“Get in the car and give me just a second,” I said to her quietly.
“Street—”
“Kyla. Please get in the car.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked at Brielle. Then back at me.
“If you leave me in a car to do this with her right now we are done,” she said. Flat. No performance behind it. Just the truth and I could tell she meant it. “I mean that. You get in this car with me and we go. Or you stay here and whatever this is—” she gestured between me and Brielle “—you choose it over me. And that’s it.”
I looked at her.
I thought about everything she had been. Everything she had given me. The time we’ve spent and how right things felt with her. The way she had just kissed me in the ring tonight in front of twenty thousand people and told me that my father was proud of me.
I looked at Brielle. Crying, and that told me that something had to be seriously wrong. She was standing there shaking and clearly had a problem that she wanted me to know about. She had come here instead of anywhere else she could have gone.
I walked to the truck and put my hand on the door.
And I closed it.
I hit the roof twice with my palm.
Signaling to let the driver know he could pull off.
Immediately, I could hear Kyla calling my phone before the truck reached the end of the block. I looked at the screen. Let it ring. Powered the phone off, put it in my pocket and turned to Gutta who had come up beside me.
“Can you drive us. She too shook up to drive and I need to see what’s going on.” I said.
Gutta looked at Brielle and then at me and pulled out his keys.
—
We got in Gutta’s car. Brielle in the back beside me. Gutta behind the wheel. She handed me her phone without saying anything else. I took it and looked at what was on the screen.
Documents. Photographs. Bank records and communications going back twenty years. Her father’s name attached to things that would have been unthinkable to her a week ago.
Her father was Veteran. It was right here in my face.
She spoke and told me that she went to confront her father about his dealings with BJ. He brushed her off and told her she was crazy. She went back on her own, breaking into his office while they weren’t home. She had found everything she needed herself.
The confirmation of what Legal had suspected, the twenty years of a secret finally cracking open, the man who had sat across Brielle’s dinner table her entire life looking at me with hate that I now understood completely.
He had hated me because I was Hood’s son.
And Hood’s son getting close to his daughter was the one thing that could eventually lead back to what he had done.
“I already called the police,” Brielle said. Her voice was barely holding together. “I sent them to the house. I have everythingthey need and I sent it over. I’m so sorry Xavier. I promise I didn’t know. My father has never given me any reason to think he was this cold, heartless and cruel individual. I never even suspected he dealt in drugs until I found all his paperwork and ledgers. I’m going to make this right, although I know you’ll never get back what my father robbed from you.” she cried.
Gutta looked at me in the rearview.
“We need to get there before the police do. He needs to look you in yo eyes, and you get the justice you see fit before anybody else can make that call.” he said. His voice was cold in a way that I recognized. The same way it got when something was about to happen that couldn’t be taken back.
“Drive then,” I said.
I didn’t know what I was going to do once I was face to face with that man. How was this shit real? The girl I’ve always loved. How was her father, that always hated me responsible for my father’s death before I even knew Bri existed. Life was fucked up like that, I guess.
—
There were four police units already outside when we pulled up. The front door was open. Lights were on inside. Neighbors on porches watching.
