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The name left Babs’s mouth like it had been dragged out of a grave.

“Carl.”

For one breath, every machine around me seemed to stop. The monitor beside my bed continued chirping, the IV pump kept humming, and rubber soles squeaked somewhere beyond the door, but none of it reached me. All I could hear was that name.

Carl.

I had spent years trying to forget the sound of metal folding around us when his men rammed our car. I had trained myself not to feel phantom fingers around my ankles whenever I woke in the dark. I had convinced myself the nightmares were only memories, and memories could not climb out of my head and hurt me again.

I had been wrong.

Babs held the hospital receiver against her ear. Her face did not move, but I knew her too well to mistake stillness for calm. When we were girls, she cried when she was afraid. Kathouse taught her to go quiet instead. Black Barbie had been born in that silence—a beautiful mask placed over every terror Babs could not afford to show.

Leaf moved close enough to hear the voice leaking through the receiver. “Put it on speaker.”

Babs shook her head.

Of course she did. She had spent most of her life stepping between danger and me as if her body were a wall bullets could not cross. Even after one had already crossed mine, she still believed protection meant facing the monster first.

“What do you want?” she asked.

The voice on the other end answered, but I could only make out its rhythm, not the words. Slow. Amused. Certain we would listen.

Babs’s eyes found mine.

Something inside them changed.

“Don’t bring her into this,” she said.

A chill moved through me. Whatever Carl had said, it was already about me.

I pushed myself higher against the pillows. Pain tore through my side so sharply that the room whitened at the edges, but I refused to lie back down. Meka took one step toward me out of habit, then stopped when I looked at her.

Her hands fell to her sides.

Those hands had washed my face. Held a straw to my lips. Rubbed lotion into my skin when I was too weak to move. They had also pressed the button that poured medication into my body and stole entire days from me.

I could not decide which memory made me sicker.

“Let me hear him,” I said.

Babs kept her attention on the call. “No.”

“He called my room.”

“Shelly—”

“Put him on speaker.”

My voice came out rough, but the command inside it was clear. Babs looked at me the way she always did when she wanted to protect me from a truth she had already decided she could survive better. This time, I did not look away.

Leaf reached for the receiver. Babs held it tighter.

“She deserves to hear it,” he said.

Babs’s gaze snapped toward him. “Don’t tell me what she deserves.”

“Then stop deciding what she can handle.”

The words struck the room hard enough to make Meka flinch.

For half a second, I thought Babs might hang up simply to end the argument. Instead, she pressed the speaker button and placed the receiver on the rolling tray beside my bed.

Static filled the room.

Then Carl chuckled.

My body remembered him before my mind did. My muscles tightened, my mouth dried, and the heart monitor betrayed me with a frantic series of beeps.

“There she is,” he said. “Michelle Rodriguez. The little secretary who grew up and became an attorney.”

Hearing my full name in his voice made me feel naked.

I forced air into my lungs. “You sound disappointed.”

“I’m impressed. Most people learn to stop digging after they get buried once.”

“Most people don’t survive long enough to dig themselves out.”

Babs turned toward me. Even through the haze of pain, I saw the smallest flash of pride cross her face.

Carl laughed again. “Still sharp. Good. You’re going to need that.”

“Need it for what?”

“For deciding who in that room deserves to leave it alive.”

Leaf scanned the ceiling corners and the narrow window in the door. Meka’s face drained of color. Babs moved closer to my bed, positioning herself between me and the entrance.

I hated that Carl could shift us around a room without even being inside it.

“If you wanted us dead, you wouldn’t be calling,” I said. “You want something.”

Silence.

It was only a second, but I felt the balance change. Men like Carl expected fear. Questions unsettled them because questions forced them to reveal that terror was not the only thing they had brought.

“I want what you took from Kathouse,” he said.

Meka looked at me.

Leaf did too.

Babs did not. She was still watching the door, but I saw her shoulders rise.

“I didn’t take anything from Kathouse,” I said.

“You were always a terrible liar, Michelle.”

“Then you should have called somebody more gullible.”

“I tried. Veronica keeps answering the phone.”

Babs’s hand tightened around the bed rail.

