What was unclear was why she had them in the first place.

They hit the living room at the back.

Oh, right.

That was why.

She sat her throne of an armchair Goodwill would turn down, long red dreads, raccoon eyeliner, pasty white skin that was not helped with copious contouring, massive gold bespoke hoops that said BRANDI across the circle at her ears, a variety of thick chains hanging around her neck, Gucci tee and track pants, Balenciaga color-block sneakers.

None of that was fake or black-market rip-offs.

Even the gold at her ears.

So, yeah.

A girl had to find the green to get her logo, keeping minions addled in narcotics was Brandi’s way.

How he grew up, Axl could do designer. And that was one thing he was down to take from his father’s teachings.

He’d been in Boss last night, with Mezlan shoes.

But he wasn’t sure about Brandi’s switch-up between Gucci and Balenciaga. He felt it flew in the face of appropriate sporting of logo wear.

What he was sure about was his distaste for Brandi appropriating Black statements.

That woman’s people had never been in chains.

Thank fuck he wasn’t partnered up with Marques today. As was his right, Marques had a serious issue with appropriation, not to mention the ability to share how he felt about that in a variety of ways.

“Fuck, how’d you find me?” she demanded while the last of the queen’s court scuttled down a side wall and made his escape.

“You’re on Hawk’s payroll, B,” Auggie told her. “And as such, Hawk expects, if you need to change scenes, you send in an updated address form.”

Brandi gave them nothing but a glare.

“Been a minute,” Axl noted.

“Sixty times twenty-four times about ninety-five days, maybe a few of them,” Aug added.

“Things got hot for me at my last locale,” Brandi spat.

“Hot how?” Axl asked.

“My business is your business only if I make it your business,” she stated. “That’s the deal.”

“Wrong,” Axl returned. “Your business isn’t our business unless you make it our business, in however we feel that might happen. And right now, ghosting us a couple of days after taking your last fee, you became our business.”

She said nothing.

“Brandi, what gives?” Axl pushed.

“Right, I’ll make it official. I’m getting out of the dicking-around-with-you-guys trade,” she declared.

“Okay, resignation accepted,” Auggie agreed readily. “So you’re good to return the retainer you didn’t earn, let’s say, now?”

She made a face.

That would be a no.

“B—” Axl started.

“You boys gotta stop dickin’ around with shit,” she told them.

Both Axl and Aug grew silent.

This was because Axl and Auggie were there to get an informant back online.

But neither of them were ever far off the trail they’d been sniffing now for-what-felt-like-ever.

And B disappeared maybe not exactly the time a variety of crews in town got interested in Cisco, which led them to death, dirty cops and a murder-suicide.

But the timing jibed.

Jesus, did she know something?

“That’s all I’m sayin’, and I’m tellin’ you, believe this, that warning is worth every penny of my last fee.” She lifted both hands and snapped twice. “Even.”

Axl broke his silence. “What do you know?”

“Okay, see, I like to,” she leaned forward, “breathe. So fuck off. You got what you got. Be happy. And keep breathing, or not, I don’t give a shit.”

“Is this about the Cisco sitch?” Auggie asked what was on both their minds.

“Fuck off,” she answered.

Okay, two “fuck offs”?

Axl was getting pissed.

He felt the same from Auggie.

But Axl got there first.

Crossing his arms on his chest, he educated, “See, you got a vagina or not, this is how we deal with wannabe G on our payroll who come up way short during performance evaluations. Hawk’s got a place you do not want to go. We take you there and keep you there until we think we’re even. And after, we decide how severance is gonna go down. Whether you gotta expend the effort to rebuild somewhere that is very much not here but we give you one last thing, a ride to that new location. Or we dismantle you in Denver in a way you’ll never fuckin’ rebuild, and you gotta make your own way to a new location. Now, we got shit to do so, you got ten seconds to make your decision. You feel like taking a ride today?”

She sat her throne with an expression that was half glare, half pout.

In that ten seconds, Axl considered the fact he knew she was thirty-nine, but she looked fifty-nine.

Thank fuck, after years of his father fucking with his head, when there was a decision to make about his future, he took the route to healthy living.

“Time’s up,” Auggie said.

They both started to move her way.

“Motherfuckers!” she snapped, shifting in her seat. “Right, fuck you and just to say, you and Nightingale and Chaos and fucking Sebring are all on radar. Do not think you’re not.”

Both men stilled.

They’d heard this.

From Kevin Bogart, dead dirty cop.

He’d made this same threat against certain players in town, including Knight Sebring, who ran a clean nightclub, but it was debatable, according to your personal philosophies, if his side business was the same.

“They are goddamn itching for you to fuck up, one of you, all of you, they don’t give a fuck,” she went on.

Both men remained silent.

“You think you own Denver,” she continued, warming to her theme something that was Brandi’s MO.

She pictured herself a gangster, but she was on Hawk’s payroll as an informant for a reason.

That reason was why she was in this shitty apartment with a strung-out cult following.

Small-time dealer, also, when she decided not to be lazy, small-time hustler, but she was shit at both. So it was highly likely Hawk, Lee Nightingale, or some cop who had her on his CI list paid for her Balenciaga sneaks.

That reason was also because she liked to know shit you did not and then make you pay for that shit, but when she stared singing, she got off on it, so she was hella useful.

“Nightingale especially,” she carried on. “That Rock Chick bullshit in those books that everyone thinks is cool?” She shook her head and dreads dragged her Gucci. “Not so much.”