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“You wouldn’t have been able to find me at all if your little doctor boyfriend hadn’t helped you. You’re incompetent, Sanai. You’re the reason all of this is happening now. If you’d just followed through with Junior’s kill, he would have been out of the way. Then when I killed the fucking Godwin brothers, it would have looked like a hit from Junior’s men for them not being able to save him. Then I would have been able to slide in and take over.”
“You’re delusional as fuck if you thought that’s how things were going to go.”
Pull the trigger.
Stop talking.
She wants you to stall.
I knew all of that and still couldn’t do it yet.
Bakari would have done it easily. After the smooth and calculated way he killed Takia, I had no doubt in my mind that I was wrong about him being a killer. His motives weren’t my own but they made him a killer, and he was damn good at it.
I couldn’t let him have this one, though. This one was for me. This one was total severance.
“It was going to go that way until you fucked it up like you do everything else in your miserable fucking—
I pulled the trigger.
The bullet lodged in her chest and she slammed against the wall with a thud. Even in the darkness, I saw the horror on her face. I walked up on her while she was gasping and sputtering.
“Can’t handle…the truth…Sanai?” she wheezed, sliding down to the floor.
“I can handle the truth. I can’t handle having you as a mother. You don’t get to live in my head rent-free anymore. Actually, you don’t get to live at all.” I fired another shot into her head at close range. The warm spray of blood coated my knuckles and my face. I stood there for a while, gun still aimed, my hand trembling. Not from the recoil but from the fact that I did exactly what I’d set out to do.
Now my mother was dead.
She was slumped over on the floor in a dark house with her eyes wide the fuck open, which meant she deserved everything she got.
I swallowed the tight knot in my throat then my hand fell to my side. Bakari’s arms were around me in the next moment. He pulled me in tight, squeezing me so hard I almost couldn’t breathe. I needed every second of it.
“It’s over, Sanai,” Bakari spoke into my hair, shushing me. I didn’t even realize I’d been crying until I heard the soft melodic sounds coming from his mouth. I gripped his coat in my fists and buried my hot face against his chest. He felt like home. Even his familiar scent helped hold me together.
“Come on, let’s go to the car. I’ll call Dice to organize this cleanup.” I nodded in response, feeling like a zombie while I followed alongside him.
I sat beside Bakari in the car, trying to pull myself out of the numb sinkhole that had opened in my chest. My feelings were so muddled that I couldn’t sort them out. Maybe now wasn’t the time to.
I placed all the thoughts, memories, questions, and whatever else popped into my head into an air-tight box and shoved it somewhere deep and dark. I’d open it when I had time. Right now, I didn’t.
I knew once we got back to the Temple, I’d have to deal with the rest of my family. Their thoughts, their anger, their grief. It would all be aimed at me even though I was the only one who had the balls to do what needed to be done despite my personal feelings.
“Look at me,” Bakari said once we pulled up to the Temple. I found his sleepy bedroom eyes in the sea of black and held onto them with my own. “You already know how your family is going to react when you get in here. They’re going to find something to bitch about. Before they sink their claws into you, I want you to know that I’m proud of you, Sanai.”
I blinked, my eyebrows pulling together a little. “Proud of me?” I wet my lips and chuckled dryly. “I just killed my mother.”
“I know. You had to do it. She was wreaking havoc and she would have eventually killed you and the rest of your family if given the opportunity. You did the ugly work that nobody else wanted to do.” He grabbed my hand in his, squeezing tight. “Junior wasn’t your big mission, baby girl. This was. And you passed it with flying colors. It was hard as fuck but you passed. You didn’t hesitate and now, you’ve saved your entire family and mine because you were able to do the hard shit.”
I sat there quietly, letting Bakari’s words drip into my soul through the layers of concrete I’d slathered on top of it. Ever since I started working with him, he’d forced cracks through my layers. Now, they were so deep that everything he said touched me.
“I really needed to hear that, Bakari. Thank you.” I leaned forward and met his lips with mine. “You have no idea how much you’ve helped me through this.”
“Shit, the same can be said for you. I guess we transformed each other, huh, Sinclair.” One side of his mouth lifted and I rolled my eyes at the sight instinctively.
“Yeah, I guess so. I turned your ass into a cold killer. Little doctor boy who wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Yeah, whatever, man. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of but I still wouldn’t change anything.”
“Good. Regret is deadly,” I told him. I reached out and touched the side of his face, feeling my stomach flutter in response.
