Chapter 37 Quest
QUEST
The courier was sweating. Young kid, maybe twenty-two, in a standard delivery uniform with a clipboard in one hand and an envelope in the other. He looked like he’d been told this was a simple drop-off and had walked into something that was very clearly not a simple drop-off.
“I was paid to read this,” he said, his voice shaking. “At this event. To this family. That’s all I know.”
“Paid by who?” Prime stepped forward.
“I don’t know. A man contacted my company and paid cash for a private delivery with a verbal reading. That’s all I was told. I swear.”
“Read it,” Rita said from her chair. Her voice was steady but something underneath it had shifted. Something I’d never heard before. Not fear exactly. More like bracing.
The courier opened the envelope with trembling fingers and pulled out a single sheet of paper. He cleared his throat and read.
“To the Banks family. On the occasion of Rita Banks’s eighty-fifth birthday, I thought it fitting to give the family a gift of truth.
Quest Banks is not the biological son of Alexander Banks Junior.
His biological father is Rashid Muhammad, formerly known as the Shadow of Brick City Crew.
This information was confirmed by Vivica Banks prior to Rashid’s death.
DNA evidence is available upon request. Happy birthday, Rita. —V.”
The room went silent. Like the air itself had been punched out and replaced with nothing.
I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. I stood there with my hand still holding Mehar’s and heard the words play back in my head on a loop. Quest Banks is not the biological son of Alexander Banks Junior. His biological father is Rashid Muhammad.
Rashid. The Shadow. The man who ran Brick City Crew. The man who trained Prime to kill. The man whose entire bloodline my family had systematically destroyed. The man who kidnapped Yusef. The man who threatened Rita in her own home.
That man was my father.
Prime moved first. He was across the room before anyone could stop him, his hand around the courier’s collar, lifting him slightly off the ground. “How did she contact you? Through who? I need a name.”
“I don’t know who she is! A man booked the delivery through our company! Cash payment, anonymous! He gave me the address and the time and told me to read it out loud. That’s all I know! Please!”
Justice was there now too, flanking Prime, his face carved from stone. “What did the man look like? Where did you meet him?”
Mekhi and Zephyr had the door blocked. Nobody was leaving until we had answers. The courier was trembling so hard the paper was rattling in his hand and I almost felt sorry for him because he was a kid who’d taken a job and walked into a war zone.
But I wasn’t looking at the courier. I was looking at Rita.
“Did you know?” I asked. My voice sounded far away, like it was coming from the other end of a tunnel. “Grandma. Did you know?”
Rita’s hands were folded in her lap. The tiara was still on her head. The champagne was still in front of her. But she looked older than she had twenty minutes ago, like the letter had aged her in real time.
“No,” she said. “I did not know.”
I searched her face for the lie the way I searched every face in every room. I didn’t find it. Rita was many things. She was ruthless, strategic, capable of secrets that would make most people’s hair turn white, but she had never lied to me. Not once in thirty-eight years.
“Quest.” She reached for me. “Baby, sit down. Let’s talk about this.”
I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t stand still. I couldn’t be in this room with everybody.
Alexander Banks Junior. The man whose company I took over at eighteen.
The man whose debt I inherited. The man whose name was on every bottle, every truck, every warehouse, every contract.
The man I’d bled for, killed for, sacrificed for.
The man whose portrait hung in the lobby of Banks Reserve headquarters.
Not my father.
I pulled my hand out of Mehar’s and walked out. Didn’t say goodbye. Didn’t explain. Just turned and moved through the casino’s dark corridors like a man who couldn’t breathe and needed air more than he needed anything else in the world.
“Quest!” Mehar’s voice behind me. Her heels on the floor. “Quest, stop!”
“Go back inside, Mehar.”
“No.”
“I said go back inside.” I was walking faster now, heading for the exit, heading for the parking lot, heading for anywhere that wasn’t here.
“And I said no.” She caught up to me and grabbed my arm and I spun on her with something in my face that should’ve scared her. It would’ve scared anyone else. It didn’t scare her.
“I want to be alone.”
“I don’t care what you want right now. I’m riding with you.”
“Mehar, I’m not in the mood—”
“I didn’t ask about your mood. You’re not leaving here alone. Not like this.”
We stared at each other in the dark hallway of the casino, both of us breathing hard, both of us shaking for different reasons.
Her eyes were steady and stubborn and full of something I couldn’t name but recognized because it was the same thing I’d felt every time she was in trouble and I showed up without being asked.
