Chapter 29 Solana
Juelz pulled up in front of Sugar Kissed and I wanted to drop to my knees and kiss the ground. This man drove like the rules of the road were a personal suggestion. The moment he stopped and kicked down his stand, I was off the back of that bike like the seat had caught fire.
“How has nobody taken your license yet?” I asked, pulling my helmet off.
I was bent forward with my hands on my knees trying to remember how breathing worked.
Juelz waved me off and kissed his teeth.
“You’re being dramatic. That’s the actress coming out.”
I laughed in spite of myself and straightened up.
“Anyway. I’m going to run inside, grab a few things, and I’ll be right back. Actually, you know what, I’ll drive us back.”
“It wasn’t that bad. And I’m waiting right here. You got ten minutes. If you’re not back down, I’m coming up, so leave the door unlocked.”
“He got to you, huh?” I asked.
“He doesn’t play about you. And we all know about the stalker situation. So yeah, I’ll be right here.”
I smiled, then turned to unlock the shop door and let myself in.
I moved through the kitchen and toward the back staircase. Then stopped.
The faucet was running upstairs.
My mind told me to turn around immediately. But my feet kept moving. One step at a time, slow and deliberate, while I ran through every possible explanation in my head. Maybe I’d left it on. Maybe I was just hearing things. I had to be.
Except Henderson knew where I was.
But it couldn’t be him. It couldn’t.
I reached the top and slid my key into the lock. It turned. If someone had broken in, they wouldn’t have locked the door behind them. At least I didn’t think they would.
I twisted the knob and stepped inside.
I went completely still.
The apartment looked exactly like my house in California had, except these pictures were recent. Current. Me in Rose Haven. Me at the bakery. Me with Duke. Every wall was covered and my belongings had been thrown across the room like someone had moved through it in a rage.
And there was a man standing at my kitchen sink, washing his hands like he had all the time in the world.
Every nerve in my body screamed at me to run back down those steps and get Juelz. But another part of me, the part that was bone tired of running, planted my feet.
Juelz said ten minutes. All I had to do was keep this man talking. I couldn’t let him walk away this time and spend the rest of my life waiting for him to appear again. I needed this to end tonight.
“What the hell are you doing in my house?”
I said it loud enough to startle him, or at least I tried to.
He didn’t flinch. He kept washing his hands like I had said nothing at all, then reached for my dish towel on the counter and dried them slowly, deliberately. Then he laughed.
And my blood went cold.
I knew that laugh.
He turned around.
Henderson.
Even dressed head to toe in black, I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to see it. Desirae’s words came rushing back to me all at once. I should have listened sooner.
I hadn’t noticed the black Glock sitting on my counter until he picked it up and leaned back against it like he was settling in for a conversation.
“Amore.” He smiled at me like we were old friends. “You aren’t happy to see me? You didn’t really think that little scene in the restaurant was going to be the last time, did you?”
I squared my shoulders and lifted my chin.
“It’s been you this whole time,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “All of it. Why?”
I needed him talking. And if I was being honest, I needed to hear him say it.
This man had been a fixture in my life for years.
He had opened doors for me, negotiated for me, stood in rooms with me when I had nobody else.
And this whole time, it had been him on the other side of every terrifying moment I had tried to outrun.
“Save all that, Amore.” His tone shifted without warning, something darker bleeding through.
“You wanted my attention from the first moment I saw you. I felt it. I dropped everything and everyone else to be there for you. Everything was for you.” He stepped away from the counter. “And you threw all of it away!”
I held my ground even as the bass in his voice made the air in the room feel different.
“So standing in my yard in the middle of the night was your way of showing me that? Breaking into my home and destroying everything I had was love?”
Henderson picked up the gun and pressed it against his own temple, pacing now, moving back and forth in front of the counter like something was vibrating just beneath his skin.
“I may have taken it further than I planned. But I needed you to feel what I feel. Why can’t you see it?
I love you.” He stopped pacing. His expression curdled.
“And then you come back here on the arm of some thug who doesn’t see a single thing in you that I see.
He’s using you. He doesn’t know you the way I do. ”
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. I did neither.
“You killed Desirae,” I said.
The words came out quieter than I expected, and somehow that made them heavier.
Henderson tilted his head and the smile that crossed his face turned my stomach completely over.
“She had one job. Lead you to me. Instead she sat across from you at dinner and did the exact opposite.” He shook his head like he was genuinely disappointed.
“She was never your friend, Solana. She told me everywhere you went for years. Every location, every trip, every detail. You trusted her and she sold every bit of it. The only reason it took me so long to find you here was because this was the one thing you never told her about.”
My throat tightened.
All those years. Every time I felt like the walls were closing in and I couldn’t figure out how anyone knew where I was. It had been Desirae, and it had been him. The two people I had let closest.
Henderson continued, almost wistful now.
“I still think about the look on your face the first time I showed up here. It was like you had been waiting for me. Like something in you recognized me.” His expression darkened. “And then that man walked in.”
“You mean the man I love,” I said clearly.
His jaw tightened.
“I’m going to tell you one more time,” he said, the warmth draining from his voice entirely. “Close that door. Lock it. And come here. Because I will have you, one way or another. And if I can’t, then I’ll make sure nobody else does either.”
I looked at him for a long moment.
I thought about every night I had spent afraid.
Every time I had looked over my shoulder.
Every home I had run from. Every version of myself I had hidden just to survive.
I thought about the little girl who had nobody after her mother died.
The girl who had fought her way through group homes and foster families and an industry that had chewed through her slowly.
I thought about Duke.
About Jessa and Aubree and Miss Lottie. About Sugar Kissed and the smell of my own kitchen at five in the morning. About what it felt like to belong somewhere for the first time in my entire life.
And I was done running.
