Kade #2
The room fell quiet after that. Not uncomfortable. Just reflective. Life had a funny way of reminding you how fragile people really were. One bad decision. One secret. One lie. One betrayal. Sometimes that’s all it took to send somebody over the edge.
“I love you, Ysis Myles.”
“I love you more.”
“Forever?”
“And ever.”
She turned back around and tucked herself against me.
Holding my wife close, I let myself focus on the sound of her breathing instead of everything waiting for me tomorrow.
The war would still be there when I woke up.
Marius would still be a problem. The secrets would still need dealing with.
But for tonight, I had my wife in my arms and my family under one roof.
Eventually our breathing slowed, our bodies relaxed, and before long we were counting sheep.
***
The next morning I woke up early to make Ysis a strawberry smoothie before we headed to her appointment with her doctor and then to check in with her doula.
Baby really had me out here acting like a domesticated husband agreeing to a home birth, but whatever she wanted I would do to keep that gorgeous smile on her face.
Afterward we stopped and ate breakfast before heading back to the house.
When we walked in, we were greeted by Aretha and my mother, who sat there with Cassian’s head in her lap, running her fingers through his hair.
He looked completely out of it, his eyes bloodshot and ringed with dark circles like he hadn’t slept a single minute.
Ysis nudged me in his direction, silently encouraging me to say something.
“Bro, can I holla at you for a minute?”
“About what?” He continued staring straight ahead.
“Come here, man.”
I pulled him up and walked him toward my man cave. Closing the door behind us, I waited until he sat down before taking a seat across from him. For several seconds neither one of us said anything. Then the tears came.
“They found her, Kade.” His voice cracked.
“That shit is everywhere.”
He dropped his head into his hands. “This shit all my fault. I should’ve never listened to Marius. I should’ve told her the truth when I had the chance. I should’ve said something.”
He broke down in a way I’d never seen before.
Cassian was always the first one to crack a joke and the last one to talk about how he felt.
We learned that shit from Marius. Smile through it.
Laugh through it. Bury it. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Looking at him now, I could tell he was caught somewhere between the way we were raised and everything he was feeling.
“You can’t put all this on yourself.”
“Yes the fuck I can,” he looked up. “I knew things. Maybe not everything, but enough. Every time I had a chance to tell her the truth, I talked myself out of it. Every time I thought about coming clean, I convinced myself I was protecting her.”
His laugh sounded hollow. “Funny how everybody keep using that excuse.”
“That’s because sometimes people really think they’re protecting somebody.”
“Were we?”
I didn’t answer right away because there wasn’t a simple answer to give.
The truth was, none of us had started out trying to hurt her.
That was the part people never understood when they looked at situations like this from the outside.
They imagined villains making calculated choices, waking up every morning determined to destroy somebody else’s life.
But most damage didn’t happen that way. Most damage happened one compromise at a time.
One secret justified as protection, one lie told because the truth felt too dangerous, one decision made out of fear that slowly turned into a hundred more.
Marius convinced himself he was protecting his family.
Cassian convinced himself he was protecting her.
Hell, I’d made choices before because I thought I was shielding the people I loved from pain.
The problem was that protection and control started looking alike when you held onto the truth for too long, and by the time any of us realized the difference, the consequences had already grown bigger than the reasons that created them.
That didn’t excuse what happened, and it didn’t erase the hurt.
But it made it harder to reduce everything to good people, versus bad people.
Sometimes people caused the most damage while genuinely believing they were doing the right thing, and maybe that was what made all of this so tragic.
It wasn’t that nobody cared; it was that everybody cared in the wrong way.
“All I know is that every person she trusted let her down. Her parents. Marius. Me. Everybody.” He continued. The room went silent again. Cassian wasn’t looking for a solution, revenge, or somebody to blame. He was grieving, and grief was a hell of a lot harder to fight than anger.
“Listen to me.” I waited until he looked up.
