“You signed every transfer!”

And there it was — the thing that always happens, in the end, to people who mistake a shared appetite for loyalty.

For as long as the money flowed, Folarin and Seraphina had been a united front, father and daughter, a dynasty, each covering for the other.

But the moment the machinery closed on them, the first thing each of them did was reach for the other’s throat. Dad told me. You signed every transfer. Two sentences, and thirty years of family loyalty dissolved into each trying to feed the other to the law first.

I had seen it before, in that warehouse and in the courtrooms afterward — how quickly the bonds among people who love the same thing more than they love each other come apart under pressure.

The trafficking network had done it too, at the end; the men who had sworn oaths to one another had tripped over themselves to inform, once the alternative was their own conviction.