I need her in my possession. Nothing else matters.
She twists and tugs on a new shirt, then her trademark leather jacket over that. I glance at the clock on the dashboard and wonder where she’s going. I wonder how long it will take me to memorize her routine. I wonder how long it will take her to notice me haunting the periphery of her life, waiting. Biding my time.
I wonder what she’ll do when she does.
Movement in the rearview mirror catches my eye. Miami-Dade Police, lights off, doing the same kind of roll-by I did a million times as a beat cop. The kind you do in trouble neighborhoods, to remind folks you’re always watching. The kind you do to remind yourself that in this one moment, you hold all the power, and you always will.
Until you don’t.
I see them clock me, and it takes me a second to view myself through their eyes. Here, I’m not a fellow officer, I’m a civilian. More specifically, I’m a large Black man sitting alone in a parked car for hours, with binoculars and no good excuse.
Tucking the hardware away as subtly as possible and rolling the window down preemptively, I place both hands on the wheel and wait. They pull up beside me, a Latina woman in the driver’s seat and an older white man leaning out the passenger window toward me. The pose should be casual, but I can see the tension coiled through him, tight and ready.
“How can I help you, officers?”
My best grin, all white teeth and charm, the kind that used to make women give me anything, even the truth. This particular woman seems unmoved, her partner even less so.
“What’re you doing out here, boy?”
My jaw tics. I don’t loosen my smile, because even though it may not be helping, any other expression is bound to hurt.
“Here to pick up my woman,” I say, nodding demonstratively toward the apartment complex and keeping my tone jovial. “She makes me wait out here so her daddy won’t catch us.”
A long pause while they consider my lie.
“Alright, man.” The woman speaks first, shifting the patrol car back into drive.
“We’ll be coming back around,” the older man says, less convinced. He doesn’t bother to veil the threat. “No loitering.”
I give him my best yes-sir nod without actually saying the words, and watch them roll away. I take one more look up at Miel Conde’s window, but her silhouette is gone.
“I’ll come back for you,” I murmur under my breath, a promise to us both.
Now that I’ve finally found her, I’ll never let her go.
Chapter Three
Miel
There’s a small loft overlooking the main stage area, with a couple rooms reserved for bachelorettes willing to fork over a week of my rent for a few hours of a man’s undivided attention. It must be a powerful notion, the idea of owning another person, if only for a night. A heady high, even if all you’re buying is forced smiles and hips that gyrate the way your husband’s never will. But tonight the rooms sit dark and empty, as they do most week nights. It creates the kind of lonely shadow that hugs me tight and lets me breathe a little bigger, the only entry point in clear view in front of me. And below me, everything that matters. Money, writhing and fluttering under neon lights, reaching up toward me. Sweaty fools, throwing it my way, screaming for me to take more. Mine. It’s all mine.
I never dreamed of a kingdom, not like Javier did. I dreamed of survival, of a life that felt better than death. Of waking to anything but pain and fear.
I left my pain in Atlanta, and I lost my fear when Javi told me to leave. Losing the only family I’ve ever known was the last thing I had left to be afraid of. No one can hurt me more than I’ve already been hurt. No one can take anything from me, because I have nothing left to give.
Nothing but my money, and they’ll have to pry that out of my cold, dead hands.
The music switches to something throbbing and nasty, and I know Cal must be taking the stage, even though I can’t see him under the whirling lights and smoke. More shrieking. I drink it in like water, breathe it in deep. People used to scream for me, too—scream for me to stop, scream for me to please, please, please. I drank that in, too.
But things are different now. Now, I’m not the object, not the target. I’m not the gun in your face, or the monster under your bed. Now I’m no one. I live in the shadows, watching everything, never being watched. After everything I’ve been before, I don’t mind this. I’d rather be nothing than live in my old skin.
I lean my elbows on the banister, kicking the scuffed toes of my boot into the floor in time to the beat. Two years ago, when Javier and I stormed heiress Selina Palacios’s home with the intention of taking her hostage, this is how we found her. Looking down at us from her balcony, wrapped in her choice of armor, jaw set. Her eyes bled fear, and she wielded no power in that moment, but I still remember the feeling of tilting my chin up to see the queen presiding over her castle. My palms curl around the cold metal bars that keep me from falling into the crowd below. I never want to be the one looking up again.
The song changes again, this time to the hourly rendition of Pony. I barely hear it anymore. This is the first time it’s played tonight, but it won’t be the last. It does indicate the end of Cal’s set, though, which means he’ll be popping his glittery ass into my office soon for his envelope of cash. I push myself into a standing position, eyes sweeping the busy floor one more time, and freeze. Striding in through the door, confident shoulders wearing a jacket that doesn’t belong in this weather. I can’t make out his features from this angle, but the way the neon lights play over his onyx complexion, I know. I just know.
