The playground looked like the city had given up on it.
Rusted swings creaked when the wind pushed them. The slide leaned like it was tired of standing. The seesaw was half-buried in dirt, one end permanently sunk, like nobody had the energy to balance things anymore.
Under a broken streetlamp that flickered more than it shined, Big Head stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at nothing and everything at the same time.
Psycho sat on top of the plastic tunnel, legs spread, cigarette burning between his fingers. Murk leaned against the monkey bars, eyes half-lidded but alert. Jack sat on the edge of the sandbox, knees bouncing like his body couldn't keep up with his nerves. Rob stood closest to Big Head, quiet, solid, eyes scanning the dark.
They had walked here separately, like ghosts in the night, but now that they were together again the air felt heavier.
Mateo's words were still in the air.
Three days.
Andre Gatewood.
Erase him.
No one spoke first.
Big Head let the silence roll for a little while. The Southside hummed around them: distant music from a house party, a stray dog barking, a car rumbling over a pothole too big for the city to care about.
"We ain't moving on Andre yet," Big Head said finally.
Psycho frowned. "What you mean, 'yet'? We got seventy-two hours. That's plenty of time to erase somebody."
"You ain't erasing nothing by yourself," Murk said lazily.
"I ain't scared of that man."
"This ain't about scared," Big Head said. "This about smart."
Psycho opened his mouth to argue, then shut it. He might have been unstable, but he wasn't stupid. When Big Head used that tone, you listened.
Big Head lifted his head, eyes dark but steady.
"Before we go after Andre, before we step into a war with men who been in this game longer than we been breathing, we need to remember why we here. Who we are. How we got to this point."
Jack swallowed. "You talking about… her?"
Big Head didn't answer.
He didn't have to.
Psycho dropped his cigarette and crushed it under his shoe. Murk's eyes drifted away. Rob's jaw clenched.
Miss Lo.
The name wasn't said, but she was suddenly there with them anyway, like she always was when everything felt too big.
The wind shifted. The years peeled backward. The past stepped in.
He remembered the first time Psycho walked into Miss Lo's kitchen, bleeding all over her floor.
Back then, Psycho wasn't Psycho. He was just a fourteen-year-old kid limping through the doorway with blood running down his face.
Five boys had jumped him behind the school for talking to the wrong girl. They put a lock in a sock and swung until his vision blurred. He swung back until his hands went numb. The only reason he walked away at all was because someone yelled "Teacher!" and everybody scattered.
He should have gone home. He went to her house instead.
Miss Lo turned from the stove, eyes widening at the sight of him.
"Adrian! Get me some towels. Move."
Big Head, smaller then, still growing into the bones that would one day hold his temper, ran for the cabinet without question. He had seen plenty of kids bleed in that kitchen over the years. Miss Lo didn't flinch at violence. She cleaned it up.
She sat Psycho down, cupped his chin with rough hands, and started wiping away the blood.
"You look like somebody tried to erase your whole face," she muttered. "What you get into, boy?"
Psycho shrugged, wincing. "Just a disagreement."
She snorted. "You call that a disagreement, I'd hate to see a real fight."
He watched her quietly.
"Why you helping me?" he asked finally. "You don't even know me like that."
Miss Lo didn't look up from his cut. "Any boy on this block is mine," she said. "That makes you family. You hungry?"
Psycho didn't answer.
His stomach did.
She fed him. Patched him. Sent him home with bandages and food wrapped in foil.
The next morning, Psycho was on Big Head's porch before the sun was fully up.
He never really left after that.
Another memory rolled in, softer at the edges but just as sharp in the middle.
The first time they saw Jack, he was backed into a corner in juvenile detention.
He had on the same orange jumpsuit as everyone else, but he wore it different: smaller, thinner, quieter. His hands were up, not in surrender, but in the kind of slow, calculated defense of someone who had learned how to last longer than he should in fights he never wanted.
Three bigger boys had him trapped against the wall.
"Give up your phone credits," one of them said. "We need 'em more than you."
"I don't have any," Jack said.
They hit him anyway.
Psycho saw it first. "We jumping in?" he asked.
Big Head didn't hesitate. He walked straight over.
"You got a problem with him?" Big Head asked the lead bully, voice calm but edged.
The boy turned, sized him up. Then he saw Psycho's grin just over Big Head's shoulder, and the calculation changed.
"Ain't worth it," the bully muttered.
They backed off.
Jack slid down the wall, breathing hard. He looked up at Big Head and Psycho but didn't say thanks.
Big Head stuck out a hand.
Jack took it, letting himself be pulled up.
"What's your name?" Big Head asked.
"Jack."
"You got people picking you up when you get out?" Psycho asked.
Jack hesitated.
