nobody."
"Got it, boss."
Supreme leaned back on the couch and rubbed his face with both hands.
When he dropped them his eyes were red and his composure was thinner than I'd ever seen it.
The man who controlled Crown Heights, who ran a multi-million-dollar operation through shell companies, who'd kept me in his household with charm and threats in equal measure.
That man was sitting on a couch in a safe house watching his empire get dismantled in real time.
"Premie." I kept my voice soft, concerned, the voice I always used when he needed soothing. "What's going on?"
He looked at me and something in his face shifted. At Pacific Street he'd been cold, accusatory, certain I was the leak. Now the certainty was still there but the anger had burned down to something emptier.
"You already know what's going on, Asha. You the one who made it happen."
I didn't answer. He watched me for a long moment, then his phone rang again and he turned away to answer it.
He wasn't handling it. He was drowning. Every phone call that came in tightened the lines around his mouth, deepened the shadows under his eyes.
His empire was being taken apart piece by piece and he was sitting on a couch in a Crown Heights apartment trying to figure out how it happened while the answer was sitting right next to him holding his arm.
I sat there and performed. I asked concerned questions, made sympathetic sounds, touched his arm at the right moments. I did what I always did. But underneath the performance, underneath the soft voice and the worried face, something was different.
I wasn't scared anymore. I wasn't performing to survive.
I was performing to buy time. Omar was out there somewhere, following the trail I'd built for him, moving through Supreme's operation with the map I'd drawn at Portia's table.
Every minute I kept Supreme calm, every question I asked that he answered, every touch that kept him focused on me instead of his phone, was a minute Omar got closer.
Bolo coughed by the door. The younger guard checked his phone. Supreme's phone rang again and he answered with a voice that was getting rougher every time.
I sat on the couch and waited for Omar to find me.
He would. I was sure of that. The same way I'd been sure of him at sixteen, when he told me he'd wait and meant it. He would find me because that's what Omar did. He showed up. Every time. No matter what was between him and the door.
The lock was a deadbolt. It only opened from the outside. But Omar had never let a locked door stop him before.