Page 136 of 4 Corinthians

Four

“Logan is pissed,” Trey said, and I shrugged. I walked through Cori’s basement looking for anything that looked out of place. I had a few hours to kill, and this shit with Orlando was still bothering me. No matter how many times I tried to wrap my head around the fact that he said Logan sent him, it didn’t make sense. Logan’s interest in Cori ended years ago; he moved on once Robert killed her parents. “They found Orlando’s body in the park.”

“I left it there,” I told him. I wasn’t hiding from Robert or Logan. I wanted them to know I was coming for them.

“Burned.”

I stopped walking and looked at the phone. “I didn’t burn his body,” I told him.

“I know,” Trey chuckled. “Robert did.”

“Why?”

“Because he found out that he was watching Corinthians,” he replied. “He was hired to go after someone else.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” he quickly replied. “Robert was hush about it. Wouldn’t say too much about it around me. When I walked into his office, he was destroying it. Nigga was so mad he was stuttering. It took him a minute to calm down.”

“He’ll be alright,” I said, then went back to looking. I was coming up empty every damn time. “Shit ain’t about to get no better for him though.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “After I finish checking over Cori’s house, I’m going to meet up with Nine. I’m done waiting. I’ve let him live too fucking long. He ain’t gonna stop unless I stop him, and the only way to do that is to kill him. He came after my son, man, that ain’t ever gonna be a livable offense in my eyes.”

“Yo son?” he questioned.

“Judah.”

“Man Four,” he sighed. “You-“

“Listen,” I cut him off. I wasn’t in the mood for any fucking lecture about this. “Judah may not be my fucking blood, but he’s mine. You either accept that shit or don’t, but that’s not stopping me from claiming him as mine.”

“You don’t know, do you?” Trey asked.

“Know what?” I stopped walking.

“Who Judah’s daddy is,” he answered.

“It doesn’t matter who helped conceive him; I’m his damn daddy.”

“It does matter,” he insisted. “Look, I gotta go. I only called to give you a heads-up; I convinced Robert to send Eight to Judah’s school instead of another nigga I don’t trust. He’s going to do it. He doesn’t trust Logan too much right now, so he wants eyes and ears on anybody associated with him.”

“Who is he taking out?” It took me damn near all night and day to finally get the paperwork together that Nine had discovered. And just like I thought, Robert used a shell company to buy Judah’s school. I was going to talk to Cori about pulling him out, but now that I knew Eight was there, staying was probably our safest option. I still planned to talk to her about it tonight, though.

“His teacher,” Trey replied. “She worked for Logan, was one of Jonathan’s girls at one point in time. After he was killed, Logan took her in. Orlando too. He was Jonathan's pet after Psalms.”

I wiped my hand over my mouth and laughed. “That still doesn’t explain why he was so afraid of Cori when she walked in the room; he’d seen her before, at the dojo.”

“You sure he wasn’t afraid of you, and you thought it was directed at Corinthians?” he asked.

I thought back to the look in Orlando’s eyes when he realized Cori was coming into the room. In the dojo, he was amused, then, to him, seeing her in the warehouse. No, that was definitely fear in his eyes, and it was directed at Cori.

“Nah,” I said, shaking my head.

My watch buzzed, and I lifted my arm to see a text from Nine.

Nine: We gotta talk.