Chapter 22
TARIQ “REEK” HORTON
The next night, I was walking into the Cartier’s private club. The poker table was already active, the drinks were flowing, and the air smelled like good weed.
That was how most serious nights with us started. Liquor, cards, and talking shit first. Then, once everybody got comfortable, the real reason for the link-up came out.
Icon and Legend were talking at the bar, and when I saw the lines in their foreheads, I knew they were talking strategy. Saint stood near the bar pouring himself something brown. Big A sat at the poker table with Wise, Prodigy, Vega, and their right hands, Lux and Lowe.
Lux and Lowe were twin cousins to the Street Kings. Lowe had more energy than Lux, who was the calmer, colder one, but both were menaces in the streets.
For the first half hour, we kept it light.
We played a few hands of poker, got drunk, some got high, talked shit, and cracked a few jokes.
We had planned the night like that. We had to feel each other out before we went to war together.
You had to know how another man moved before you trusted how he’d shoot.
Eventually, Icon set his glass down and cleared his throat. That was enough to make the bullshit chatter die on its own.
He looked around the table and said, “Y’all know why we asked you here.”
Wise nodded once. “We heard about the attack.”
“Everybody heard about the attack,” Saint muttered.
Prodigy leaned forward and folded his hands. “So say it plainly.”
“Last year, we went to war with The Crown and took down the boss and most of its high-ranking soldiers. But his brother is in Chicago, Matías De La Cruz. He rebuilt what was left of the Crown and came at us heavy.”
Wise looked at Prodigy, then back at Icon. “How heavy?”
“They hit a public event with coordinated shooters on foot, in cars, and on roofs,” Legend answered. “We lost men.”
Vega’s expression lost all humor then. That was the first real switch I saw in him that night. One second he looked like the easiest man in the room to joke with. The next, he looked like he’d burn a block down.
Prodigy asked, “What do we know about the brother’s structure?”
Jamir was there too, tucked off at the end of the bar with his laptop open. He turned the screen enough for the men closest to him to see. “He came with manpower and discipline. He has shooters that know how to hold positions, apply pressure, and ride out a plan without folding under return fire.”
Prodigy nodded once. “So, this isn’t just revenge driven by emotion. It’s a calculated attack.”
Legend pointed at him. “Exactly.”
Icon took a sip of his drink. “We called y’all because we need experienced soldiers who can go to work.”
Legend added. “We respect how y’all move. If we’re going to answer this the right way, we need men who are trained, mature, and not just hungry to shoot.”
That ask meant something. It was one thing to invite another crew into your city to eat.
It was another thing entirely to ask them to stand beside you in real war.
That meant trust. That meant respect. That meant we weren’t just nodding at the Street Kings as the next wave coming up.
We were recognizing them as men whose structure could stand beside ours.
Vega lifted his glass a little. “That’s love.”
Big A leaned back and looked them over. “It’s also because y’all some fly niggas and we don’t want to die looking basic.”
That made Lowe laugh first. “I knew I liked you Cartier niggas,” he said. “You violent and unserious.”
“Mostly violent,” Lux corrected, finally speaking up.
All eyes went to him because he hadn’t said much all night.
He leaned his forearms on the table and said, “If Matías came this way once and didn’t finish the job, he’ll come again.
So, the question is how hard you plan on hitting back and when.
Because you can’t play no games, you gotta hit them and hit them hard. ”
Prodigy looked toward Lux with approval, then back at Icon. “He’s right. If this ends with us knocking down foot soldiers and shooting up two or three spots, then all we’ve done is announce ourselves. We need the head.”
Vega set his glass down. “But not rushed.”
Legend nodded. “That’s where we are.” Then Legend looked around the room and said, “So let’s call it what it is. We’re asking for an alliance.”
Wise answered first. “You got it.”
Then Vega added, “We’re in.”
Prodigy nodded. “On one condition.”
Saint lifted a brow.
Prodigy added, “When we make a move, we finish it. No random attacks.”
Icon answered without hesitation. “Agreed. We make the move when the time is perfect, when it’s effective.
We take the head and end this shit for good.
” Icon looked around at all of us and added, “Until then, security stays tripled. Everybody keeps their head on a swivel. Nobody rides loose. Nobody freelances. Nobody gets comfortable.”
Lowe leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Well then. Let’s show the city what happens when old kings and new kings move together.”
When the meeting wrapped, I left the lounge and headed for Ava’s place.
