“Girl, get out of my way. I don’t have time for this. You need this money more than I do so I don’t know why you’re trying to hold me up.”
“Rita.” I put my hands on her shoulders gently. “I’m Serenity. Your granddaughter. We’re in Hartford, Connecticut. It’s nighttime and you’re not going anywhere.”
She looked at me. Really looked at me. I watched it happen in real time. The certainty in her eyes flickered like a bulb deciding whether to stay on or go dark. Her brow furrowed and her mouth opened slightly. She looked down at her purse, at her shoes, at the front door, then back at me. The confusion that spread across her face was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen because Rita didn’t get confused. Not ever. Eighty-five years on this earth and this woman had never once looked lost.
“Serenity?” she said quietly, like she was testing the word to see if it fit.
“Yes, Grandma. It’s me.”
She blinked a few times. Looked around the apartment like she was seeing it for the first time. Then her shoulders dropped and something dimmed behind her eyes.
“I’m confused,” she said softly. “I don’t know what just… I’m gonna go lay down.”
She turned and walked back toward the guest room, slower this time, without the purpose she’d had thirty seconds ago. Her purse was still on her shoulder. Her shoes were still on. She went through the door and closed it behind her without taking off either one.
I stood in the living room alone. The TV was still going. Sarai was still sleeping. The legal documents were still on the kitchen table. Everything was exactly where it had been five minutes ago but nothing felt the same. My grandmother had just looked me in my face, called me a name I’d never heard, and asked for a gun to go run a club that closed before I was born.
I needed to call my brothers A.S.A.P. Something was off with Rita and I was starting to fear the worst.
49
Justice
“You good?” Prime asked as we sat across from each other at the E Street Diner.
I leaned back in the booth and let out something between a laugh and a sigh. “Nigga, I am beat. Came too close to death last night.”
Prime chuckled and sipped his coffee like we were two regular men grabbing a late meal instead of two brothers who had just wiped a cartel off the map. The diner was nearly empty at this hour. A waitress refilling salt shakers at the counter and a drunk couple arguing in the back booth. Normal people doing normal things while we sat here with gun oil still under our fingernails and adrenaline slowly draining from our blood.
“It’s over now,” he said.
“Mostly.” I rubbed the back of my neck where the tension had been living for weeks. “Still gotta find Zeph.”
Prime nodded and set his mug down. “Quest will handle that. Trust me, our brother ain’t letting that slide. But we gotta get back to our lives. You need to go see your babies and I need to head upstate to get my family.”
I studied him for a second. It was wild to hear him talk like that. To watch a man who had spent most of his adult life moving through the world alone, sleeping wherever the job required, answering to nobody and needing nobody, sit across from me and say the words my family with a softness in his eyes he couldn’t even hide. Fatherhood had done something to Prime that nothing else could. Not the money, not the kills, not the decade he spent underground building a reputation that made dangerous men nervous. None of that changed him. But those twins did. Zainab did. I could see the eagerness to get out of here in his body as he angled towards the door, ready to jump at a moment's notice.
I understood that pull because I felt it every time Dream called me Daddy in that little voice that made the whole world shrink down to just me and her. My daughters were my center.
But I was also grateful for this break from them. As terrible as that sounded, the truth was that navigating a war had been easier than navigating the emotional minefield of raising a fourteen-year-old girl. Soldiers were predictable. Storie was not.
Something was shifting in my oldest daughter and I could feel it even from a distance. Through FaceTime calls where her eyes were flat and her reactions were just slightly off from where they should have been. She said the right words but they landed wrong, like someone had taught her the script without explaining the emotion behind it. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly, but my gut had been whispering about it for months. I’d just been too busy with the war to listen. That was about to change. I owed my girls my full attention and they were about to get it.
“You know Monica would’ve wanted you to be happy, right?” Prime said, catching me off guard. He was looking at me with that older brother directness that he usually saved for conversations about business or strategy. “I get y’all hady’all problems in the past, but she wouldn’t want you to keep punishing yourself.”
All I could do was shrug. I appreciated what he was trying to do but he was knocking on a door I had sealed shut a long time ago. Monica and I had our ups and downs. We went through things that would’ve destroyed most marriages and some of those things were my fault. When she died, I made a promise to spend the rest of my life making it up to her through our girls. I had failed her as a husband and I wasn’t going to fail her as a father. Every decision I made was for Storie and Dream.
They were my redemption and my penance wrapped into two little people who looked just like the woman I lost.
“I hear you,” I said, because I did hear him. I just wasn’t ready to do anything with it.
Prime gave me a look that said he knew I was deflecting, but he let it go. He’d planted the seed and that was enough for now. We sat in a comfortable silence for a minute, two brothers decompressing from a night that would have given most men nightmares for the rest of their lives. My phone buzzed on the table between us.
It was Serenity. I felt bad about how I hadn’t been physically there with everything she had going on. But I knew my boy Xander was going to get her right.
I picked up on the second ring. “What’s good, sis?”
“Justice.” Her voice was tight in a way that made me sit up straighter. She wasn’t crying but she was close. “Something happened with Grandma last night.”