Very few people called her Veronica. Fewer said it like they owned the version of her that existed before Black Barbie. Carl was not speaking her name. He was reaching backward, touching a girl he had no right to know.

“Say her name again,” I warned, “and this conversation ends.”

“There she is,” he murmured. “The real muscle.”

All my life, people had mistaken Babs’s fire for strength and my quiet for surrender. They did not understand that Babs struck the match, but I studied where the exits were before the room caught fire.

“What do you think I took?” I asked.

“A black ledger. Handwritten names, dates, payments, preferences. Tony believed computers were dangerous, so he kept the important business on paper. Then one day his little book disappeared, and not long after that, so did the two of you.”

The room tilted.

I had not thought about the ledger in years.

That was a lie.

I had thought about it every time Leaf was arrested. Every time a politician appeared on television and I remembered the name he used when he called Kathouse. Every time an officer looked at Babs too long during a traffic stop. Every time a judge lectured someone about morality from a bench while I remembered the fantasy he paid women to perform.

I had never stopped thinking about the ledger.

I had only stopped admitting it existed.

Babs finally looked at me. “Shelly?”

There was no accusation in her voice. That made it worse.

“He’s lying,” I said.

Carl sighed. “Ask her why she packed those old law textbooks when you fled to Philadelphia. Ask her why she protected a cardboard box more carefully than her clothes.”

Babs’s eyes stayed on mine.

A memory rose between us: me shoving books into the trunk while she screamed that we had seconds, not minutes. Me refusing to leave until the box was wedged beneath our bags. Her calling me crazy because nobody needed constitutional law during a kidnapping.

I had let her believe the books were the only things inside it.

“Hang up,” I said.

“Not yet,” Carl replied. “You should also know the bullet inside you wasn’t meant for you.”

My hand moved to my bandaged side.

Babs went completely still.

“Who was it meant for?” Leaf asked.

Carl ignored him. “You saw something before the lights went out, Michelle. Something your mind has been trying very hard to give back to you. Latif knows it. Meka knows enough of it to be frightened. And the person who opened Lux’s back door knows exactly what you saw.”

“Who opened the door?” I asked.

“Bring me the ledger.”

“You don’t have anything to bargain with.”

“I have the name of the person who ordered the shooting.”

“Give it to me.”

“The ledger first.”

“You’re assuming I still have it.”

“No,” Carl said. “I’m assuming you’re smart enough to know it’s the only reason you’re still alive.”

The line went dead.

For several seconds, none of us spoke.

Then the monitor beside me screamed.

The door flew open and a nurse hurried in. She took in the scene—Babs beside the bed, Leaf near the window, Meka pressed against the wall, and my pulse racing across the screen.

“Everybody needs to step out,” she said.

“We’re fine,” I told her.

“Your heart rate says otherwise.”

“Someone just threatened her,” Babs said. “Call security.”

The nurse reached for the wall phone.

“No police,” I said.

Four faces turned toward me.

The nurse frowned. “Ma’am, if you’re in danger—”

“Hospital security only. No police until I speak with counsel.”

“You are counsel,” Babs snapped.

“Not when I’m the victim.”

My voice broke on the last word, and I hated it. Victim felt like a coat someone else had forced over my shoulders. It did not fit the woman I had fought to become, but denial would not remove the bullet wound or return the hours Meka stole.

The nurse’s expression softened. She adjusted my oxygen line, checked the IV, and told us security would arrive shortly. Then her attention shifted to the pain pump.

“Who changed the dosage?”

No one answered.

She looked at the display, then at me. “This lockout interval is different from the order.”

Meka closed her eyes.

Babs lunged.

Leaf caught her around the waist before she reached Meka. The movement pulled a sound from Babs that I had not heard since we were young—something between a growl and a sob.

“You changed the machine?” she screamed. “You didn’t just press it? You changed it?”

Meka backed into the wall. “I knew the code.”

“How?” the nurse demanded.

“I watched.”

“That code changes by shift.”

Meka’s eyes darted toward the door.

The attorney in me pushed through the medication fog. “Someone gave it to you.”

“No.”

“You just said you watched. The nurse said it changes. Both things cannot be true.”