Last spring, I tortured a man in the Palacios estate’s wine cellar. I was meant to kill him, but I’ve never been able to pass up an opportunity to prolong a man’s suffering. I had only just begun slicing him when an RPG to the building above knocked us both out. When I came to, he was gone.
And now he’s here.
In my club. In my city.
My radio is already at my mouth, hand fisted dangerously tight around the plastic.
“Lucia,” I snap, careful not to let any emotion other than impatience bleed into my voice. “That big guy by the door, just came in. He has to go.”
“On it,” her fuzzy voice bounces back at me. I watch her and Yesenia approach the intruder. I know what my girls are capable of, but they look small beside him. I don’t think the former detective would put up a fight in such a public place, but if he did, they wouldn’t stand a chance. They exchange a few words, and then Andrews turns to leave. At the very last moment, he glances upward, and I feel his eyes on me even though it’s too dark up here and too smoky down there for him to be able to see anything. He’s all bulk and sharp angles, his cheekbones swathed in pink, blue, gold. Something tightens in my chest. But then he turns and walks out the front entrance, his steps loose and unaffected by the rejection.
“He’s gone,” Lucia chirps back through the radio. “Who was that?”
I wait a beat, until my ribcage loosens enough for me to speak.
“A dead man.”
That much is true, but that’s not all Reggie Andrews is.
He’s also the only man who’s ever made me feel a damn thing.
Chapter Four
Andrews
I’m not bothered that Miel had me thrown out of Hard Candy. If anything, I walk away from the noisy club feeling even more emboldened than before. Her reaction tells me that she sees me as a threat that needs to be handled. That feeling glows hot in the pit of my belly, and I have to dip my head as I walk back to my car to keep from flashing a perverse grin. Now she knows that I know where she is, and that I’m coming for her. Tonight was a tease. What comes next is foreplay.
There was a time when I would do anything to avoid being seen by women as a threat. I’ve always been a presence. Tall, wide, solid. The kind of guy that the football coach sees on the first day of freshman year and realizes his whole year is made. The kind of guy that barely needs to take the Academy
fitness exams, because, just look at him.
The kind of guy that makes women grab their purse straps tighter and cross the street.
Maybe that’s why I’ve never been in a relationship for more than a few months. In the end, it didn’t matter if they actually feared me or not. What mattered was my certainty that they would. It always felt inevitable.
But now, that same feeling of passive intimidation doesn’t leave me feeling lonely. It heats me from my very core, feeding into the red-hot frenzy already burning in me. I no longer care about women, or relationships, or making Captain one day. I don’t care about having a bed of my own to spend nights in, or a meal that consists of more than grease and crumpled paper.
Every fiber of my being is focused solely on the destruction of Miel Conde.
I drive back to Sunset Cliffs, the darkness a rolling boil in my stomach and my foot heavy on the gas pedal. She knows I know she’s in Miami. Now she needs to know that I know everything.
I take the stairs two at a time, glaring down the creepy fucker not-so-subtly watching me from next door until he lets the blinds fall shut. Out of my back pocket, I retrieve a sheet of paper and unfold it carefully, the creases worn delicate and thin with time. Miel’s face stares back, the large print rendering it even more blurry than it was in the original surveillance footage. I trace her pixelated jawline with my thumb as I have a hundred times before, mentally superimposing my hazy memories of her face onto the image. Soon enough, I’ll see her again, up close and personal.
Close enough to touch.
I drive back to my own makeshift Miami home halfway across town, in a much better state of mind. I might have only gotten her current location a couple weeks ago, but this plan has been months in the making. I leave my shitbox car on the street—it doesn’t stand out in this abandoned industrial zone. Before the year is up, this place will be crawling with workers turning the decaying buildings into high-end apartments no local could afford, but that gives me plenty of time to carry out my own destruction. I ride the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. Still a few levels below the penthouse, but high enough to make my stomach twist if I stand too close to the floor-to-ceiling windows. If there were once walls blocking this floor into smaller rooms, they’re long gone, leaving behind the very definition of an open-floor concept. A few old plastic tarps hang like curtains at seemingly random spots, occasionally dancing in some impossible breeze. At the center of the space is the cheap queen-sized mattress I spent the last of my money on. A couple feet away, rope hangs expectantly off an exposed beam. That, I brought with me from home.
I’ve known what I wanted from Miel Conde from the first moment I saw her: her fear, her tears, her untimely demise. In the intervening year, that desire has only grown. It’s only a matter of time until she’s mine.
I take a bottle of water from the open 24-pack next to the mattress and guzzle it down. I’m a little hungry, but in the hypnotic haze of the night, I forgot to grab any food on the way here. No matter. These days, the storm brewing inside me is so palpable I can nearly feed off it. I’m a machine, fueled by rage and bloodlust.
I peel my clothes off and collapse into the makeshift bed. I don’t fall asleep easily, but it has nothing to do with my physical discomfort or the sleepless buzz of a thriving city, and everything to do with the ice-cold killer almost within my reach. Many men have been foolish enough to come after her, but I’ll be the first to survive.
