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.
Tariq pulled out a single item: a thumb drive. “On this is the location of every stash house your father left behind, plus the new distribution network you set up during the lockdown. You kill me, it goes to the Feds, the Castillos, and your cousin Lorenzo in federal prison.”
But in the vacuum of a campus half-empty due to the pandemic, the rules of the street had only gotten sharper.
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. Power Book II- Ghost -2020-2020
“You have balls, St. Patrick,” she said, lowering her piece. “Don’t lose them in the second wave.”
Tariq sat in his dorm room, the buzzing fluorescent light the only constant. His laptop screen flickered between a half-finished economics paper and a dark web portal. The pressure from Monet Tejada hadn't let up. If anything, the lockdown had made her more dangerous. With fewer cops on the street and everyone trapped inside their own fiefdoms, her rules were absolute.
The story, Power Book II: Ghost – The Lost Year , isn't the one you saw on screen. It’s the one that happened in the cracks between the episodes, during the silent, sweltering months of 2020. Their first job was a disaster
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.
He didn't know who sent it. A fed? A friend? His father's ghost? It didn't matter.
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. Tariq, channeling the ghost of his father, didn’t flinch
The real turning point came when Tariq discovered that the Tejadas had a secret: a makeshift lab in an abandoned bodega in the Bronx, churning out a high-grade synthetic product. But the chemist was sick—really sick. And he refused to work unless someone got him a ventilator for his asthmatic daughter.
“You’re not Ghost,” Cane sneered, ripping off his black cloth mask. “You’re a ghost of a ghost.”
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.