“Shelly, please.”

“Who gave you the code?”

She started crying again, but I had learned long ago that tears were not testimony. They could be honest, manipulative, or both. Pain did not automatically make a person truthful.

“Who?” I repeated.

“A man in scrubs,” she whispered. “He met me by the vending machines. He said Latif sent him.”

The nurse stepped back from the pump as though it had become contaminated. “I’m calling my supervisor.”

“Describe him,” Leaf said.

Meka shook her head. “Mask. Surgical cap. Average height. I never saw his face.”

“Voice?” I asked.

“Deep. Maybe older. I don’t know.”

“What did he give you besides the code?”

Her hesitation answered before she did.

Babs stopped fighting Leaf’s grip. “Empty your pockets.”

Meka did not move.

“Empty them,” I said.

She reached into her cardigan and removed a small plastic keycard. It looked like a hotel key, except there was no logo on either side. A strip of pink tape ran across one corner with a handwritten number: 317.

Leaf released Babs and took it.

“What does it open?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

Babs laughed once, without humor. “You got a lot of things you don’t know for somebody who almost killed my sister.”

“He told me to keep it until I received instructions.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“You met a disguised man in a hospital, accepted a restricted medical code and a keycard, then altered my medication. But you never asked his name?”

“I was scared.”

“So was I,” I said. “The difference is I was unconscious.”

Meka folded inward as if the words had struck her.

I wanted that to satisfy me. I wanted her shame to feel like justice, but love made revenge complicated. Some part of me still recognized the curve of her shoulders. Still remembered wrapping my arms around her from behind while she cooked. Still wanted to tell her to breathe when panic shortened hers.

That was the cruelty of betrayal. The truth did not erase tenderness on command. It poisoned it slowly, forcing you to question whether every good memory had been bait.

Two hospital security officers arrived with the nursing supervisor. The next ten minutes dissolved into questions, badge checks, and controlled alarm. The pump was disconnected. My blood was drawn. The supervisor promised to preserve the machine and review hallway footage. When one officer reached for Meka, she looked at me.

Not Babs.

Not Leaf.

Me.

“Please don’t let them take me,” she said.

My heart answered before my mouth could. It remembered her asleep beside me, one hand resting on my hip. It remembered the first time she said she loved me in a grocery-store parking lot because she had been too nervous to say it over dinner. It remembered laughing so hard with her that I forgot to be careful.

Then my body answered.

The heaviness behind my eyes. The missing days. Her fingers on the pump.

“Go with them,” I said.

Her face broke.

“Shelly—”

“If any part of what you felt for me was real, go. Tell them everything. Every call, every meeting, every instruction. Do not protect Latif from the consequences of what he made you do.”

“What about me?”

The question was so small that it nearly pulled me apart.

“I can’t protect you from yours either.”

The officer guided her toward the door.

As she passed the bed, Meka stopped. “The night Lux opened, I saw Reek near the back hallway.”

Leaf’s head snapped up.

“What?”

“He was arguing with someone,” she said. “A woman in a black coat. I couldn’t see her face.”

The pendant in the photograph flashed across my mind.

Kat.

“Why didn’t you say that before?” Babs demanded.

“Because Latif told me Reek was the one who let them in.”

Leaf crossed the room so quickly that both officers reached toward their belts.

“Latif lies,” he said.

“I know.” Meka’s eyes moved back to me. “But not about everything.”

Then they took her away.

The door closed, leaving a different kind of silence behind.

Babs turned to Leaf. “Where is Reek?”

“I don’t know.”

“Call him.”

Leaf pulled out his phone.

The call went straight to voicemail.

He tried again with the same result.

“When did you last speak to him?” I asked.

“Before we came here. He said he was checking on security at Lux.”

Babs’s mouth tightened. “Convenient.”

Leaf looked at her. “Watch yourself.”

“Your loyalty already put you in a cell once. I’m not watching anything except the people around my sister.”

“Reek is not Latif.”

“You said the same kind of thing about Latif before you knew what he was.”

“Enough,” I said.

Neither stopped.

Leaf stepped closer to Babs. “Reek stood beside me when everyone else disappeared.”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t open that door.”

