Page 131 of Collateral Love
Miles thinks he’s pointing the way.
Cameron thinks she’s pulling strings.
Charles thinks he’s still relevant.
All of them are wrong.
Because the path they’re laying?
It doesn’t lead to safety.
It leads to consequences.
And tonight, we start walking it—slow, deliberate, and watching every shadow for the moment it flinches.
Miles stayed close to me.
Too close.
Not the way soldiers closed ranks when things got dangerous, but the way men did when they wanted to be seen. He walked half a step behind my right shoulder, close enough that I could feel his presence without turning my head. Close enough to speak low, like we were aligned by default.
That proximity told me more than anything he’d said all night.
We moved through the city without sirens, without lights, without urgency on the surface. Convoys did that when they wanted to scare people. We weren’t trying to scare anybody yet. We were trying to see who blinked.
Rain slicked the asphalt, turning streetlamps into long smears of gold. Crestwood looked clean like this—washed, innocent, like it hadn’t swallowed men whole for decades. I watched reflections in the windows as we passed. I watched shadows and watched timing.
We turned off Lenox, deeper into the industrial pocket where warehouses leaned like tired old men, and nobody asked questions because nobody wanted answers. This was old ground. Familiar ground. The kind of place men like Charles believed still belonged to them because it used to.
I checked the time on my Rolex.
The drops were staggered.
The money was frozen in pieces.
The phones were half-dead.
Everything was working exactly how Kenya designed it.
Miles broke the quiet again. “If we don’t move tonight, Cameron will reposition.”
There it was again. That push as if I didn’t know what he was trying to do. This motherfucka was scared of Cameron. What did she have over him?
I didn’t respond right away. When men rushed words, it was because they were afraid of silence doing the talking for them.
“She’s already repositioned,” I said finally. “That’s why she hasn’t called.”
Miles frowned. “Or she’s waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” I asked, glancing at him now.
His mouth opened. Closed. He recovered fast, but not fast enough.
“For… leverage,” he said.
I nodded like that made sense.
But leverage was already in play. Anyone paying attention could feel it in the air—the way accounts froze without explanation, the way lawyers stopped returning calls, the way Charles’s name had gone quiet on channels that used to sing it like a hymn.
