Ma'Dre

Chicago-based journalist Julian Redding needs a story worth telling, but what he has instead is something he doesn’t fully understand.

When Julian was fourteen, his grandfather told him about a woman named Geneva, a night that never quite left him, and a card she had given him afterward. It had been a simple gesture at the time—helping someone out of a difficult situation—but it carried a weight his grandfather could never fully explain, and all Julian ever saw was the card itself, marked only by a single sugarcane stalk etched into its surface.

That story stayed with him, and now, with his career hanging in the balance, Julian asks for the card, convinced there’s something in it worth chasing, even if he can’t yet define what that is or where it might lead.

His grandfather gives it to him with everything he knows, and for a brief moment, it feels like the beginning of something. That feeling doesn’t last.

At the funeral, a woman in a black suit introduces herself as Heather Toussaint and removes the card from Julian’s possession because he never mean to have it, leaving him with nothing but questions and a growing sense that he’s brushed up against something far larger than he realized.

What should have ended there becomes the starting point.

When Julian pitches the story to his editor, she meets it with skepticism until he shows her a picture of the card, which triggers a memory she can’t ignore—a story about a group of women and children who disappeared off the coast of Florida in the late 1700s, later referred to as the Lost Sugarcane Colony because when the slave ship returned to claim them, the only thing left behind was a metal card marked with a single sugarcane stalk.

That connection is enough to move the story forward, but the approval comes with a warning he can’t afford to dismiss. The landscape of journalism is shifting, and his job isn’t just at risk—it’s next, and he won’t survive another round of layoffs without something substantial to show for it.

Julian follows the thread to Kingston, chasing something he still can’t define, and what begins as a chance encounter at a bar shifts the moment the woman he assumed was a moment in time steps forward and introduces herself as Ma’Dre, the leader of the Legacy, a system built on power, loyalty, and control that extends far beyond anything he expected to uncover.

She doesn’t avoid him or shut him out. Instead, she sets the terms, giving him twelve hours to interview her, during which he can ask whatever he wants with the understanding that once the inteview is over, there are rules he is expected to follow without exception.

He does not investigate anything she tells him or research the people, places, or history she gives him, and once he writes the article, she reads it for final approval before it goes anywhere, after which the story ends.

Julian agrees to all of it, fully aware of the boundaries being placed in front of him, and for a time, he intends to honor them.

That intention holds until Ma’Dre is pulled away in an emergency, he hears something he was never meant to, a name tied to her.

Ma'Dre's cardholder.

This information lands with a kind of weight that shifts everything he thought he understood about the situation he’s stepped into.

It isn’t just a powerful name; it’s the kind of name that operates across industries and borders, a presence that reframes Ma’Dre not as someone standing alone, but as someone aligned with a level of influence that changes the scale of the story entirely.

At that point, the question stops being who Ma’Dre is and becomes who she stands behind, what that allegiance affords her, and how far that access might reach in ways that could extend well beyond the story he originally set out to tell.

That’s where the agreement begins to fracture.

What starts as a mutally agreed upon controlled interview turns into an rogue investigation that pulls him from Kingston to Las Vegas and then to the Bay Area, where the connections begin to form in ways he was never meant to see and can no longer ignore.

The deeper Julian digs, the clearer it becomes that this was never just a story being handed to him, and that Ma’Dre was never simply answering questions.

She was managing him.

Now the only question left is whether Julian Redding can rebuild his career before he crosses a line he was explicitly told not to cross, or if the truth he’s chasing is the very thing that will put him directly in Ma'Dre's path.