I reached out and slammed the door as hard as I could.
The sound cracked through the apartment like a gunshot. Henderson flinched, then his face twisted.
“Why the hell would you—” He stopped himself and pointed the gun at me. “Bring yourself here. Now.”
“This is my house,” I said. “And I am done letting people like you take things from me. You don’t have a right to me. You never did. I belong to myself. So if you want me, you’re going to have to come get me.”
Something broke loose behind his eyes.
He took a step forward. His finger found the trigger.
I held his gaze and didn’t move.
And then the door exploded off its hinges.
Juelz came through like he had been launched, gun already drawn and level. Henderson spun and fired in the same motion, and the two shots cracked through the apartment simultaneously, so close together they sounded like one.
I hit the floor with my hands over my ears, the sound ringing through my skull.
On the way down I saw Henderson’s head snap back. The force of it sent him backward and the side of his head connected with the edge of the counter with a sound I would not forget for the rest of my life.
He dropped.
The room went still.
Then a groan pulled my attention to the right.
Juelz was on his side, one hand clamped over his shoulder, his gun still in the other.
I didn’t think. I grabbed the scarf I had left on the chair and scrambled over to him, pressing it against the wound and wrapping it as tightly as I could manage.
“Damn!” he hissed through his teeth.
“I know, I know. Keep pressure on it.” My hands were shaking but I didn’t stop. “I need my phone. I have to call—”
“Already done,” he said, jaw tight.
I glanced toward Henderson. He hadn’t moved. The angle of him told me everything I needed to know, but something kept me from looking too long.
“Is there anything else I can do?” I asked.
Juelz gritted his teeth and helped me press the scarf tighter.
“Nah. That man couldn’t shoot for anything. I’m not dying from this, so relax.” He paused, then looked up at me. “I’m glad I heard that door. Glad your girl hung up on me when she did, too.”
I let out a breath that felt like it had been trapped in my chest for years.
Aubree had called him. Her frustration, her refusal to stay on the line, had made him look up at exactly the right moment. I would never let her live that down for as long as I lived.
“Thank you,” I said. “I didn’t know if it would work. I prayed it would.”
Juelz looked up at me with heavy eyes. “Wasn’t even a question. You’re family now.”
Those three words hit me somewhere deep and quiet, the same place that had been empty for most of my life.
The sirens arrived first, then the rumble of engines underneath them, low and unmistakable. I already knew.
I heard the steps before I saw him.
Duke took the stairs fast and came through the doorway with something in his eyes I had never seen there before. Not the calm, controlled version of fear he kept locked away. This was raw. He took in the room in one sweep, and then his eyes found me.
He crossed the space in three steps and I met him halfway, jumping up into his arms and wrapping around him like I was trying to disappear into him entirely.
His arms came around me so tight it almost hurt and I didn’t care even a little.
I pressed my face into his neck and everything I had been holding together since I walked through that door came undone all at once.
Every tear I had pushed down. Every moment I had told myself to keep moving.
Every night I had spent afraid and alone and convinced that I was too broken to ever feel safe.
It all came out.
Duke held me through every bit of it, one hand cradling the back of my head, the other pressed flat against my back like he was keeping me from falling apart completely.
“She the only one you see?” Juelz said from the floor. “I’m the one that got shot.”
I laughed and cried at the same time, which was probably the most honest thing I had done all night.
Duke looked down at him and shook his head slowly.
“Looks like a flesh wound to me. You need to work on pulling faster.”
“Flesh wound.” Juelz groaned and tried to sit up, then immediately thought better of it. “Fuck you very much.”
Duke finally looked over at Henderson.
He didn’t say anything. His arm tightened around my waist and he pulled me slightly in front of him, like even now, even with Henderson still and gone, he wanted to be between me and that side of the room.
Voices came up the stairwell.
“Clear up there?”
“Clear enough,” Duke called back. “Body and a gunshot wound. Need paramedics for the wounded one.”
He guided me out of the apartment as the officers and paramedics moved in, one hand on my back the entire time, steady and certain. Outside on the steps he turned me toward him and looked me over slowly, checking every inch of me the same way he had checked my knuckles at the block party.
“Talk to me,” he said quietly. “You good?”
I looked up at him.
For the first time in as long as I could remember, I actually was.
“I’m good,” I said.
He kissed my forehead and held it there for a moment.
The officers came to me next and I told them everything from the beginning. Every detail I could recall. Duke stood beside me the entire time, and when I started to flag he stepped in and let them know he would bring me to the precinct in the morning for anything more they needed.
By the time they wheeled Juelz out, the street in front of Sugar Kissed had a crowd gathered at the edges, kept back by the officers. Duke walked beside the gurney holding my hand.
“Thank you,” Duke said to him.
Juelz looked up with that same boyish smirk that somehow survived everything.
“You straight. Solana’s family. You know that.”
Duke nodded once.
“We’ll be at the hospital.”
Juelz glanced over at me as the paramedics moved him toward the ambulance.
“Make sure you tell your girl I jumped in front of that bullet like Martin in Bad Boys. I want her to know that.”
I rolled my eyes as they loaded him in.
I turned back to Duke and pressed my face into his chest as the coroner’s team came out next with Henderson’s body bagged on a gurney, moving past us without ceremony.
I watched until they had him in the van. Then I exhaled.
“I hope this is finally over,” I said.
Duke wrapped both arms around me from behind, his chin coming to rest on top of my head.
“It’s over, love. I got you.”
I’d heard him say those words before. He had said them in moments of comfort and moments of heat and moments somewhere in between.
But standing on the sidewalk in front of the place that had become my home, with the chaos settling around us and the night finally going quiet, those three words felt like something different entirely.
They felt like the ending of one story and the very first breath of another.
And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of what came next.