“And a necklace doesn’t prove Kat did.”

“I know my sister’s jewelry.”

“You know what someone wanted you to see in a photograph.”

“Enough!”

The word ripped through my wound and left me gasping. Both of them turned.

“Get out,” I said.

Babs stared at me. “What?”

“Both of you. Get out for five minutes.”

“I’m not leaving you alone.”

“There are two security officers outside the door.”

“Carl just called this room.”

“And I cannot think while the two of you turn fear into a contest over whose family is more suspicious.”

Leaf lowered his eyes first.

Babs did not move.

“Please,” I said more softly. “Five minutes.”

Something in my voice reached the part of her that remembered I was not a little girl anymore. She walked to the door but stopped before opening it.

“You should have told me about the ledger.”

There it was.

Not anger. Hurt.

I had survived her fury more times than I could count. Her hurt was harder to face.

“I know.”

“Do you still have it?”

I looked at the blanket over my legs.

“Shelly.”

“Give me five minutes.”

She left without another word. Leaf followed.

The door clicked shut.

For the first time since waking, I was alone.

I closed my eyes.

The absence of noise should have brought relief. Instead, memories crowded in.

At Kathouse, I had lived behind screens. Men called asking for women as if ordering from menus, and I matched voices to appointments, appointments to payments, payments to names. Tony thought I was only scheduling. Kat thought I was only studying. Babs thought I was only saving enough money to leave.

None of them knew I had started copying the ledger.

It began after Carl’s first appointment with Babs. She returned unsettled, though she tried to hide it. She told me about the scream beneath his floor and the pale face at the basement window. When Carl called later and used my real name, fear became evidence.

Someone had given it to him.

Kathouse protected clients with aliases, but Tony’s ledger held everything. Real names. Phone numbers. Payments. Requests. Notes about which men liked violence and which men paid extra for silence. The women were expected to surrender their identities while the buyers kept theirs hidden.

I decided anonymity should work both ways—or not at all.

Every night for two weeks, I photographed pages after Tony went upstairs. Then I printed the images at the law library because I did not trust a cloud account. I placed the copies inside hollowed-out textbooks and told myself I was building insurance.

The original ledger disappeared before we left.

I had not taken it.

That was the part Carl did not know.

I only had copies.

Or I used to.

When we reached Philadelphia, I placed the books in a storage unit under a variation of my mother’s maiden name. Later, after passing the bar, I digitized every page and encrypted the files. The books remained where they were because paper could survive what technology sometimes could not.

I had never told Babs because she would have wanted to use the information. Not for money. She was not built that way. She would have used it to protect us, which was more dangerous. Babs believed leverage was a weapon. I had learned in law school that evidence only became power when you controlled who could authenticate it, who could access it, and when it appeared.

The ledger contained men with enough influence to erase both of us.

It also contained a symbol beside Carl’s name that I had never deciphered.

A small crescent moon drawn in red ink.

The same symbol had appeared beside five other clients. Unlike the rest, their payments were not recorded in dollars. Tony wrote dates, locations, and women’s initials. Two of those women disappeared from Kathouse without collecting the money they were owed.

Kat said they had moved on.

I never believed her.

My fingers trembled as I reached for my phone. The device was on the bedside table, plugged into a charger. Babs must have brought it. The screen held dozens of notifications, but one caught my attention.

An email had arrived three days earlier while I was sedated.

The sender’s address was a meaningless string of letters and numbers. The subject line contained only one word.

AWAKE?

I opened it.

There was no message, only an attachment named RECEIPT.

My thumb hovered over the file.

Every lesson I had ever learned about digital security told me not to open it. Every instinct I had developed at Kathouse told me the sender already knew enough to make caution irrelevant.

I switched the phone to airplane mode before downloading the attachment.

It was a photograph.

The image showed me lying in the hospital bed.

Meka sat asleep in the chair beside me. The timestamp in the corner was from the previous night at 3:17 a.m.

Room 317.

The number on the keycard.

My stomach turned.

The photograph had been taken from inside my room.

I zoomed in. A sliver of reflection appeared in the dark television screen mounted across from the bed. A figure stood near the foot of my bed wearing scrubs and a surgical cap.