I didn’t have the energy to fight her. I didn’t have the energy to fight anything.
“Fine. Let’s go.”
We got in the whip. I pulled out of the parking lot fast enough to make the tires bark against the pavement.
Mehar buckled her seatbelt without saying a word and I was grateful for the silence because if she’d tried to comfort me I would’ve shattered and I was not prepared to shatter in front of anyone.
I drove. No destination. Just movement. The city passing by on both sides like a blur of streetlights and buildings that didn’t matter.
Rashid Muhammad was my father. That was my bloodline.
My mind went somewhere it hadn’t been in decades. I was five or six years old. Sitting on my father’s lap behind the wheel of his car, a big black sedan that smelled like leather and his cologne. Alexander had put a piece of cardboard in my hands and told me it was my driver’s license.
“See that?” he’d said, pointing at the Banks Reserve sign across the street from where we were parked. “One day that’s going to be yours. Everything I’m building will is all going to be yours, Quest. You’re going to run it. And you’re going to be better at it than I ever was.”
I remembered holding that piece of cardboard like it was the most important document in the world.
I remembered believing him with every cell in my small body.
I remembered thinking that my father was the biggest, strongest, most important man alive and that I was going to grow up to be exactly like him.
Not my father.
Then I remembered the day she told me. I was in my room playing with my action figures when Vivica came in and stood in the doorway. She didn’t sit down. Didn’t kneel to my level. She just looked at me and said “Your father is dead” the same way you’d tell someone the mail arrived.
I started crying. Loud, ugly, child sobs that I couldn’t control because I was a little boy and my daddy was gone and nobody had prepared me for a world where that was possible. Vivica crossed the room and slapped me. Hard. Across the face. I was seven years old.
“Banks men don’t cry,” she’d whispered through clenched teeth. “Stop it. Right now.”
I stopped. I wiped my face and I stopped crying and I didn’t cry again for twenty-six years.
Not when Quindon died. Not when Peanut betrayed me.
Not when the warehouse burned or the company almost went under or the women in my life proved over and over that trust was a currency I couldn’t afford.
I just stopped. Because my mother told me to at my father’s funeral.
Except he wasn’t my father. And she wasn’t just cruel.
She was protecting a secret. Every slap, every cold look, every moment of calculated distance, it wasn’t just Vivica being Vivica.
It was a woman looking at her oldest son and seeing the face of the man she’d cheated with.
Every time she looked at me, she saw Rashid.
I wanted her dead. Not in prison, not suffering behind bars, dead and gone and erased from the earth the same way she’d tried to erase the truth about who I really was.
Mehar’s hand touched my arm. Gentle. Not demanding. Just there.
I looked down and realized I was going ninety-five on the highway. I eased off the gas and took the next exit and pulled into the parking lot of a gas station and sat there with the engine running and my hands on the wheel and my jaw locked so tight my teeth hurt.
Mehar didn’t say a word. She just sat there with her hand on my arm and let me drive.
I took the next exit and drove toward her apartment building because she didn’t need to be in this car with me right now. I was a bomb and I was about to go off and she didn’t deserve to be in the blast radius.
When I pulled up to her building, I put the car in park and stared at the windshield.
“I don’t know why you came with me. Get out.”
“No.”
“Mehar, I’m not playing with you.”
“And I’m not playing with you.” She turned in her seat to face me fully. “You are not getting rid of me. Not tonight. I don’t care how angry you are. I don’t care how much you want to push me away. I know what it looks like when a man is drowning and I’m not going to stand on the shore and watch.”
“I don’t need you to save me.”
“Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”
That landed. Because she was throwing my own words back at me. Every time she’d told me she didn’t need saving and I’d showed up anyway. Every time she’d pushed me away and I’d stayed. She was doing the same thing to me now and I hated it and needed it in equal measure.
I sat there for a long time. The engine running. Mehar in the passenger seat with her arms crossed and her jaw set and her eyes saying try me.
“I’m not going to your apartment,” I said.
“Then take me wherever you’re going.”
I put the car in drive and kept moving. No destination.
Just away. I ended up at an overlook off the George Washington Parkway.
It was a spot I used to come to when I was younger and needed to think.
The city sprawled out below us, lit up and indifferent, millions of people living their lives without knowing or caring that mine had just been detonated.
I killed the engine. The silence settled around us and the Potomac shimmered in the distance and neither of us said anything for a long time.