Page 109 of Omar

The night wasn't over. There was still the warehouse, the product, the records, the remaining crew. But Supreme was done. The man who'd kept Asha in a cage for three years, who'd funded TK's war on our territory, whose operation connected back to Pops' disappearance through shell companies and a man named Leonard Pryce was lying on the floor of a ground-floor unit in Crown Heights seeing nothing.

I went back downstairs to the car. James was waiting.

"Warehouse?" he asked.

"Warehouse."

We drove to Crown Heights. The night's work wasn't finished.

On the way I texted Devon: Send a secondary team to Supreme's apartment. Bedroom closet, left side behind the suits. There's a safe. Crack it and secure whatever's inside before anybody else gets there.

Devon replied in ten seconds: On it.

But the part that mattered most was done.

Chapter 44

Asha

The shaking stopped sometime before dawn. I was on the couch with a blanket Omar had put over me, my head on a cushion, my knees pulled up to my chest. Nene was asleep in the bedroom. Omar was in the chair across from me, his phone on his thigh, his eyes closed but not sleeping. Every time a car passed on the street below his eyes opened, scanned the window, then closed again.

Supreme was dead. The man who'd kept me for three years was gone. I kept thinking those words, turning them over, testing them for weight.

Omar walked into that room and walked me out. He closed the door behind him. Supreme didn't come out.

I didn't ask what happened in that room. I didn't need to.

Omar's phone rang just after the light started coming through the blinds. He answered it quietly, listened for a minute, then hung up.

"Devon's team got into Supreme's apartment," he said. "The safe in the bedroom closet. They cracked it before the police arrived."

"What was inside?"

"Emergency passports. Three of them, different names. A backup phone. Cash, about forty thousand. And a ledger. Handwritten, going back years. Devon's going through it now."

A handwritten ledger. Supreme had kept records by hand, away from any computer Devon could hack, locked in a safe I'd mentioned at Portia's table. Whatever was in that book was something he'd wanted no one to find.

"Rest," Omar said. "I need to go see Kadeem."

"Everything that happened is my problem too."

"Not this part." He kissed the top of my head. "I'll be back."

He left and I sat on the couch alone for a while. Nene came out of the bedroom with her hair wrapped and Omar's t-shirt hanging past her knees. She took one look at me and went to the kitchen to make coffee.

"He's dead, isn't he?" she asked from the counter.

"Yeah."

She poured two cups, brought them to the couch, and sat down next to me. We drank without talking.

"How do you feel?" she asked eventually.

"I don't know yet." I wrapped both hands around the mug. "I keep waiting for something to hit me. Relief or guilt or sadness or something. But it's just... quiet. Like someone turned the volume down on everything."

"That's shock, baby."

"Maybe."