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KAI
Once we finished burying João’s mother, João wanted to find Akio for information. He didn’t have anything—or at least, I didn’t think he did—but there was no use in not trying to get something out of him.
“Akio’s not going to fucking be here,” João said, glaring out the foggy windshield with blood covering his hands. He tightened his fists around the steering wheel and parked the car in front of a run-down house in the slums. “His family conducts business on the other side of town.”
“I put a tracker on his phone,” I said, looking at the one-story home with its windows smashed and the siding falling off the house. I had placed the tracker recently because I didn’t trust him around Imani. “He’s here.”
After shoving my phone into my pocket, I opened the door and walked around the back to find a sheet-covered car parked behind a dumpster that smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. I pulled up the blanket to find Akio’s expensive car sitting around in the middle of the slums.
“I told you,” I said, glancing back at João.
He lit a cigarette the way he always did when he was anxious, then held it between his bloody fingers and crossed his arms. “Let’s get this fucking over with. I’m ready to kill his ass.”
I walked toward the back door and picked the lock. “We’re not going to kill him.”
Hearing those words come out of my own mouth sounded so … foreign. So unreal. I had wanted to kill Akio for so long. I wanted to be the one to take away something precious from his mother and father. But the more I learned about him, the more I realized that his parents couldn’t care less about their only son. If he died, he died. They wouldn’t hurt the way that I had when they killed my father. Hell, they’d probably be happy.
After opening the door, I followed João into the single-room home to find Akio fucking furious. Akio slammed his heel into a Redwood police officer’s face, knocking two teeth right out of his mouth and making blood spurt everywhere. His clothes were covered in splattered blood, his hands with dirt, and his eyes more rageful than I had ever seen them.
João parted his lips in surprise, the cigarette falling out of his mouth and onto the wooden floorboards. He looked over at me, then back at Akio, who didn’t stop smashing that man’s face into the ground. Akio must’ve found out that what I had told him about Nicole—the girl he had a little crush on—was true.
The police really must’ve been pimping her out.
“You fucking believe this?” João said, stomping out his cigarette with the tip of his sneaker and pointing to Akio.
Truthfully, I couldn’t believe this. Under his dark-framed glasses and that innocent boy facade, Akio had a dark side that he had just seemed to release to the world. I hadn’t even thought an innocent kid like him could even think about death, never mind wrap it up and give it to someone with his fists.
But I remembered the first time I had killed someone.
I had been so blinded, so hurt, so irate that I couldn’t stop slamming my fists into his face as he struggled underneath me. I’d refused to stop until his body went limp and his face fell pale. It was the most terrifying yet freeing feeling in the world.
This would be the first man that Akio had ever killed, and I refused to stop him.
“All right, I’m fucking done waiting,” João growled, stepping forward and pulling out a gun.
After placing a hand on his chest, I held him back and stared at Akio, who landed a final punch right to this man’s chin. He had hit the officer so hard and for so many times that I couldn’t even recognize him.
When the guy stopped moving, Akio scrambled to his feet and stared down at him with his chest rising and falling quickly and his cheeks flushed. A couple moments passed, and his eyes widened, realization flooding through them. He stumbled back toward us, shaking his head, as if he couldn’t believe what he had done.
“Good job,” I said.
Akio jumped, reached for his gun in his back pocket, and turned around quickly. Surprise was written all over his face, his cheeks pale and fear heavy in his eyes. When he saw it was me and João, his hands shook.
João grabbed the barrel of the gun and pointed the muzzle toward the ground, so it wasn’t aimed directly at us. Akio dropped the gun completely, ran a hand through his hair, and began pacing the room.
“I just killed a man,” he said. “I couldn’t stop myself.”
“Why’d you kill him?” João asked, crouching beside him. “We could’ve used him.”
“He did it to protect his girl,” I said, watching Akio. “That’s why you did it, isn’t it?”
Akio stopped with his back turned and tense. He rested his hands on the doorframe and gripped it so hard that he almost pulled the damn thing off the wall. “I didn’t have proof, but I found him with Nicole, and I lost my shit.”
João pulled up a chair from a table—which was the only other piece of furniture in the room—grabbed Akio by the shoulders, and shoved him down into it roughly. Then, he gripped a fistful of his dark hair, pulled it back, and shoved the muzzle of his gun underneath his chin.
“I don’t give a fuck what you did. What do you know about my mother?”
Akio froze, then shook his head. “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