"No."
Big Head nodded like that was the answer he expected.
"A'ight," he said. "Then you rolling with us."
When they walked out of juvie months later, Jack was there at the gate with his plastic bag of belongings and nowhere else to go.
Miss Lo fed him.
Gave him a bed when she could.
A couch when she couldn't.
"My quiet storm," she called him, tapping his temple. "All that noise in here, and you think I don't hear it."
After she died, Jack smiled less. Talked less. Planned more.
He had been alone once. He wasn't going back.
Rob's memories were different. Sharper. Meaner.
He had learned early that sometimes the most dangerous person in a house was the one paying the rent.
His father's voice was a trigger. It always came before the hands. Before the belt. Before whatever object was closest and heaviest.
By ten, Rob could tell what kind of night it was going to be by how his father closed the front door.
One night, the slam shook the whole frame.
A bottle flew. His mother screamed. Something broke that didn't sound like glass.
Rob didn't wait to find out which part of the house was shattering next.
He grabbed his shoes and ran.
He ran until his lungs burned.
Ran past corners where boys twice his age posted up.
Ran past liquor stores, churches, boarded houses.
He slept behind dumpsters, stomach growling, head pounding. He stole chips and candy from gas stations, got chased into alleys, got hit in the head with a flashlight by an older kid for reaching into the wrong backpack.
That was where Big Head and Murk found him: bloody, exhausted, but still on his feet.
"You got somewhere to go?" Big Head asked.
Rob shook his head.
"You hungry?"
He nodded.
Big Head didn't ask anything else.
"Come on," he said. "My mom cooking."
Miss Lo fed Rob that night like he had been missing from her table his whole life.
She wrapped his wounds, cleaned his face, put a blanket over him on the couch and said, "You're safe here. Till you prove you don't want to be."
Rob didn't speak for three days.
When he finally did, Miss Lo smiled and said, "There you are."
He never forgot that.
He never forgot who pulled him out of the trash. Who gave him back a name.
That was why, out of all of them, his loyalty cut the deepest.
And Murk… Murk had always been there.
Before they were a crew, before they were feared, before anybody whispered the words "Southside Boys," there was just Adrian and Malik.
Big Head and Murk.
Cousins on his mother's side. Shared birthday parties. Shared hand-me-down clothes. Shared punishments when they broke any of Miss Lo's rules.
When Murk's own mother got locked up, Miss Lo didn't hesitate.
"Pack his things," she told her sister. "He staying with me now."
Murk slept on a mattress on the floor in Big Head's room for months. Miss Lo treated him no different than her own son: yelling, feeding, hugging, correcting.
He was quiet even as a kid. Angry too, but he hid it under silence.
After Miss Lo died, he didn't say much for a long time.
When he finally spoke again, it was to Big Head.
"Whatever you do next," Murk said, voice low and steady, "I'm with you."
And that was that. No big speech. No dramatic moment. Just a promise. The kind that doesn't break.
The memories slid away like fog, leaving only the cold night and the weight in all their chests.
"She made us," Jack said quietly.
"She made the whole damn Southside," Rob added.
Psycho didn't say anything. He just stared at the cracked ground, jaw working like he was grinding his teeth.
Big Head's eyes were dark. "She kept this block off limits," he said. "From the North. From the East. From everybody. The second she was gone, people started circling like vultures."
"Your uncle…" Jack started.
Big Head didn't let him finish.
"He had something to do with it," Big Head said. "I know he did."
Psycho shifted. "You still think he ordered the hit?"
"I don't think," Big Head said. "I know."
Rob's hands balled into fists in his pockets. "Then why we ain't done nothing about it?"
"Because in this game, you don't kill blood without proof," Big Head replied. "You don't move on a man like him without a map, a plan, and enough power to survive what comes after."
"The map starting tonight," Murk said.
"Exactly." Big Head nodded. "We handle Andre. That's the first move. We do it right, we don't just pay off Mateo, we send a message. To Andre. To the East. To the North. To my uncle."
"What message?" Psycho asked.
Big Head looked around the empty playground, the dead swings, the broken court.
"That the Southside got a spine again," he said. "And if they want it, they gonna have to break us."
Footsteps crunched on gravel behind them.
All four boys tensed at once.
Murk's hand dropped to his waistband. Psycho slipped off the tunnel. Jack slid off the sandbox and backed up. Rob shifted closer to Big Head's shoulder.
Someone was approaching.
Not stumbling. Not drunk. Not scared.
Confident.
They turned as one.
A lean figure stepped into the yellow haze of the broken streetlamp at the edge of the playground.
Big Head recognized him instantly.
Terrance Gatewood.
Andre's little brother.