In his hand was a keycard with pink tape.

The doorknob moved.

I locked my phone and shoved it beneath the blanket.

Babs entered alone.

She carried two paper cups and the expression she wore when she had decided to forgive me but had not yet figured out how.

“Leaf went to call his mother,” she said. “He’s having someone find Reek.”

She placed one cup on the table.

“What is it?”

“Tea. The nurse said you can have a little.”

“You made tea?”

“I put hot water over a bag. Don’t make it sentimental.”

A laugh escaped me before the pain turned it into a wince.

Babs pulled the chair closer and sat. For a while, she watched steam rise from her cup.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

There was no need to pretend I did not understand.

“Because you would have tried to protect me.”

“That’s supposed to be a bad thing?”

“Sometimes.”

Her eyes lifted.

“You think I’m like Meka?”

“No.”

“You compared me to her ten minutes ago.”

“I said protection without trust can become control. I didn’t say your intentions were the same.”

“Intentions don’t matter, right? That’s what you told her.”

I looked toward the window. Dawn had begun thinning the darkness over the city. Buildings emerged as silhouettes, their hard edges softened by the glass.

“Do you remember when we were twelve and those girls jumped me behind the rec center?” I asked.

Babs frowned. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“You found out who they were, waited three days, and fought both of them.”

“They deserved it.”

“Probably. But you got suspended, your mother beat you, and one of their older brothers started following us home.”

“So?”

“So your protection solved my bruises and created three new problems. That’s what you do. You love people so loudly that you can’t always hear what they’re asking for.”

She leaned back as if I had pushed her.

“I never asked you to save me from everything,” I continued. “Sometimes I only needed you to stand beside me while I saved myself.”

“You were a child.”

“Not forever.”

Her eyes shone, but Babs did not cry. Black Barbie still rationed tears as if someone might charge her for them.

“When Carl took you, I thought I lost you,” she said. “Do you understand that? I heard you screaming, and I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get to you. I promised myself I would never feel that helpless again.”

“So did I.”

She looked at me.

“That’s why I kept the ledger.”

The truth settled between us.

“You have it?”

“Copies. I never had the original.”

“Where?”

“Safe.”

“Shelly.”

“I’m not telling you where until we understand who is involved.”

She stood so quickly the tea sloshed over the rim of her cup. “After everything that just happened, you still don’t trust me?”

“I trust you with my life. I don’t trust what you will do with someone else’s.”

Her mouth opened, then closed.

I reached for her hand. At first, she resisted. Then her fingers folded around mine.

“I love you,” I said. “But I will not hand you a list of monsters while you’re angry and pretend I don’t know what comes next.”

“One of those monsters just called your hospital room.”

“Which means he doesn’t know where the ledger is.”

“He knows enough.”

“No. He wants us to panic. He wants us moving because moving exposes what fear has kept hidden.”

Babs studied me. Slowly, the anger in her expression shifted into thought.

“You think the call was bait.”

“Partly. Carl knows I have copies, but not where. He also knows something about the shooting. He connected the ledger, Latif, and whoever opened Lux’s back door in the same conversation because he wants us to believe they are one problem.”

“You think they aren’t?”

“I think men like Carl mix truth with lies because pure lies are easier to reject.”

I pulled my phone from beneath the blanket and showed her the photograph.

The color left her face.

“When did you get this?”

“Three days ago.”

“You were unconscious three days ago.”

“Exactly.”

She zoomed in on the reflection. “That keycard.”

“Room 317. The time is 3:17.”

“Whoever sent this is playing games.”

“Or warning me.”

“People who warn you identify the threat.”

“Not if the threat is watching them too.”

Babs handed back the phone. “Send it to me.”

I did.

She blinked in surprise.

“Standing beside me,” I reminded her. “Not in front of me.”

For the first time since she entered the room, she smiled. It was tired and small, but it belonged to Babs, not Black Barbie.

“I’m trying,” she said.

“I know.”

“You also need to tell me what’s in the ledger.”

“Names. Payments. Things clients requested. But there are six entries that are different.”

