He didn't know who sent it. A fed? A friend? His father's ghost? It didn't matter.
That was the moral quagmire Tariq never expected. He wasn't just moving weight; he was now an accessory to healthcare fraud. Using his Stansfield credentials and a fake student relief fund, he bribed a hospital administrator. He watched as two men in hazmat suits loaded a ventilator into an unmarked van. For a moment, he saw his father’s reflection in the van’s tinted window—the same look of a man who had crossed a line for family, for survival.
Their first job was a disaster. A meet in a deserted parking garage under the Queensboro Bridge. The supplier, a jittery man with a hacking cough, tried to short them. Tariq, channeling the ghost of his father, didn’t flinch. He calmly pulled a small UV light—used for disinfecting mail—and shined it on the counterfeit bills the man had tried to pass.
It was the summer of 2020, and the world felt like it was holding its breath. For Tariq St. Patrick, the pause button had been pressed on his entire life. His father, James "Ghost" St. Patrick, was dead by his hand. His mother, Tasha, was in witness protection. And he, a freshman at Ivy League-adjacent Stansfield University, was supposed to be blending in, not standing out as the son of a Queens drug lord. Power Book II- Ghost -2020-2020
Tariq walked off the roof, his heart pounding beneath his hoodie. The city below was silent, save for the distant wail of an ambulance. He pulled out his phone. A single text from an unknown number: Your mother is safe. Keep it that way.
The man laughed, then coughed. Brayden instinctively reached for a hand sanitizer clipped to his belt. The tension broke for a split second, a surreal, darkly comic moment. Here they were, playing a life-or-death game of drug-dealer chess, while a global pandemic made every handshake a potential death sentence.
The year 2020 was a crucible. It didn't make Tariq St. Patrick a killer. It made him a survivor. And in a world paused by plague and panic, he learned the final, brutal lesson Power never taught him: There is no intermission in the game. The ghost doesn't rest just because the world does. He didn't know who sent it
“Try again,” Tariq said, his voice eerily calm. “And step back six feet.”
The summer culminated in a rooftop confrontation. Not a shootout—ammo was too precious, and the sound would draw unwanted attention from the few cops still on patrol. Instead, it was a trial by fire. Monet, Cane, Dru, and Diana had Tariq cornered. They’d found out about the ventilator deal, realized he’d kept a cut for himself.
But in the vacuum of a campus half-empty due to the pandemic, the rules of the street had only gotten sharper. His father's ghost
“You’re not Ghost,” Cane sneered, ripping off his black cloth mask. “You’re a ghost of a ghost.”
The problem was supply. The usual pipelines had dried up. Borders were tight, shipments delayed, and every two-bit hustler with a mask thought they were king. Tariq’s only ally was Brayden, his well-meaning, chaos-magnet roommate, who had traded his frat kegs for a crash course in covert logistics.