“You can sit in this room and beat yourself up all day, but it ain’t gone change what happened. What it will do is destroy what’s left of you. Marius got enough victims already. I’m not adding my brother to that list.”
His jaw tightened. “You hear me?”
He nodded.
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere where you can let all this shit go.”
We walked out of the room. He grabbed his shoes and followed me outside without any further words.
The silence between us wasn’t awkward, it was heavy.
The kind that settled over a man when his mind was moving too fast for his mouth to keep up.
I didn’t bother trying to fill it. Some things couldn’t be talked out. Some shit had to be worked out.
Driving about forty-five minutes outside the city, we eventually turned down a dirt path before I pulled up to a large metal building sitting in the middle of nowhere.
Killing the engine, we climbed out and headed inside.
The second we walked through the doors, Smith greeted us from behind the counter.
Smith was a sixty-year-old retired arms dealer who now ran one of the most private gun ranges in Tennessee.
His warehouse housed a variety of weapons, some of which Yayo had purchased from him directly over the years.
It was actually Yayo who brought me here the first time, claiming there wasn’t a better way to release stress than sending a few thousand dollars worth of ammunition downrange. Looking back, he wasn’t wrong.
“Wassup, Smith. Give me the usual. For my brother here, get him the one Yayo just bought. He got alot of...stress to release.” Smith looked between us before nodding.
“Gotchu.”
Without another question, he disappeared behind the counter and began gathering what we needed.
A few minutes later he returned carrying enough firepower to start a small war.
When he sat the M249 down in front of Cassian, the first real reaction I’d seen from him all day crossed his face. His eyes widened.
“Yayo bought this big muthafucka?” He looked between me, Smith, and the weapon. “For what?”
“You know that nigga got a loaded arsenal full of shit in that house. Grenades too. He keep all that shit locked inside a vault. Nigga wild as hell.”
Cassian shook his head. “That nigga got grenades?”
“Nigga got enough shit to overthrow a small country if he get bored.” The corner of his mouth twitched.
It wasn’t much, but it was something. Whenever we came to the range, it eventually turned into a competition.
Between me and Yayo, we always got competitive.
Somebody always started talking shit. Somebody always claimed they could outshoot everybody else.
“Come on, nigga.” I grabbed my gear.
“Good looking, Smith. We gone need a couple hours.”
“Use the fourth floor.” He nodded toward the elevator. “Should be clear and enough room to exercise whatever the hell you boys feeling.”
“Appreciate it.”
“Here’s how this gone work. You ain’t talking. You ain’t thinking. You ain’t apologizing. You ain’t blaming yourself. For the next couple hours, your only job is to pull that trigger until your shoulder hurt.”
Cassian looked down at the weapon before looking back at me. “And then what?”
“Then you do it some more.” Since I’d picked him up out that room, he let out an actual laugh. It was small, broken, and gone almost as fast as it appeared, but it was real. After everything he’d been carrying, I’d take whatever progress I could get.
Taking the elevator to the fourth floor, we stepped off and walked over to our shooting stations, leaving the station between us open.
The space was massive, designed for people with more money than sense and enough firepower to make the government nervous.
I set my gear down and looked over at him.
I didn’t want to crowd the man, especially with what I knew he was about to do with that weapon.
I knew that spark in his eyes too well. We’d just walked into this nigga’s element.
At the far end of the floor sat large steel bullseye targets designed to withstand serious punishment.
While the lower levels held the traditional paper targets for casual shooters.tThis floor was designed for people who came here looking to get real issues off their chest. Steel targets.
Reinforced barriers. Dummy targets. Enough space and firepower to let a man work through whatever demons he brought through the door.
Looking out across the range, Cassian slid the muffs over his ears and gripped the weapon firmly with both hands.
Bracing the stock against his shoulder for additional support, he took aim without saying a word.
Then, without warning, he let that muthafucka sing.
The sound thundered through the warehouse.