Masaki drove his car on the westbound Belt Parkway until he came to the Rockaway Boulevard exit. The sun had just set on Canarsie, but with the bright streetlights New York was notorious for, he was more than visible to the knowing eyes that watched him drive down the street.

He spotted an unmarked police car following him, and knew it was show time. Before he crossed the next traffic light, he saw siren lights come to life in his rear-view mirror. A second later, Masaki heard the officer directing him over a loudspeaker to pull over, exit the car slowly, get on his knees, and clasp his hands behind his head.

He did as instructed. Three plain-clothes cops jumped out of the dark sedan, with bulletproof-vests on, their weapons drawn and pointed at him. He also noticed a crowd of people gathering, stopping to watch the scene unfold. He just hoped the right pair of eyes were watching him.

The police officers transported him back to the seventy-fourth precinct, and left him inside the same industrial interrogation room he’d been in when they questioned him about the shooting-deaths of Izzy and Aesop, and Oshun’s near fatal injury.

Goosebumps caused the hair on his arms to stand at attention. This was all for show, but it still fucked with his instincts to be in the presence of the police, even when it was a planned sting.

A few moments after arriving, Lieutenant Smyth entered the room. He directed Masaki to stand up, and escorted him to another room down the hall. Masaki stepped inside of another industrial room with concrete walls and drab gray paint slathered across them. But this room at least had a few more furnishings than the lone table and four chairs of the interrogation room.

“Your office?” Masaki stood still as the lieutenant removed the handcuffs from his wrists.

“Yeah,” Smyth responded. “We didn’t want to chance anyone overhearing what we were saying in the interrogation room. I’m gonna get you wired, and test it out with my surveillance team. When we’re good, we’ll get things underway.”

Masaki nodded even though his natural inclination was to balk at being an informant for the cops. You didn’t snitch in his world. You handled your business and dealt with your enemies by the code of the streets.

He would’ve given anything to have things work out that way. But when these motherfuckers came first for Oshun, and then his mother, Masaki had to put aside his own code of street justice, and let the police handle this, at least for now.

Oshun was right. The moment he discovered his mother had become a target, his anger pushed through his defenses, and he was ready to go on a shooting spree. If Oshun hadn’t been there to calm him down, and offer him an alternative to ferreting out their enemies and exacting revenge, the arrest scenario tonight would’ve been real.

Smyth took his seat behind the large desk sitting in the middle of the room and directed Masaki to take the seat in front of his desk. “Let me get your suit jacket before you sit down, and we’ll begin,” Smyth requested.

“My suit jacket?”

“Yeah, technology is a wonderful thing. Gone are the days of wires, and bulky cameras taped to the body. There’s a high-powered audio-visual recording device in this lapel pin. My team can control the camera angles remotely as you encounter the suspect.”

Masaki nodded, handed his jacket over, and was about to sit down when a familiar name on a Manila folder caught his attention. He pointed to the folder as he asked, “What’s this about?”

The lieutenant stared at him strangely for a moment before answering Masaki. “You’re joking, right?”

“Not particularly,” Masaki responded. “We have immunity where this case is concerned. You double crossing us?”

“Be easy, Yamaguchi,” Smyth cajoled. “We got this. Your C.I. papers are in order. As long as you tell the truth regarding these matters, we’re not coming for you for crimes related to this case. This folder is completely focused on our target for tonight’s operation. I put this together for you to go over, to make sure we have the details correct.”

Smyth walked around his desk, sitting in front of Masaki as he spoke. “We’ve had the suspect under surveillance since you and Oshun gave us the intel. As soon as he heard you were back in town, he put out feelers for someone to do wet work. We were able to get one of our undercovers in.”

“The target will pick you up, with our undercover officer, and they will take you to an abandoned warehouse near JFK. We have plainclothes officers surrounding the perimeter. We won’t let anything happen to you.”

Masaki nodded his head, and took the folder the lieutenant offered him in his hand. He read each line carefully, recognizing most of the details as correct. However, the information listed for probable cause for suspicion of the crimes in question didn’t make sense.

Decoy hideouts only known to Oshun and her father meaning only two people believed his mother had been present on those premises. Masaki could feel his blood heat from an annoyed simmer to a raging boil when all the pieces fell into place.

