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My shoulders drooped. “Good.”
“It’s all bluster. I think, overall, they took it incredibly easy on him considering,” Marta continued. “I…”
“You need to leave.”
My dad’s booming voice had us both looking up in time to see him barreling down right on top of us.
“I’m not leaving,” Marta said. “He’s my son.”
“You also almost got him killed,” my father countered. “You’re the last thing he needs to see.”
“You can’t make me leave,” Marta snapped. “I’m here to stay, whether you like it or not.”
“I can make you…” The Judge reared his ugly face.
There were two parts of Raiden St. James. The first part was my father. He was the stiff, non-relenting asshole that always got what he wanted. And if that guy didn’t get what he wanted, the one who I called ‘The Judge’ in my head showed. The Judge was the manipulative bastard. The man that, if he didn’t get his way, did what he wanted and that was by forcibly removing his opponent.
The Judge showed up more often than not when it came to Marta St. James.
“Do you really want to do this in the hallway of the hospital where your son is in a room because he was jumped by a drug dealer?” I snapped at The Judge.
Raiden St. James didn’t like being reprimanded. Even more, he didn’t like when that reprimand came from a girl that he wasn’t too sure he liked altogether.
“Why are you even here?” he asked. “You’re the reason that he’s in this place in the first place.”
I gritted my teeth.
“I am not,” I snapped.
“You don’t think that I don’t know that you were the one to get him this job?” he asked. “The job that was the only place in town that would hire his handicapped ass?”
If I could’ve gotten away with punching my father in the face, I would have.
Sadly, I was able to contain myself.
But barely.
“Father,” I said through clenched teeth. “I didn’t get him that job. He got that job all on his own.”
Kind of.
See, I worked for Little and Stratton, a welding company off of Eleventh Street. Eleventh Street, where only the worst of the worst lived and thrived. One day, I’d met my brother at the convenience store where he now worked, and the woman had offered him a job almost on the spot when she saw how he handled a fight between a couple of local gangbangers.
My brother had accepted, and ever since then, Jimmy had been working right across the street from me.
Which was both good and bad.
Good because I got to see him all the time. Bad because he was working in a dangerous place where the world was different.
There was this imaginary divide that started at the beginning of Eleventh Street and continued all the way to the end. That divide was like an entirely different world where cops weren’t called on people and things were handled internally.
Meaning, nothing would happen to that little fucking prick who’d hurt my brother because he’d find a way to get out of it mostly by nobody speaking up even though the jumping had happened in broad daylight.
“I think it’s time for you to go, too,” he said.
It was time to go.
I had half an hour left in my lunch break, and my boss and I were on a big timeline.
Now that I knew that my brother was safe, I’d be going back to work. But mostly that was because I couldn’t stand my father and he was probably going to be here for the long haul.
Without answering him, I headed into the hospital room and stopped beside my brother’s bed.
He looked horrible.
His eyes were both black and swollen shut. His hands had defensive wounds on them. His jaw was bruised, and his lip was split on both the bottom and the top.
“Stop staring at me,” my brother said.
I smiled, even though all I wanted to do was cry.
“I’m not staring,” I lied. “I’m admiring your new look.”
His lip quirked and that small movement made the crack in the bottom of his lip start to bleed.
I nearly wept. The only thing stopping me from doing so was the way I was digging my nails into my palms and likely breaking my own skin in the process.
“It’s a good one, isn’t it?” he asked. “I finally have some street cred.”
I would’ve laughed at the absurdity of it if he hadn’t been speaking the truth.
The young, impressionable teens that came into the convenience store, better known as Sparky’s where Jimmy worked, had always given him shit because he ‘didn’t know what it was like’ to live and breathe Eleventh Street.
Well, now, he did.
“Dad’s kicking me out,” I sighed. “I have to go back to work anyway. I haven’t gotten much done because I’ve been worried about you, calling you and all of your friends. Plus, I don’t want to hear them fight for hours. But I just wanted you to know that I stopped by, and I love you.”
