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IMANI
Surprisingly, when I had gotten home from Kai’s last night, Mom hadn’t said two words to me.
She had stayed up to see if I got home all right, but after a, “Good night,” she went right to bed. I hadn’t pushed it because I didn’t want to argue.
But the next day, I needed answers to my burning questions. I sat at the kitchen island on my computer and glanced at Mom, who made her coffee with her hair pulled into a bonnet this late in the morning, which was unusual.
Her eyes were still black, the bruises on her lip still prominent.
“Can we talk about Akio’s family?” I asked her.
“No.”
“Yes, we need to,” I said. “Are they the mob?”
“Don’t worry about them,” she said quickly, blowing on her hot coffee and refusing to look up at me. Instead, she took a seat across from me and swallowed hard. “We took care of them for you.”
“Took care, as in killed?”
“No! Imani, who do you think we are?”
“I don’t know, Mom. Who are you? Why do you have connections to the Redwood mob? A couple days ago, I didn’t even think there was a mob in this town!” I shook my head, still unable to believe it. “And how the hell are you involved in it?”
After a couple moments, she looked around, as if someone were listening, and leaned closer to me. “They helped fund your father’s engineering business when he first started,” she admitted. “We owe them everything. Even after we paid the debt, they won’t stop coming. They demand more money, more money, more money. It never stops.”
“So, you invite them over more often?” I asked, brows drawn together.
“We have to, Imani.” Mom’s voice was firm. “We don’t have a choice. Just never do something like that again. You cannot do anything to them or talk back to them. And be careful around Akio. He seems like a nice boy, but all of them do until they show you their true colors.”
I guessed that I wouldn’t tell Mom that Akio had shot a man for me …
We fell into an awkward silence because I didn’t know what to say to her, and then I went back to what I had been researching on my MacBook. I wanted to talk to her, to be able to have a good relationship with her again, but … God, I didn’t know if that was even possible.
But it couldn’t hurt to try, right?
“Do you think you could help me?” I asked Mom.
“With what, sweetheart?”
“Something for the”—I paused—“for the boys.”
“For the Poison boys?” she asked me with her jaw clenched, yet it wasn’t as taut as it had been every other time that I hung out with them or talked about those three boys who must’ve killed our principal by now.
I hoped that they had gotten rid of his body, so nobody could trace his death back to them.
“Yes, it’s for them.”
Mom stared intensely at me, but I didn’t back down like I would’ve done before I met them. I stared back at her with the same amount of intensity, so she knew that I was serious about this. Each of those boys meant something to me.
After a couple moments, Mom finally sighed and pulled out the seat beside me, sitting and glancing over my shoulder at my MacBook screen. She furrowed her brows. “Why are you looking for insurance?”
I gnawed on the inside of my cheek, chest tightening. “I don’t think they’re on insurance. I mean, I assume that they’re not.”
Landon’s family was fucked. Kai didn’t have a family. And João’s mother had unpaid hospital bills that were way more expensive than the bill I had gotten a couple years ago when I broke my wrist.
Granted, it wasn’t the same thing, but … her bills were in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Insurance would’ve covered some of that, wouldn’t it have?