I told her about the crescent symbols, the dates, and the missing women.

Babs’s expression hardened. “Carl was one of them?”

“Yes.”

“Who were the other five?”

“Four used aliases I never connected to real identities. One name I recognized later.”

“Who?”

Before I could answer, someone knocked.

Babs moved between the door and my bed.

“Who is it?”

“Nursing,” a man called.

The voice was deep.

Older, maybe.

The figure reflected in my television filled my mind.

Babs reached for the handle.

“Wait.”

She stopped.

The man knocked again. “I need to check the replacement pump.”

I looked at the empty IV stand. The supervisor had said no replacement would be connected until the doctor reviewed my blood work.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

Silence.

Then the handle turned.

Babs slammed her weight against the door. A shoulder struck from the other side, forcing it open several inches. A gloved hand came through the gap.

There was a syringe in it.

“Security!” I screamed.

Babs caught the man’s wrist with both hands and drove it against the doorframe. The syringe fell, skittering across the floor. The man shoved harder. Babs’s shoes slid on the tile.

I reached for the call button, but the cord wrapped around the bed rail. Pain exploded through my side as I leaned.

Outside, one of the security officers shouted.

The pressure against the door disappeared.

Footsteps thundered down the hall.

Babs yanked the door open, but the officer blocked her from chasing him.

“Stay in the room!” he ordered.

“He tried to kill her!”

The second officer ran after the man. Nurses poured into the corridor. Somewhere beyond them, a stairwell alarm began to shriek.

Babs picked up the syringe using the edge of a towel.

“Don’t touch it,” I said.

“I’m not.”

Her hands were shaking.

The syringe held a cloudy liquid. No label. No cap.

The nursing supervisor returned, saw it, and immediately called hospital administration and police despite my earlier objection. This time, I did not stop her.

Someone had entered a guarded floor dressed as staff and tried to inject me. Attorney-client privilege could wait. Survival could not.

The next hour became a blur of uniforms and questions. Detectives photographed the room. A crime-scene technician collected the syringe and the medication pump. Hospital staff moved me to a private room under an alias and stationed an officer outside.

Babs never left my side.

Leaf returned after the attempted attack. He listened without interrupting, but rage sharpened every angle of his face.

“They found the scrubs in the west stairwell,” he said after speaking with security. “No sign of the man.”

“Cameras?” I asked.

“He knew where they were.”

Of course he did.

“Reek?” Babs asked.

Leaf’s expression darkened. “Still missing.”

He placed Meka’s keycard inside a clear evidence bag a detective had given him. “Hospital security tested it. It doesn’t open anything here.”

“Then 317 is somewhere else,” I said.

“Or it’s not a room number,” Babs replied.

Leaf stared at the strip of pink tape. “March seventeenth.”

“What happened March seventeenth?” I asked.

He did not answer immediately.

Babs folded her arms. “This is where you remember that loyalty without honesty is how we got here.”

Leaf looked at me, not her. “That was the date Latif’s younger brother was killed.”

“I didn’t know he had a brother.”

“Most people didn’t. Jamal was sixteen. Wrong place, wrong time—or that’s what everybody said.”

“What did Latif believe?”

“That someone close to my family set him up.”

“Did they?”

Leaf’s jaw tightened. “My mother knew more than she admitted.”

The room became colder.

“Ms. Kareemah?” I asked.

He nodded.

The answer I had almost given Babs returned to me. One recognized name beside a red crescent in Tony’s ledger.

Kareemah Hassan.

I had assumed it belonged to a man using a woman’s name to hide his identity, or perhaps a payment routed through a relative. When I met Leaf’s mother years later at the recreation center, I convinced myself it was coincidence. Kareemah was not an unusual name. Hassan was not an unusual surname.

But the crescent had never felt like decoration.

“What did your mother know about Jamal?” I asked.

Leaf paced toward the window. “She said he had started running errands for men who used the rec center parking lot. She warned him to stop. A week later, he was dead.”

“What kind of errands?”

“Packages. Cash. Maybe women.”

Babs looked at me.

I kept my face still.

“And Latif blamed your family?” she asked.

“He blamed everybody. Me most of all, because I was supposed to be watching Jamal that night.”