Ava had texted me earlier that she had a stack of orders packed and ready to go, and I told her I’d swing by and take them to the post office for her.
I loved that she had her own business and was really making a bag from it too.
Ava wasn’t just sitting pretty waiting on some man to take care of her.
She was building something, moving product, growing her name, and looking fine while doing it.
I had just stepped out and started toward my truck when two unmarked cars rolled up too smooth and fast. That made me stop in my tracks. The doors opened almost at once. Mallory got out the back seat of one. Two Chicago detectives got out the other.
I already knew from the way they spread that this wasn’t some casual little run-in.
Mallory came right at me. “Tariq Horton.”
I looked between her and the detectives. “The fuck is this?”
“We need you downtown.”
“For what?”
She stopped a few feet in front of me. “Questioning.”
I laughed once. “And if I’m busy?”
One of the detectives answered that. “Then we all stand out here making this look worse than it has to.”
I looked at him, then back at Mallory.
She stepped closer. “There’s an active missing-person investigation. You’re connected. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
I should’ve told them all to eat a dick and call my lawyer.
Instead, I looked around the street once, clocked the attention already starting to turn our way, and understood exactly what this was.
They weren’t cuffing me. They weren’t reading me rights.
But they were boxing me in just enough that fighting them in public would create more heat than going with them.
So I said, “A’ight.”
Mallory nodded toward the car.
The ride downtown was quiet and uncomfortable.
Nobody said shit to me, which was probably the point. Let a man sit. Let him think. Let him wonder what they really had and what they were just hoping he’d react to.
By the time they walked me into one of those plain interrogation rooms with gray walls, bad lighting, and a table bolted to the floor, I was already irritated enough to want to put my fist through something.
Mallory came in a minute later with a folder and sat down across from me and opened the folder.
“Sienna Langford is not just missing.”
I leaned back in the chair and looked at her. “Okay.”
“She was compromised.” I kept my expression blank, as Mallory folded her hands on top of the folder and watched me too close. “And you’re the last man who would’ve known enough to silence her.”
I looked at her like she was boring me. “That’s what you brought me down here for? Theory hour?”
Her lips pressed into a thin line. “This is not theory. We know she was under pressure before she disappeared. We know she was involved with you. We know you were one of the last people in her orbit with any real access.” She leaned in a little.
“And we know you’re exactly the kind of man who would react violently when a woman became a liability. ”
I gave her the same thing I had been giving since the beginning.
“I told y’all already. The last time I saw Sienna, we hung out. We fucked. I left. Ain’t heard from her since.”
Mallory didn’t blink. “Do you really expect me to believe that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t care what you believe.”
She opened the folder and slid a few photos across the table.
Sienna at a restaurant.
Sienna outside her building.
Sienna walking beside me from some distance.
Then a still from Ava’s pop-up with my hand on Ava’s stomach.
That one made my jaw tighten before I could stop it.
Mallory caught it too.
“Interesting,” she said softly.
I looked back up at her. “What is?”
“You went from one woman to another awfully fast.”
I stared at her.
“Was Sienna in the way?”
That almost made me laugh because I could hear how badly she wanted me to be emotional enough to say something stupid.
Instead, I said, “You seem too interested in my dick.”
That didn’t throw her off, but it did irritate her. “What I’m interested in is whether Sienna found out something that made her a liability for you.”
I shrugged. “She wasn’t a liability for me.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then where is she?”
I leaned back again and let silence answer for me.
Mallory kept trying different angles after that. She brought up Langford, the attack at the pop-up and asked if violence followed me.
I gave her nothing.
After a while, even she got tired of hearing her own questions hit a wall.
She closed the folder and looked at me with the kind of calm that usually meant this wasn’t over. Just delayed.
“You’re not smarter than grief, Tariq.”
“What the fuck that mean?”
“It means fathers like Langford don’t let go. And the bigger this gets in his head, the messier it’s going to get for everybody around it.”
She stood after that and gave the detectives some signal through the glass.
A few minutes later, they let me walk.
When I stepped back outside into the cold, I stood there for a second with my hands in my pockets and my anger boiling.
The bigger danger wasn’t just law enforcement. Law enforcement still needed proof, a body, and something more concrete than instinct and grief to bring me down.
Langford didn’t. That man was acting on pain now. And grief in a man like him, with his money, his power, and his obsession, was starting to look a lot more dangerous than a federal agent.