30. SKYE
SKYE
The house had a strange kind of quiet to it on weekends like this one, every room empty of the people who usually filled them.
Prime and Zainab had taken Dream and their own two out to a farm for apple picking for the day.
Apparently there was a hayride and barn animals.
It sounded like something a little girl would have enjoyed.
Dream had been talking about it since Tuesday, counting down the hours on her fingers every morning at breakfast. Justice had Storie to himself, daddy-daughter time he’d promised her weeks ago, an outing that used to come easy for the two of them before I showed up and complicated every single thing in this family.
I stood in that kitchen for a full minute just listening to nothing, and I hated how much I missed the noise. Missed him, specifically, more than a woman with my particular set of problems had any business missing anybody at all.
I grabbed my keys before I could sit with that thought any longer than I already had. The weekend caregiver had just arrived to sit with Rita and I had some business to handle.
I sank into my old-ass Camry and headed to the diner to link up with my cousin. It was time to start making some real moves. I was getting too close to Justice and this was about to blow up in my face.
Duke was already at the diner when I got there, tucked into the back booth he always picked, the one with a clear view of both the door and the parking lot. Some habits didn’t leave a person just because the danger did, and my cousin had never fully believed the danger was gone.
“You look…”
“What?” I sneered.
“You got a glow about you. I ain’t seen you look like this in a while…”
He slid a coffee across the table toward me, already fixed the way I liked it, and waited until the waitress walked off before I leaned in and dropped my voice.
“Roman’s here in DC. Aubrey saw him at the Banks casino. Or at least he was. I just don’t… I know what’s going on. I need help. I gotta get out of here.”
“Slow down, Cuz.” Duke was tall and lanky, reminding me of Snoop Dogg or Nipsey Hustle.
Despite his height he was never athletic and didn’t have a lick of muscle to him.
But he still stayed protected in the hood.
So much so, he was never bothered. He was one of my few family members who made it out of the hood and became a professional.
At a very young age, he had an interest in all things technology.
He would buy defunct computers and rebuild them.
He would create personalized software and video games.
Eventually he got into computer security and programming.
His talents landed him some off the record contracts with criminals.
And he was my ticket out of here. He was the reason I had a cleanish background check under this fake alias.
“I can’t slow down. He’ll find me.”
“Listen, I ain’t trying to gaslight you but I doubt he’s coming for you. He’s done the worst possible thing he can to you.”
“You don’t know him like I do. He is a narcissistic sociopath. When I decided to leave him, he went scorched earth. He will never stop torturing me. NEVER!” The fear strained my throat.
I’ve seen so many bitches get online and talk about how their exes were narcs. But most of them weren’t. True narcissistic personality disorder was rare. And my ex-husband had it, along with sociopathy. He was not capable of empathy. Evil was his blood-type.
In my job as a defense lawyer, I had met my share of cluster-B personalities.
NPD, antisocial, borderline, you name it, I’d sat across an interview table from all of them.
I knew the hallmarks cold. And my husband was that to a T.
He was so smart and so charming about it that I didn’t clock what I was looking at until it was already too late.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about a man like Roman.
By the time you meet him, it’s already too late.
The love bombing came first. Three weeks in and he was already telling me I was the only woman who’d ever understood him, that his exes had all been crazy and jealous. He proposed in month four. I felt chosen. Special.
Then came the charm that only worked in public.
Roman could walk into a room full of judges and have every one of them feeling like his best friend inside ten minutes.
My own mother loved him right up until the day she died still thinking I’d married a good man.
The cruelty only ever came out behind our own front door, quiet and precise, by which point I’d already built my life around him.
That’s the next hallmark I still can’t believe I missed.
The isolation. It never looked like isolation.
It looked like concern. My sorority sisters were a bad influence.
My best friend was jealous of my marriage.
One by one, everybody who might’ve told me something was wrong got pushed out of arm’s reach, until the only voice left explaining what was normal was his.
And the rage never looked like rage to anybody but me.
He didn’t yell. Yelling leaves witnesses.
His rage came out in things like my case files rearranged the night before trial, a whispered comment about my weight thirty seconds before a closing argument.
Death by a thousand cuts, every one deniable, every one small enough to make me sound unstable instead of him.
Worst of all was the lack of remorse. Not once did I see that man’s face crack with actual guilt. He could destroy something I loved and speak calm as still water, like I was the one being unreasonable.
I had every hallmark memorized. It didn’t save me from a single day of it.
“I’ll find out what he’s here for,” Duke said, reaching over to squeeze my hand once. “Could just be visiting. Business, maybe. I think you can count on him leaving you alone.”
“You don’t understand.” My voice came out sharper than I meant it to, but I let it. “A man like him lets nothing go. He ruined my life, Duke, and I promise you he’d rather see me dead than let me just live one, quietly, somewhere he can’t reach.”
Duke didn’t argue that part. He knew better than to argue that part, because he’d been the one who helped me disappear the first time, the one who understood exactly what Roman was capable of when he decided a thing belonged to him.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked instead. “Another new identity? I thought we were waiting until you had enough cash to flee the country clean.”
“I am. I thought six months but now I’m thinking six weeks.” I turned my coffee cup slow between my hands, watching the steam curl up off it instead of looking at him. “I can get my son and get out of here for good.”
Six months. I’d said that number so many times it had started to sound like a prayer instead of a plan, something I recited to keep myself steady rather than something I actually believed I’d survive to see through.
Six months to save enough. Six months until Keenan was old enough, close enough, findable enough for me to make my move.
Six months of living two entire lives at once under one roof, mother and fugitive and nanny and, God help me, a woman falling for a man who had absolutely no idea what he’d let sleep two doors down from his daughters.
