Page 11 of 4 Corinthians

“Smart man,” Robert said, nodding. “Greed is a sin. Ain’t that what the Bible says? I heard a Pastor say that last week.”

“Yes, sir,” Exodus answered. “My granddaddy just preached about it.”

“Oh yeah, your granddaddy is a preacher?” Robert asked. He was faking interest. He knew my granddaddy was a preacher because I heard my daddy talking to him about it. “His church around here?”

“The big church around the corner,” Exodus slowly answered. It wasn’t common for people not to know who the DeCortes were or where our family church was.

“Welp, I guess I gotta hurry and try to catch him,” Robert sighed. “Y’all be safe out here and hurry home.”

“We will,” Exodus said, still watching him. “You have a good day, sir.”

“You too, young man,” Robert said, then pulled off.

“He was kind of weird,” Exodus said, watching Robert’s car until it turned. “I’m going to tell Granddaddy about him.”

“Tell Madea, Granddaddy ain’t scary enough to me,” Krude said with a laugh, then shrugged. The first streetlight started to flicker above us. “Let’s go before Madea is on the porch.”

“Race y’all back to the house!” Exodus yelled and then took off running.

I looked back for Bug and saw her standing in the grass, head down. She never raced because she was the shortest and never won, but I knew she wanted to.

“Hey, come on,” I said, reaching for her. I touched her shoulder, and she jumped. “Hey, it’s okay.”

“I had an accident,” Bug said, lifting her head to look at me. I looked down at her shorts and saw that she had peed herself. I wasn’t surprised. Ever since we had met Robert, she’d been having accidents.

Sighing, I took her hand. I knew seeing Robert scared her because it scared me, too. “It’s okay, I got you,” I told her as I interlaced our fingers. “Let’s go change your clothes.”

Uri

“Breathe through the pain,” I told Kenbral. He was shaking, and I could see that he wasn’t going to last much longer. “Just breathe.”

“I am,” he groaned. He’d lost his sparring match, and as punishment, Robert had him kneeling on broken concrete. He started to shake, and I reached for him. “Don’t touch me!”

“I’m just trying to help,” I said, stepping closer. “I know-“

“You don’t know, Uri,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t know because you can't feel it. My knees hurt so much, and they are bleeding.” To add to the weight he was already carrying, Robert filled a backpack with bricks and made him wear it.

The buzzer sounded, and I rushed around to pull the bag off his back, dropped it on the floor, and then helped Kenbral up. He struggled to get to his feet, and once he did, he had to lean against me. I gladly took his weight and helped him to the chair in the corner of the room.

“I didn’t mean to say that,” he mumbled as he sat. His knees were cut and bruised. “I was just hurting.”

“I know.” I grabbed a water bottle from the table, opened it, and poured it over his knees to try to get some of the concrete out of his skin. Kenbral winced in pain, and I sighed. “It’s fine.”

“Uri-“

The doors opened, and I looked over my shoulder to see Logan walk into the room. He looked from me to Kenbral, then back at me and smirked. He kept walking through the room and left through the door opposite the one he’d used to enter the room.

“He’s up to something,” Kenbral said, still staring at the closed door. “He was smiling, which means something bad.”

“I have to spar later,” I told him. After I finished cleaning his knees, I took my shirt off, ripped it, and wrapped the pieces around his wounds. It would have to do for now. When we got home, I could do more.

“Spar with who?” he asked, and I shrugged. “I thought since you were leashed that you couldn’t?”

“Robert said sparring doesn’t count. “I stood and put my hands in my pockets. “He said it’s training.”

Kenbral kissed his teeth and shook his head. “He’s trying to kill us,” he said.

“Not yet,” I denied. “We are still useful to him.” What I didn’t say was that if this was us when we were useful, I was scared to see what it would be like when we weren’t. Robert didn’t love us; he wasn’t even capable of love. All he knew was anger and pain. That’s what made him happy.