Terrance, Little Dre to the streets, wore a hoodie with his hands tucked in the front pocket, chin lifted like the whole hood belonged to him.
He wasn't built like Andre. Andre carried weight and age like armor. Little Dre was still growing into his reputation. But his mouth was already dangerous.
"Well, look at this," Little Dre said. "Southside boys having a little meeting. Y'all should've sent out flyers. I would've brought snacks."
Psycho stepped forward. "Say less. I'll rock his shit right now."
Little Dre smirked. "Relax, lil' man. I ain't here for you."
His eyes slid to Big Head and stayed there.
"Heard your name been buzzing tonight," Little Dre said. "Adrian, right? Miss Lo's boy."
Big Head didn't answer. His face stayed unreadable.
Jack's heart kicked up.
If Little Dre knew about Mateo, that meant Andre knew too.
"You carrying a lot of noise for some dudes who still meeting on playgrounds," Little Dre continued. "Word is, somebody from the Southside kicked in the wrong door recently. Hit the wrong house. Took the wrong bricks."
Psycho snorted. "Word is, you talk too much for somebody who ain't earned stripes yet."
Little Dre's smile thinned.
Behind him, at the curb, a black sedan idled with its lights off. Just a shadow, but Big Head recognized the shape. The engine. The way it hugged the corner.
His uncle drove the same kind of car.
If it wasn't him, it was someone who moved like him.
Little Dre jerked his chin toward it. "My people hear things," he said. "They hear Mateo was on this side tonight. They hear he don't usually pull up unless something serious going on. They hear he gave y'all a little assignment."
"You hear too much," Murk said quietly.
"And you talk too little," Little Dre shot back. "Look, I ain't here to snitch. I don't care who Mateo got y'all pointed at. I just came to say this: if y'all screw this up, Andre gon' fix the problem himself. And when he fix problems, they don't walk away."
He looked right at Big Head when he said it.
"You think I'm scared of your brother?" Big Head asked calmly.
"No," Little Dre said. "I think you're tired of burying people. There's a difference."
For a second, the playground went dead silent.
Then Psycho took a step closer, eyes wild. "You keep his name out your mouth."
Little Dre laughed once. "Or what? You gon' swing on me in a park?"
Psycho's hand twitched.
Big Head moved faster.
He grabbed Psycho's hoodie and yanked him back so hard Psycho stumbled.
"Not here," Big Head said. "Not now."
Little Dre watched that, filing it away.
"You boys think you making choices," Little Dre said. "But from where I'm standing, looks like the whole Southside just got turned into a pawn board. Mateo. Andre. The Northside. Your uncle. And you?"
He smiled, small and cold.
"You just the pieces."
He started backing away.
"Handle your business," he added. "Or my brother will handle you."
He turned and walked toward the black sedan. The car's window rolled down a few inches.
A shape inside.
Older.
Watching.
For one second, as the taillights flashed on, Big Head saw a familiar profile. Sharp nose. Strong jaw. Same posture he had seen growing up.
His uncle.
The sedan eased off and melted into the dark.
Little Dre was gone.
The silence he left behind felt sharper than anything he'd said.
Psycho ripped his hoodie free from Big Head's grip.
"You should've let me crack him," Psycho muttered. "Would've sent a whole different message."
"And start a war we ain't planned for?" Big Head shot back. "Nah. You don't swing blind and call it power. That's what idiots do."
Psycho clenched his teeth, but said nothing.
Jack rubbed his face. "If Andre and your uncle both know about Mateo, that means this ain't just some job. This is—"
"A test," Murk said. "Mateo testing us. Andre testing us. The North watching, waiting to see if you fold or stand up. They gonna move based on what you do."
Rob finally spoke, voice low. "Then we better not fold."
Big Head looked around at all of them.
"We won't," he said. "But we also ain't rushing into this like we got nine lives. We only get one. Mateo told us what he wants. Andre probably already moving pieces. My uncle watching from the shadows, same way he did when my mother got hit. This ain't about one man no more. This about the way people talk about the Southside for the next ten years."
He stepped closer to them, voice dropping.
"We handle Andre, and that's the first time in a long time this side of the city ain't just reacting. That's us choosing the move."
"And your uncle?" Jack asked.
Big Head's eyes hardened.
"He next," he said. "But first we send a message."
"What message?" Rob repeated.
Big Head looked at the dead swings, the cracked court, the empty houses around them.
"That we ain't kids in Miss Lo's kitchen anymore," he said. "We the men she knew we'd have to be if she ever left."
Psycho's smirk came back slowly. "I been waiting to be that man."
Murk nodded once. "You say when."
Jack breathed out, scared but steady. "We all in."
Rob's voice was sure. "Southside or nothing."
Big Head felt something settle inside him.
The grief.
