Chapter 221
Kieran's POV
By 4:30 AM, I was on my bike heading toward South Station. The streets were empty except for a few delivery trucks and the occasional taxi. The cold bit through my jacket, but I barely felt it.
At the station, I bought a ticket for the 4:30 PM train to Providence—just in case I needed to run. Then I walked two blocks to the AMC on Tremont and used the self-service kiosk to buy a ticket for the 3:15 PM showing of some action movie I'd never heard of. I didn't plan on watching it. What I needed was the timestamp on the receipt and a theater full of strangers who wouldn't remember whether one more kid in a hoodie had been sitting in the dark or not. If anything went wrong tonight, I wanted a paper trail that put me somewhere else during the hours that mattered.
Because I'd made my decision somewhere between hanging up the phone and hitting the streets. I wasn't going to give Drake fifty thousand dollars. I wasn't going to let him control my life anymore.
I was going to give him exactly what he deserved.
The next part was harder. Logan had mentioned a name once—Teddy Reeves—back when we were talking about his cousin who'd gotten jammed up passing counterfeit twenties in Dorchester. I'd filed the name away the way I filed everything away, not because I ever thought I'd need it, but because growing up in Southie taught you to keep a mental catalog of people who could get things done outside the system.
Finding Teddy was another matter. The number Logan had wasn't his—it belonged to a girl named Dina who ran a hair salon on East Broadway and served as a kind of informal switchboard for people who didn't want to be found directly. I called her at 5 AM and got cursed out for the hour. Called again at 6. She told me Teddy didn't deal with kids. I told her it wasn't about drugs. She hung up. I texted her a photo of two hundred-dollar bills and the words Practice bills. Training stock. That's all I need.
Twenty minutes of silence. Then a pin drop on my phone—a narrow alley off Broadway, near the old bakery that had been shut down since I was twelve.
Teddy was shorter than I expected, mid-forties, with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and the calm, appraising eyes of someone who'd been doing this long enough to stop being nervous about it. He looked me over, then looked at the alley behind me, checking if I'd been followed.
"You're Logan's friend."
"Yeah."
"He know you're here?"
"No."
He studied me for another moment. "What do you need?"
The transaction took less than five minutes once we got past the staring contest. Two thousand in real cash bought me fifty thousand in practice bills—the kind banks used for teller training. They looked real enough at first glance, especially in dim light or if you were drunk. The serial numbers were all the same, but you'd have to look closely to notice, and I was counting on Drake being too greedy and too wasted to look closely at anything.
"These are marked practice bills, kid," Teddy warned me, handing over the brick. "You can't use them for anything real."
"I know exactly what I'm doing."
He looked at me for a long moment, then shrugged. "Your funeral."
I spent the rest of the day in a daze, going through the motions of classes I couldn't focus on, avoiding Summer's texts because I didn't trust myself not to tell her everything. At lunch, I sat alone in the physics lab and ran through the plan again and again, looking for holes, for ways it could go wrong.
There were a thousand ways it could go wrong.
But there was only one way I could see to end this for good.
At 3:45 PM, I left campus and headed toward Old Colony Projects. The warehouse Drake had specified was exactly the kind of place you'd expect—broken windows, rusted metal doors, needles and empty bottles scattered across the concrete floor. I'd been here before, years ago, back when Drake used to drag me along to his "business meetings." The memory made my stomach turn.
I was early. Good. That gave me time to scope out exits, to position myself where I'd have the best chance if things went sideways. The fake money was in my backpack, carefully arranged to look like neat stacks of hundreds. In the fading light filtering through the broken windows, they'd pass inspection. Probably.
Drake showed up right on time, just as the last orange light was bleeding out of the sky beyond the broken windows. He looked worse than I remembered—more gaunt, more desperate. His eyes had that glassy quality that came from too much drinking and not enough sleep. He was carrying a folded knife in his right hand, not even trying to hide it.
"Smart boy," he said, grinning. "Knew you'd see reason."
"Where's the rest of your crew?" I asked, keeping my voice steady. "Thought you'd bring backup."
"Don't need backup for my own son." He moved closer, and I forced myself not to step back. "Now show me the money."
I tossed the backpack at his feet. "Count it if you want."