There it was: the root beneath Latif’s jealousy. Not just envy of Leaf’s power. Grief sharpened into blame, then fed for years until vengeance felt like justice.

“Where were you?” I asked.

Leaf’s voice lowered. “With Reek.”

Babs laughed bitterly. “Of course you were.”

“We were handling something for my mother.”

“What?”

“I never asked.”

“You expect us to believe that?”

“Back then, if my mother said move something, I moved it. She kept the center alive when the neighborhood was falling apart. I trusted her.”

“Everybody keeps using that word like it’s a defense,” I said.

Leaf turned toward me.

“Trust does not erase responsibility. It only explains why you failed to ask the question.”

He absorbed that without arguing.

I respected him for it.

“Call your mother,” I said.

“At this hour?”

“Someone tried to inject me with an unknown drug. I’m no longer concerned about her sleep.”

Leaf dialed.

Ms. Kareemah answered on the fourth ring, her voice thick with exhaustion. The moment Leaf said Jamal’s name, the sleep disappeared from it.

“Why are you asking about that child?” she said.

“Because someone gave Meka a key marked 317.”

Silence.

Leaf put the call on speaker.

“Ma?”

“Leave it alone.”

Babs and I exchanged a look.

“I can’t,” Leaf said. “Shelly got shot. Somebody just tried to finish the job in the hospital.”

Ms. Kareemah inhaled sharply. “Is she alive?”

“I’m here,” I said.

“Baby, I’m sorry.”

The tenderness in her voice sounded genuine. That did not make it innocent.

“What is 317?” I asked.

“Nothing that can help you now.”

“Someone believes it can.”

“They’re wrong.”

“Then explain it.”

Her breathing filled the speaker.

“March seventeenth was not the date Jamal died,” she said finally. “It was the date he disappeared.”

Leaf stopped pacing.

“You told me he was killed that night.”

“His body was found six days later.”

“Why would you lie about that?”

“Because what happened during those six days could have gotten you killed too.”

My pulse quickened.

“Was Jamal taken to Kathouse?” I asked.

Another silence.

This one was an answer.

Babs leaned toward the phone. “How do you know Kathouse?”

“I know a lot of places I wish I didn’t.”

“Do you know Tony?”

“Hang up, Leaf,” Ms. Kareemah said.

“Ma, answer her.”

“This is not a conversation for the telephone.”

“A man named Carl called Shelly’s hospital room,” I said. “Does that change your mind?”

The line became so quiet I checked whether the call had dropped.

Then she whispered, “Get out of that hospital.”

“Why?”

“Because Carl doesn’t call unless he already knows the answer to the question he’s asking.”

The call ended.

Leaf stared at his phone.

Babs stared at me.

I thought of the ledger, the red crescent, and Ms. Kareemah’s name.

“What aren’t you telling us?” Babs asked.

I could have lied again. Part of me still wanted to. Secrets had kept us alive before, but I was beginning to understand that they had also kept every betrayal breathing.

“Her name is in the ledger.”

Leaf’s head lifted slowly.

“My mother?”

“Kareemah Hassan. Written beside one of the crescent symbols.”

His expression closed.

“You said there were six names,” Babs said.

“Carl, Kareemah, and four aliases.”

“What dates were beside hers?” Leaf asked.

“I don’t remember.”

“You remember everything.”

“Not every date from a ledger I copied years ago.”

He looked away, and I knew he did not believe me.

The truth was worse: I remembered the month and year, but I needed to see the page before saying it aloud. Memory was powerful, not infallible. I had built my career by respecting that difference.

“We need the ledger,” Babs said.

“We need copies of three pages,” I corrected. “Taking all of it out of hiding would be reckless.”

“Can someone else access them?”

I thought of the encrypted digital folder. “Maybe.”

“Who?”

“Me.”

I opened my phone and navigated to an app disguised as a calculator. After entering a twelve-digit code, a password field appeared. My hands shook too badly to type, so I asked Babs to hold the phone while I entered the phrase.

Access denied.

I tried again.

Access denied.

“Are you sure that’s the password?” Leaf asked.

I ignored him and attempted the recovery key.

