Page 14 of When a Soul Cries

Maybe that was why Yasmine’s flirting didn’t move me. I had learned the hard way that a beautiful face could hide an ugly heart.

I walked through the empty house one final time, locking the rear entrance and checking every room before leaving.

I owned enough property to drive through almost any part of the city and pass something carrying the Devereaux name. Apartment complexes. Commercial buildings. Luxury homes. Vacant lots people once called worthless until Kai and I bought them and made them valuable.

My name sat on contracts worth more money than Sugga used to make in ten years.

But if she told me to go buy groceries, I went to buy groceries.

It wasn’t fear.

It was memory.

There had been a time when food wasn’t something we could take for granted. A time when Sugga could stretch one package of chicken across three dinners and somehow make Kai and me believe she had already eaten.

She hadn’t.

I knew that now.

Back then, I believed her every time she pushed the last piece of meat onto my plate and said she’d grabbed something at work. I didn’t understand why she drank a tall glass of water before bed or disappeared into the bathroom whenever her stomach growled loudly enough for us to hear.

Sugga raised two boys with no man in the house and no room to fall apart.

Kai’s father disappeared before he learned how to walk.

Mine had never been more than an empty space on my birth certificate.

Whenever I asked Sugga who my father was, she gave me the same answer.

“A man who didn’t deserve to know you.”

Eventually, I stopped asking.

I became the man of the house before I was old enough to understand what the title required. I learned how to reset a breaker, unclog a sink, and talk landlords into giving us another week. I knew which shutoff notices were warnings and which ones meant we needed to fill every pot in the house with water before morning.

Kai never understood how bad things were because Sugga and I made sure he didn’t.

She worked until her feet swelled, smiled when she wanted to cry, and somehow made poverty feel temporary. But love didn’t keep the lights on. Pride didn’t fill an empty refrigerator.

Money did.

So I found a way to get it.

Kai followed me into the streets the same way he had followed me everywhere else.

At first, I tried to keep him out of it. I told him to stay in school, mind his business, and let me take care of things.

Kai had never been good at listening.

Before long, we became two of the biggest dope boys in the city. We weren’t loud or reckless. We didn’t need to advertise who we were because everybody already knew.

Our names carried weight.

People respected us, feared us, and knew better than to play with anything connected to the Devereaux brothers.

We made more money than we could count and collected more enemies than we could see.

I convinced myself I was protecting my family. Sugga never had to choose between groceries and the electric bill again. Kai wore whatever he wanted. We moved Sugga out of the apartment where rainwater leaked through her bedroom ceiling and bought her a house with more space than she knew what to do with.