ANDRE After Molly, he had tried to lose himself a little bit. Sex helped. The randomness of the sex helped even more. He had sworn off drugs after he saw what they did to some crack heads in the city, so there was no help from there at all. Not coke, not heroin. Only the occasional weed to mellow his rioting emotions now and again, to help him forget. Alcohol had been his biggest fall back on, the most reliable too. It was cheap, easy to reach for, easy to get accustomed to, easy to slip into like a forgotten layer of skin. But he made sure to never got too accustomed to the blessed forgetfulness of it, and he never got too used to the new skin it lent him. He saw what it did to his father. Andre was no saint, but he would not become what the man became. A man that could not distinguish between friend and foe, lashing out at everyone and everything, even his own child.'Yes,' Andre said to her. 'Me too.''I figured.' She shrugged as she began to clear away the bottles. She returned th

ANDRE At the surprise on Andre's face, Nick laughed. 'Yes, I know. I know you brought your henchman to every meeting we have had on this rooftop. If I make a wrong move, you drop me—that was the logic, was it not? Tell me, was that why you always wanted to talk here, in this godforsaken place?'Andre had not the words. It had been Trent on the roof all those nights, all those times. The reminder was an every moment, unrelenting agony. He was finally beginning to understands why Big Jack had refused to run even after he had lost everything so fast and so violently. The man just could not. He could only fight. That was the only option this raw feeling in his chest made available.He could only fight. He would find a way to climb back to the top, not for Nick or his sodding self interest, not even for Trent. For himself. He would make quick work of Dante. It was the bosses—Natasha, Sean, Amir, Blythe —it was them who were his biggest problem. Dante was not streetborn or bred, like he w

JACKIEIn the summer, the cemetery where her mother was buried was a place of stone and manicured grass—although there were small thickets of undergrowth here and there—a place of beloved and, sometimes, forgotten people. Now, a layer of weighty, white blankness that befitted the place's purpose and mood had covered the field.Jackie ambled through the flaky snow. Headstones made of hard, indestructible concrete grew from the soft ground, jutting from the floor like hands of stone. Hands, reaching for something, perhaps the sky. Always reaching but never touching it. A forlornness pervaded the atmosphere here even though the place was obviously tended to almost as well as some museums were, even though there were always people around, weaving between the reaching stone hands, wiping dust off them affectionately, whispering to long dead parents and nieces, weeping softly too, sometimes.The groundskeeper asked Jackie if she needed help finding someone, but she told the woman that she di

DANTE Trouble, like a thundercloud, is often heavy with pregnancy. This Dante found soon enough. He had thought the greater majority of his problems had been solved when he won the polls, but it turned out that they were only just beginning. For him, they began with the courier.The driver was hunched over and she held a hand to her stomach, clutching her ribs tightly. She limped, leaning on her left leg just slightly. It was nearly imperceptible, but she still had to be helped to the chair. Dante sat at the other side of the table, across from her, while Imani, his ever-present, ever-irritable hulk of a bodyguard sat a table behind him, her hand in the slash pockets of her denim jacket, probably palming her gun for all he knew. Imani was his second as much as she was his bodyguard. She handled small affairs by herself and had proved herself adept at the job only a few days in. The woman kept on a stoic demeanor that could have passed for a serial killer's, but once, he had seen he

ANDRE Mole.Snitch.Informant.Tattletale.Turncoat.There were many names for the thing Andre had become. Many, many names. Snitch was the one that resonated most in these streets. It was the one that hounded him wherever he went.It was a whisper in his ear. It was the running of water from the shower. It was the crunch of his tyres on the driveway gravel. Snitch, snitch, snitch. Sometimes it was Trent's voice; other times, he could swear that when he heard the word and turned around, for an instant, a split second, he caught sight of Molly, hair like dirty straw, one eye gone. He was trailing ghosts now. But Molly's ghost was easiest to accommodate. Time had made it easier to carry the weight of her passing, and when she skirted at the periphery of his mind, he did not recoil. Instead he looked out for her. When he caught glimpses in the rearview mirror, he parked the car. When he saw her in the shopping mall's mirror, he checked. These sightings were what drove him, what kept him