Chapter 184: The Danger Lurking!

The apartment smelled like burnt foil and wet carpet.

It sat on the third floor of a building the city had stopped pretending to care about years ago. The hallway lights flickered or didn’t work at all, and somebody had kicked a hole through the drywall by the stairwell that nobody ever fixed. Inside, the only furniture was a sagging couch, a mattress shoved against the wall, and a folding table covered in empty bottles and cigarette burns.

They weren’t alone. A woman nobody had bothered to learn the name of was curled on the mattress, staring at the ceiling, lips moving around words that didn’t come out. A skinny guy in a hoodie sat cross-legged in the corner, scratching at his forearm over and over, laughing quietly at nothing. Every few minutes someone new drifted in through the unlocked door and drifted out again.

Drake sat sprawled on the couch, eyes glassy, pupils blown wide, one leg bouncing like it had a mind of its own. Enrique leaned against the window, peering through a gap in the stained blinds.

"Still can’t believe that old man," Drake muttered.

"He wasn’t even supposed to be there. No wait, I meant the fucking camera."

"Yeah, well, you didn’t check well enough. " Enrique said flatly.

"I just wanted to kill him and get it over with man."

"You were supposed to not leave any traces."

Drake laughed, loose and ugly. "I didn’t."

"You put him on the floor in four seconds, güey. And say you didn’t."

Neither of them said it like it was a tragedy. They said it the way people talk about a missed bus. The clerk was a mistake in the plan, not on their conscience.

Drake rubbed his face with both hands.

"Next time, we watch the place longer. A week, not two days. Learn the faces. Learn who’s behind the register and when."

"And the cameras," Enrique said. "We checked the obvious ones. We didn’t check for the little one."

"Nobody puts a camera behind a cereal box."

"That guy did." Enrique turned from the window and tapped his own cheek. "And now my face is the one on the news. Not yours. Mine."

Drake grinned lazily. "Luck of the draw."

"Luck." Enrique’s jaw tightened. "You pulled the trigger and I’m the one on every channel. You understand how messed up that is?"

"You’re still breathing, ain’t you?"

Enrique didn’t answer that. He stepped closer to the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, and Drake squinted up at him.

He barely recognized him.

The long hair was gone, buzzed down close to the scalp.

The tattoos that used to crawl across his cheekbone and down his neck had vanished under a smooth layer of makeup, blended so carefully into his skin that even up close under this bad light, Drake couldn’t find the edges. And his eyes, normally almost black, were now a pale, muddy hazel.

"Contacts?" Drake asked.

"Contacts."

"Damn." Drake leaned forward, genuinely impressed through the haze. "You did all that yourself?"

"Who else was gonna do it? You?" Enrique snorted. "My sister used to do makeup for quinceañeras. I watched her for years. Never thought it’d save my life."

"You look like a whole different dude."

"In the right light, maybe. In daylight, if somebody stares too long, I’m done." He turned back toward the window. "That’s why we need to move. Get out of this city before somebody looks too hard."

"Not yet."

"Drake."

"I said not yet." Drake’s leg stopped bouncing. "Not until I talk to Darren."

Enrique’s expression soured immediately. "Man, forget Darren."

"Darren’s the smartest guy I ever ran with. He knows people. He knows how to disappear. He knows how to plan." Drake jabbed a finger at him. "If we’d had him with us, that old man would be dead without any evidence and you wouldn’t be wearing your sister’s foundation."

"Darren went straight. He’s got a girl, a job, posting gym pictures like some influencer. He’s not coming back for you."

"He doesn’t have to want to," Drake said quietly.

The guy in the corner laughed again at nothing. The woman on the mattress rolled over and pulled the blanket over her head.

Enrique stared at Drake for a long moment. "What does that mean?"

Drake leaned back into the couch, eyes half-closed, a slow smile spreading across his face.

"It means everybody’s got somebody they’d do anything for. I just gotta find out who his is."

Drake was smart enough to know he shouldn’t provoke Darren or he could have easily hung out at his gym and wait for him despite Darren being smart enough to post things that were obscure and more or less made it impossible to know his location by the background alone.

If they weren’t blurred out, it was vague and opaque.

-

Darren pushed through his front door and let it swing shut behind him, not even bothering to lock it right away. His keys hit the counter. His shoes came off somewhere between the kitchen and the couch, kicked aside without a glance.

He was exhausted.

It was barely afternoon, and somehow the day already felt like it had lasted a week. His shoulders ached, his eyes burned, and his body felt heavy in a way that had nothing to do with training. He hadn’t even done anything that hard today. It was just one of those days where everything seemed to drain him a little at a time until there was nothing left.

He dropped onto the couch with a long groan, one arm thrown over his face to block out the light coming through the window.

"Just five minutes," he told himself. "Five minutes, then I’ll get up and eat something."

The apartment was quiet. No traffic noise from outside, no neighbors arguing through the walls, just the low hum of the fridge and his own slow breathing.

He didn’t remember closing his eyes.

He didn’t remember drifting off either.

But somewhere in that heavy, dreamless dark, something shifted, and Darren began to dream.

It was a very strange dream.