He kept reading until details began to create clearer pictures. He understood one thing now. He’d been deceived. By the woman he loved, and by the person he deemed his right hand.

“The picture in the back is of my undercover officer. At this point, I’d tell you to call your lawyer and have him look things over before you sign on the dotted line. But since Seth Stein is our target, you can either call another attorney, or I can get you a court-appointed lawyer if you like.”

Masaki ground his teeth as he tried to calm down. He couldn’t fuck tonight up. If this night when to shit, he’d be on the run forever. Any longer away from his organization, and chaos would ensue. No, tonight had to be the night they finished this.

“No, I’ve read it. I understand the terms,” he uttered. “Give me a pen.”

Masaki scribbled his signature in the designated places, the black gel ink flowing from the pen like blood. When he finished, he handed the lieutenant the folder, and leaned back, attempting to keep his calm facade in place.

“I need to call my lady before all this begins. Would you mind giving me the office for a few minutes?”

Smyth paused for a moment, staring at Masaki pointedly until Masaki put on a smile. “I know you guys have everything planned out,” Masaki said. “But, I just want to let her know I love her, in the event I don’t get the chance to say it later.”

He saw something in the cop’s eyes soften, perhaps he too understood what it was to face one’s mortality. Smyth nodded and stepped out of the room, leaving Masaki there alone.

Masaki removed his burner phone and tapped Oshun’s icon in his contacts list. He squeezed the arm of the chair he sat in, hoping to decompress the pressure he felt building in his skull with each unanswered ring.

“Hello,” she answered quickly.

“When did you know?”

There was silence across the line. If he hadn’t heard background noises, he would’ve checked to make certain their connection hadn’t been lost. He took a deep breath. Yelling in this room would only draw unwanted attention to him, so he let his breath flow loudly in and out instead.

“I asked you a question, Oshun. When did you know my right hand, the man I trusted with my mother’s life, was trying to kill us? When did you know? Was it when that motherfucker tried to end us both in that diner? Or was it when he tried to kill my fucking mother? When did you know? And when were you going to share that shit with me?”

* * *

Oshun knew he would find out, had narrowed it down to almost the exact minute he would become aware of her deception. She thought she’d prepared herself for it. She’d known when she made the decision to keep this information from him that he’d feel betrayed. Who wouldn’t? But she hadn’t believed her reaction would be the quivering nerves that twisted her stomach.

She stole a glance at Heart Searlington sitting in the driver’s seat of the unmarked surveillance van they were in. Heart keeping her eyes focused on the smartphone in front of her was about as much privacy as could be expected in their current close quarters. But privacy or not, Masaki wasn’t about to let her out of this conversation.

“I figured out it was Stein when my father called me to tell me the decoy spot had been hit. If only you and he believed your mother was there, I knew he was the one that ordered the hit.”

“And it never crossed your mind in the two minutes it took you to leave your room, and return to mine, that maybe I’d want to be aware of Stein’s treachery? That maybe I’d want to end that son of bitch before he had another chance at my mother, or the woman I loved, or me?”

“Masaki, listen to yourself,” she pled. “You’re calling me from where? A police station? You’re talking about ending someone in a police station. This is why I didn’t tell you, Mas. I didn’t want to risk your anger getting in the way, possibly allowing Stein to go free. Or even worse, causing you to go off without thinking, without protecting yourself first.”

“That wasn’t your choice to make, Oshun.” His voice was quiet, but she could feel the force of what he’d said reverberate through the line. “What gave you the right to make that decision without my input?”

“Because I love you,” she countered. “I love you enough to save you from your own miserable self. And if you’ve got a problem with it, tough. We’ll deal with that shit later. But right now, I need you to get your head right. Because so help me, Masaki, if you let your foolish anger fuck this sting up, or worse, you get hurt because of it, I will ring your neck my damn self.”

He growled into the phone, the timbre of his voice low, and deep. “Don’t think this shit is over because you say so. You promised me no secrets, Oshun. I won’t forget this.”

The line disconnected, and Oshun stared at the phone in her hand. She’d held her ground, made no bones about the decision she’d made. But the finality in Masaki’s voice, the way he’d ended their argument, it rang eerily of a coming goodbye.