A red message filled the screen.

ACCOUNT LOCKED AFTER REMOTE ACCESS.

My stomach dropped.

“Somebody got in,” I said.

“When?” Babs asked.

I opened the security log.

The last successful login had occurred at 3:17 that morning.

While the man in scrubs stood inside my hospital room.

“He didn’t come to kill me,” I whispered.

“He had a syringe,” Babs said.

“He came for the access code. The drugs were insurance in case I woke up.”

“Did they download the files?” Leaf asked.

The log showed a transfer, but the destination was masked.

“Yes.”

Every name, payment, and secret I had protected for years now belonged to someone else.

Babs sat on the edge of the chair. “Carl?”

“If Carl had the files, he wouldn’t be asking me for them.”

“Latif,” Leaf said.

“Maybe.”

I searched the folder index. Most directories had been copied without alteration. One file had been opened and edited.

HASSAN_K.

My breath caught.

“What is it?” Leaf asked.

I opened the document.

It was a scan of the ledger page containing Ms. Kareemah’s name. The original handwriting remained, but someone had added a digital note across the bottom in bright red letters.

ASK LEAF WHAT HE MOVED ON 3/17.

Babs read it over my shoulder.

Leaf did not need to. The guilt on his face told me he already knew.

“What was in the package?” I asked.

“I told you, I never opened it.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

He dragged both hands over his face. For the first time since I had met him, Leaf looked less like a powerful man and more like a boy who had spent years running from one night.

“It wasn’t a package,” he said.

Babs stood.

“Then what did you move?”

Leaf’s eyes found mine.

“A girl.”

The room disappeared beneath a rush of memory.

The pale face in Carl’s basement window.

The screams Babs heard beneath his floor.

The women whose initials replaced dollar amounts in Tony’s ledger.

The dates. The locations. The red crescents.

“Was she alive?” I asked.

Leaf swallowed.

“When we picked her up.”

Babs crossed the room and struck him.

The sound cracked through the air. Leaf took the blow without raising his hands.

“You moved a woman for your mother?” she demanded.

“I was seventeen.”

“Old enough to know a person isn’t a package.”

“I didn’t know what was happening.”

“But you knew enough not to look.”

Leaf’s eyes burned. “You think I haven’t lived with that?”

“She didn’t get to live with anything!”

“Stop,” I said.

Neither heard me.

“Where did you take her?” Babs asked.

“A house outside the city.”

“Whose house?”

“I never went inside.”

“Whose?”

“Carl’s.”

The answer hollowed out the room.

I looked at Leaf, trying to reconcile the man who loved Babs with the boy who had transported a terrified girl to a monster. Both could be true. That was the problem with justice when it entered your home. Guilt did not become innocence because you loved the guilty person. But people were not frozen at the age of their worst act either.

“Was Reek with you?” I asked.

Leaf nodded.

Meka’s final warning returned: Reek near Lux’s back hallway, arguing with a woman in a black coat.

“Did Latif know?”

“Jamal found out. He followed us.”

“And six days later, he was dead.”

Leaf lowered his head.

The pieces aligned in a shape I did not yet trust. Jamal discovered Leaf and Reek moving a girl connected to Carl. Ms. Kareemah concealed the truth. Latif spent years blaming Leaf. Kat appeared in a photograph of Lux. Carl wanted the ledger. Someone used my unconscious body to access the digital copy.

And the night Lux opened, Reek stood beside the door through which the shooters entered.

My phone vibrated.

All three of us looked at it.

A text had arrived from an unknown number.

It contained a live location pin.

Beneath it was a photograph of Reek sitting in a wooden chair. Blood ran from his temple. His hands were bound behind him, and the gold cat pendant hung around his neck.

Kat’s necklace.

A message appeared beneath the image.

BRING THE KEY TO ROOM 317. COME ALONE, SHELLY.

Then a second message arrived.

YOU HAVE ONE HOUR BEFORE REEK TELLS YOU WHO PULLED THE TRIGGER.

I stared at the screen as the monitor beside me began recording the truth my face refused to show.

This time, nobody was going to put me to sleep.

This time, I was going to the door myself.