Page 14 of Raziel

Bria had called me and asked if I’d drive from Tampa to Miami with her to drop off some work. I didn’t want to do that shit, but she said she needed somebody—and I owed her.

“You always say that, friend. But you gonna help me if I need it,” she shot back.

I narrowed my eyes at her. “I’m serious this time. If Miyori finds out what I’m doing, she’ll kill me. Then she’ll bring me back and have Priest kill me slowly. Your ass gonna die too.”

My sister had beenveryclear about me staying away from the people and lifestyle I was involved with before rehab.

Bria was one of those people I was supposed to avoid. She’d been with me when everything went wrong with Priest.

Her boyfriend had gotten locked up, and we’d seen it as an opportunity. High on molly, we came up with a stupid-ass plan to take the product we were supposed to deliver to him and sell it ourselves for profit.

We’d done drop-offs for him before and thought we could handle it.

But after five of the nine scheduled drops, we’d snorted enough cocaine to take down a rhino.

It was two-day binge I regret.

I woke up in a South St. Pete trap house with Priest standing over me like I was already dead.

I had beensofucking scared.

Never again.

I wasn’t going back to that life—not after everything I’d been through. Not after getting my sister involved with Priest just to bail me out.

I might miss the high sometimes, but not enough to risk everything again.

When Bria opened the warehouse door, it felt like stepping onto the set of a 1990s drug movie.

The air smelled like bleach, sweat, and cocaine.

We passed two armed guards holding automatic rifles. At folding tables, naked women with long acrylics bagged product with blank expressions while rap music thumped in the background.

My stomach turned, but my mouth was salivating.

There was a cornucopia of drugs.

Pills in every color. Little round ones. Long, oval ones. The kind you chew. The kind you swallow. The kind that melt under your tongue and slide you straight into numb. Happy pills, sleepy pills, touch-the-sky pills.

They had weed, coke, E, K.

Crushed Xanax, bootleg Adderall.

Powders, too. Had me remembering the lines I cut with a credit cards on a cracked glass table. I’d gotten so high I’d experience paradise and hell.

I shouldn’t have been there.

Just being in that space made me crave, that old itch crawled under my skin like ants.

The only thing that kept me steady was remembering the disappointment on Miyori’s face.

Not anger. Not fear.

Disappointment.

That look she gave me before even the Priest incident, when she found me face-down on the bathroom floor, needle still in my arm.

I’d never seen her cry like that. I never would again. Not because of me.