Chapter Five
Miel
I spend the rest of the night locked in my office, occasionally letting one of my boys in to collect his pay. I’m distracted, forgetting to roll my eyes when Sam flirts with me, almost giving Jackson twice his cut. That boy has no sense, immediately handing back the extra when he easily could have gotten away with it. It’s that good ol’ boy charm, the perfect blond hair and blue eyes. He’s stuck in the same sandbox as the rest of us, but he doesn’t have to be quite as scrappy, still gets to the vague hope of tomorrow. Maybe that’s why he’s the only kid here saving up for college, or at least the only one who will actually make it.
Between boys, I sit at my desk and play with my butterfly knife, the one I rarely use for reasons other than intimidation. I’ve lost practice, nicking myself a couple times. My heart has hardened during my time in Miami, but the rest of me has softened. Outside of threatening middle-aged drunk women here and there, I haven’t had much reason to flex my most vicious muscles. Every day is still a fight for survival, it’s just less of a literal one. Could I even take a man like Andrews right now?
Of course I could. In every impossible situation, you always have at least one thing over your enemy. Mine is desperation. It always has been. You fight differently when you’re fighting for your life; you fight with everything you’ve got twice over. You fight without care or second thought to your own safety outside of this moment. You fight without thinking of the consequences of every minor decision. When it’s life or death, it doesn’t matter if the life will be spent scarred or in a cage. It’s still a life.
Fuck. The blade bites me again, and with a guttural cry I throw the knife as hard as I can across the room, with enough force that it embeds itself into the drywall, deep enough to stick. I stare at the sight for a moment. I feel nothing. If the knife was in my sternum, I’m not sure I’d feel anything more. A knock on the door jolts me out of my dark reverie.
“Miel, it’s Daveed,” a voice says, and I rise from my desk. On the way to the door, I grab the knife and wrench it out of the wall, folding it up and tucking it back into my pocket. Then I unlock the door and let Daveed in, letting him chatter out his greetings without response.
The problem with fighting for your life is that for it to work, you have to want to live.
By the time I get back to my apartment in the wee hours of what is technically tomorrow, I’m exhausted by my own restlessness. The adrenaline that flooded my system when I saw Andrews’s face at my club has yet to leave my body. It’s a hot rush that binds my chest tight and takes, takes, takes. My mind has been running nonstop for just as long, producing an endless list of potential next steps.
Do I just leave town? I started over once already. I can do it again.
Do I preemptively eliminate the problem? He got away from my knife once. He already owes me his life.
Do I do nothing, waiting to see what happens next? It was dark in the club, maybe that wasn’t even him. Maybe I’m being paranoid.
But when I reach the landing, it becomes clear I haven’t been paranoid enough. My own blurred face stares back at me, slightly askew. I can’t tell where this image is from, likely some sort of surveillance footage. I rip the paper off my door and the balmy night becomes ten degrees colder when I feel how worn the photo is, see the deep lines cut across it from folding, unfolding, folding. He’s had this for a while. Long enough to rub the ink off my edges.
I slam the door behind me, twisting the three deadlocks and immediately grabbing the single folding chair from the kitchenette and shoving it under the knob. I check all the windows, making sure the blinds are shut tight and the flimsy locks are all in place. This apartment is a cardboard box. If someone wants in, they’re getting in. I just need to slow them down for the handful of seconds it takes to aim and pull the trigger.
My favorite piece is already tucked into my waistband, as it always is, but more is always better. I throw open the closet door and pull a worn duffel off the top shelf, the only thing I brought with me from Atlanta. The handful of tanks and clean underwear it used to include are already strewn all over the bedroom floor. I dump the remaining contents out onto the unmade twin bed.
A clatter of metal, the unmistakable scent of gunpowder waiting to be fired. I breathe it in in lungfuls, already feeling better than I have all night. Not that that means much.
I shove a small pistol into one boot and a hunting knife into the other. I tuck a smaller pocketknife into my sports bra and as many clips as will fit into my jacket pockets. Then I grab my rifle an
d take a perch on the kitchenette’s linoleum counter, the best vantage point to watch both the front door and the large bedroom window that leads to the fire escape, the only entry points. I click the safety off and get comfortable.
I don’t know exactly what Andrews wants with me, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll never get a chance to fucking touch me. I’ll put the barrel in my own mouth first.
When I left Atlanta, I swore I’d die before ever letting a man hurt me again.
Chapter Six
Andrews
I go back to Hard Candy.
I go back to Hard Candy every day for a week, and every day Miel’s girls throw me out.
Until today.
When The Pretty One approaches me—I’ve mentally nicknamed the other two The Small One and The Blonde One—I assume she’s about to ask me to leave. Again. Instead, she gestures for me to follow her.
“The boss’ll see you,” she says with a light accent.
Hard Candy Page 2