The anger.
The loyalty.
The history.
All of it pointed in the same direction now.
"We start with Andre," he said.
A faint rustle came from behind the chain-link fence at the back of the playground.
Murk's gun was in his hand before the sound fully formed. Psycho pulled his own piece. Jack ducked back behind the plastic tunnel. Rob slid sideways, giving Big Head room to move.
"Who there?" Big Head called out.
Silence.
Then footsteps bolted away.
"Got 'em," Psycho growled, taking off.
"Wait—"
Big Head moved first, sprinting after the shadow slipping past the trees.
The figure hit the sidewalk, shoes slapping the concrete. The hood slid back for half a second as they glanced over their shoulder.
Streetlight caught their face.
Big Head stopped like someone had grabbed his spine.
He knew that face.
Not from enemies. From family.
A girl. Late teens. Eyes too old for her age.
Miss Lo's daughter.
The one who left after the funeral.
The one who swore never to come back.
The one he had promised himself he would never drag into this life.
She stared at him, breathing hard, shock and hurt fighting in her expression.
"I heard everything," she said.
The words weren't loud.
But they were loud enough to make the whole future shift.
Big Head suddenly understood.
The war he was planning to fight on the streets was about to come crashing straight through his past.
And this time, it wasn't just his boys on the line.
It was her too.
She stared at him, breathing hard, shock and hurt fighting in her expression.
"I heard everything," she said.
Big Head didn't know what to say. The words jammed in his throat. Before he could take a step toward her, she shook her head and backed away.
"I shouldn't have come back," she whispered. Then she turned and ran down the block.
He didn't chase her. He couldn't. Not right now. Too much was moving, too many pieces on the table, and every one of them was sharp.
Behind him, the boys jogged up.
"Who was that?" Jack asked.
Big Head didn't answer. He just breathed out slowly, forcing his heartbeat to steady.
"Come on," he said. "We done here. Let's walk to the store."
They moved across the street and down the cracked sidewalk. The night felt heavier than before, like the block itself was watching them.
The corner store sat under a buzzing red sign, half the lights inside flickering. Psycho pushed the door open, the bell barely clinging to life as it rattled.
"Grab some Backwoods," Big Head said. "Dark Stout. And get some chips or something."
Rob walked ahead to the counter while Psycho scanned the shelf, grabbing packs that weren't crushed. Jack stood by the drink cooler, staring at his reflection in the glass like it might tell him the future.
Big Head stood near the door, eyes on the street.
Something felt off.
Too quiet.
Too still.
Murk noticed it too. "You feel that?"
"Yeah," Big Head said.
A beat passed.
Then headlights swung around the corner—fast, reckless, too low to the ground to be anything but trouble. A silver sedan with Eastside plates slid to a stop in front of the store, tires screeching.
Before Big Head could shout a warning, the back windows dropped.
Four muzzles pointed straight at them.
"Eastside, motherfuckers!"
The scream came right before the first shot.
Glass shattered. The store lights blinked out. The air exploded with gunfire. Shelves crashed to the floor as bullets tore through chips, soda bottles, and metal racks like paper.
"Down!" Big Head yelled.
Psycho dove behind a display cooler, pulling his piece. Jack scrambled behind the counter. Rob tackled the old store owner behind the register, dragging him out of the line of fire. Murk swung behind a metal pillar, returning shots through the broken front window.
Big Head fired three rounds back into the sedan, aiming for the driver's side. The car jerked, swerved, but kept spraying bullets across the storefront.
Sparks jumped off the metal shelves. A can of soda burst open like blood.
"Push 'em back!" Psycho roared, popping up long enough to fire off four shots that sent the Eastside boys ducking.
The sedan's tires screeched again. The shooter in the back leaned farther out of the window, screaming curses as he emptied his mag blindly.
Big Head aimed, breathed, and fired.
The back window cracked. The shooter screamed and dropped back inside.
"They hit!" Jack called.
"Don't matter!" Murk shouted. "They still moving!"
The sedan peeled off, engine roaring, leaving a trail of glass, smoke, and shouted threats behind it.
But before the boys could regroup, Big Head heard something else.
Sirens.
Far, but coming fast.
"Split!" Big Head barked. "Now! Nobody stays together!"
Psycho bolted out the back door, cutting across the alley. Jack sprinted down the side of the store, hopping a fence. Rob ran the opposite direction, disappearing behind a row of abandoned houses. Murk slammed a fresh mag into his gun before vanishing into the shadows like he had never been there.
Big Head took one last look at the shattered front window, the destroyed shelves, the blood trail from the Eastside car.
The whole block was cracking open.
The clock was ticking faster now.
Seventy-two hours had just become sixty… maybe less.
He ran.