Page 33 of Vega

“You were told to take her?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To make sure she doesn’t run before Roman can talk.”

I stepped closer to the man with the coffee.

“You’re going to fall back.”

He looked toward his partner before answering. “Roman sent us.”

“And Roman hired me. If she sees three men tracking her through a train station, she’ll panic, call the police, and fuck up everything. Then I’ll have to explain to Roman that his own people ruined the job.”

“We’re following orders.”

“So am I.”

Neither man moved.

“Walk the fuck away before I decide you’ve become part of my problem.”

The man holding the coffee swallowed. His partner recognized the warning faster. He touched the first man’s arm and nodded toward the opposite sidewalk. “We’ll tell Roman you have it.”

“You tell him whatever you have to. Just stay the fuck away from her,” I warned.

They walked in the opposite direction without looking back.

I watched until they disappeared around the corner.

Roman was getting frantic. So, Sonnet had run out of time.

I descended the station stairs and found her waiting on the platform near a group of commuters. She stood beneath the arrival board with one hand wrapped around the strap of her tote. Her gaze moved across every face around her before settling on the tracks.

She knew danger was close. She simply didn’t know what it looked like yet.

I could refuse the assignment and walk away, but Roman would replace me before the end of the day. If one of his men reached Sonnet first, I doubted she would ever make it to the conversation he claimed he wanted to have with her.

I had to take her before they did. But I wasn’t delivering her to Roman until I knew what she had witnessed, why he feared her, and how I could keep her alive without pulling Wise, Prodigy, and the entire Street Kings organization into a war.

SONNET ELLISON

I had been staring at the same forkful of pasta for almost a minute.

The café sat across the street from my office. Before that night, I would have had lunch on a bench in the park to enjoy the summer weather. Now I needed windows, witnesses, and enough people around me that nobody could quietly drag me into a vehicle.

Trying to live normally had become a full-time job. From the outside, nothing had changed. Inside, I was constantly waiting for something to happen. I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching me. Sometimes it was only a car parked too long near my building. Other times it was a man standing on a train platform or somebody walking behind me for more than one block. I checked reflections in storefront windows, changed routes, and avoided isolated streets even when doing so added twenty minutes to my commute.

I kept telling myself fear could create patterns where none existed. That was what people did when they were scared. We built theories. We analyzed harmless details until they became evidence.

The problem was, I no longer believed the details were harmless, and the fear felt too familiar. It reminded me of living in the group home, where danger rarely announced itself before it arrived. I never knew which girl might decide to corner me because she was angry, which older boy might follow me into a hallway and let his hands linger where they didn’t belong, or whether the adults responsible for us would care enough to intervene. Even when nobody was actively hurting me, I remained alert because safety could disappear without warning. Back then, I also carried the constant fear of aging out. I didn’t know where I would live, how I would survive, or who I could call if everything fell apart. I had escaped that life, built a home, and created the stability nobody had given me. Now, I was living with the same helpless anxiety again, waiting for danger I could feel but couldn’t locate.

My phone vibrated beside my plate, and Dior’s name appeared on the screen.

I almost just let it ring, but I instantly felt guilty. “Hey.”

“Do not ‘hey’ me in that tired little voice.”