Because that was the truth sitting underneath everything else I hadn’t said out loud to Duke yet, the one I could barely admit to myself in the quiet of my own head.
I was falling for Justice Banks. Had been for weeks now, longer than I wanted to admit, longer than made any sense given everything I still had left to run from.
It had started small, the way these things always do.
A cup of coffee already made the way I liked it before I even asked.
The way he checked twice that Dream’s seatbelt was buckled before he ever pulled out of a driveway.
The way his face changed when he laughed at something one of his girls said, like the laugh cost him something and he was glad to pay it anyway.
None of that was supposed to matter to a woman with an exit plan already drawn up in her head. It mattered anyway.
And the falling wasn’t even the cruelest part.
The cruelest part was knowing, clear as anything, that the man wanting me back had no idea who he actually wanted.
He was in love with a woman who didn’t exist on paper, built out of a fake name and a manufactured file and every soft lie I’d handed him one careful piece at a time.
The real me came with too many secrets. Too much trauma.
Things I was too broken to even speak on.
Justice Banks did not sign up for that woman. He signed up for Skye.
So I needed to be gone sooner than later.
Duke was watching me and nodding his head. I knew that I probably looked crazy to him. His long fingers picked up his ice water and held it to his lips, taking a long sip before he spoke.
“Just lay low,” he said finally. “I’ll work on getting you the new papers ready to go whenever you need them. Honestly, though, you’re barely recognizable these days anyway. You’ve gained weight back.”
“Excuse you!” I nearly choked on my coffee.
“I mean it as a compliment, cuz. You look good. But you were a tiny thing when you got out of that marriage. I mean, I used to be able to count your ribs through your shirt. Collarbone used to be sharp as hell,” he laughed.
“Yeah, well.” I set the cup down. “Turns out stress from a narcissist works better than Ozempic ever could.”
The laugh evaporated into thin air and he shook his head.
“Your hair’s different too. Longer, that color on you is different. You used to keep it short and blonde. Honestly, if I passed you on the street and didn’t know better, I wouldn’t clock you as the same woman. I doubt he would either, if he saw you walking down some sidewalk in broad daylight.”
“Okay,” I said in a curt manner. I knew the truth. Roman would be able to recognize me in full clown make-up. He knew me well. I gave him purpose. Purpose to destroy. And his entire meaning in life was destruction.
Duke studied me a second, and whatever he saw on my face made his own expression shift.
“Skye.”
“What?” I asked.
“What’s going on with you and that man?”
“What man?”
“Don’t do that.” He tilted his head, studying me the way he used to study a hand of cards before he decided to call somebody’s bluff. “Justice Banks. There’s something going on aside from Roman being in town.”
I opened my mouth to deny it, had the lie halfway built and ready to hand him. But this was Duke. Duke had pulled me out of a burning house once, in every sense of that phrase, and lying to the one person who’d earned better than that just wasn’t in me.
“It’s not what you think,” I replied but I knew I wasn’t convincing.
“Skye.” Just my name, flat, waiting.
“Fine.” My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. “I think I might be falling for him.”
Something in Duke’s face didn’t look surprised so much as resigned, like a man watching a storm he’d already tracked on radar finally make landfall. He sat back in the booth and blew out a breath, and for a second neither one of us said anything at all.
“I need to say something to you, and I need you to actually hear it instead of getting mad at me.”
“That’s never a good sign.”
“You can have him.” He nodded, like he was agreeing with somebody, though I hadn’t said a word yet. “Or you can have Keenan. But you cannot have both, cuz. This isn’t going to end the way you want it to.”
I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t, really.
My throat had closed up around every argument I wanted to throw back at him, because every single one of them was a lie and we both knew it.
I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that there had to be some version of this where I got to keep both things I wanted most in the world.
But Duke had never once lied to me, not even when a lie would’ve been kinder, and that was exactly why I trusted him enough to keep breathing air on the same side of the law he still walked.
“And on top of all that,” Duke went on, gentler now, like he regretted the first half but needed to finish anyway, “he’s in love with a costume, Skye.
He doesn’t know your real name. Doesn’t know what you did, what was done to you, none of it.
Whatever he feels, it’s for a woman that only exists in that house.
One day the real you is gonna walk through that door, and there is no telling which way that man goes when she does. ”
“I know that,” I said.
“I’m not trying to hurt you.”
“I know that too.”
I’d known all of it from the very first night I let him touch me, had known it and pushed the knowledge down somewhere I didn’t have to look at it every day.
Hearing it said plain, in Duke’s voice, at a diner table with syrup rings still on it from whoever sat here before us, made it a fact instead of a fear.
Facts didn’t let you talk yourself back around them the way fears sometimes did.
We sat there a minute in the quiet that only family can share, the silence that doesn’t need filling in. Then I nodded, mostly to myself, and reached for my coffee again like my hand wasn’t shaking a little around the cup.
“Just help me get the papers together,” I said. “I’ll figure out the rest.”
“That’s all I’m asking.” Duke slid out of the booth and stood, tossing a twenty on the table before I could argue about the bill. “Get your money together, get your boy, and get out this country.”
“I will,” I said, and I meant it as a promise to myself as much as anything I was saying to him.
He pulled me into a hug on our way out the door and I hugged him back just as tight. Then I got in my car and sat there a minute before I even started the engine, watching him cross the parking lot toward his own truck.
I drove back with the radio off, thinking about the mess that I was in. I had to put some distance between Justice and me. Besides, can I really trust him? He was richer and more powerful than Roman was. He could hurt me in worse ways. Those Banks had a reputation.
I needed to get to my son and get the hell out of here.