Chapter 16 #2
The ride across town felt longer with the woman sobbing in the backseat the entire way. Somewhere between the freeway and their home, the little girl eventually cried herself to sleep.
I directed them to the east-side stash house I visited when my memories first started returning. Whoever robbed us after my accident and Booda got locked up had trashed the place, but it was still usable.
I couldn’t take them back to my apartment, and damn sure not the warehouse.
We rode until the city slowly began to look older, darker, and more abandoned around us. Empty buildings lined the streets while boarded storefronts passed outside the windows, one after another.
The east-side stash house looked exactly how I remembered it, except somebody had torn it apart looking for money.
Couch cushions had been sliced open. Holes covered sections of the walls where people had clearly searched for hidden compartments, and one of the kitchen cabinets hung halfway off the hinges, but the place still wasn’t terrible.
That was all I cared about.
My soldiers dragged the woman and little girl upstairs, and the second they reached one of the back bedrooms, the woman tried pulling away again.
“Please,” she begged. “Please don’t hurt us.”
“Sit her ass down,” I ordered.
City Boy shoved her onto the mattress before standing guard by the door.
“You want us to stay?” he asked.
“Nah, but have someone clean up that mess, grab toiletries, and buy groceries.”
“I’ll get on it now.” He turned to leave.
“Oh, and get clothes for them, too.”
The men filed out one by one, leaving me alone in the room with the woman and child.
The little girl immediately buried herself deeper against her mother while staring at me like I was the devil himself.
Maybe I was.
Booda stepped into the doorway as City Boy left. “You got this in here, or do you want me to stay?”
“I’m good.”
“Aight. I’m heading downstairs. Call me if you need me,” he said before walking away.
I closed the bedroom door behind me before pulling my phone from my pocket.
Fear flashed across the woman’s face instantly.
“Don’t be scared. I just need to rough you up a little for these pictures,” I said while sliding Karma from my waistband.
The woman flinched the second I moved toward them, pulling the little girl closer.
That was when I noticed the bruises scattered across her arms and the dark fingerprints wrapped around her wrist. My eyes traveled higher and landed on a long scratch running down the side of her neck beneath her shirt collar, and none of the injuries looked old.
My eyes dropped toward the little girl and found bruises on her too. Smaller ones. Some fading, some fresher, but it was enough to make my stomach turn anyway.
“Rich do that?” I asked.
The woman looked away, and when she finally spoke, her voice sounded hollow.
“Yes. He beat us almost every day,” she admitted. “Me especially. If she cries too much or makes him mad, he beats her too.”
She took a deep breath as if needing a moment to continue.
“All I am to him is an incubator. If this baby ain’t a boy…”
She gently moved her daughter aside so I could get a better look at her little round belly.
“He wants me to keep having babies until I give him a son. The cycle of abuse will continue for all my daughters and me.”
That pissed me off. Seeing them like that took me back to when I was six, and my momma’s boyfriend used to fight her. I never saw him in action, but the bruises stayed with my mother even after they healed, and me too.
I looked away from the woman and tightened my grip around Karma. The room went quiet except for the little girl’s uneven breathing and the distant sound of my soldiers moving around downstairs.
Then my phone buzzed against my pocket. I pulled it out and looked at the screen.
It was Rich.
A slow smile spread across my face the second his name flashed across the screen. The woman noticed it and started panicking again.
Rolling my eyes, I sighed. “When I pick this phone up, you and that little girl better scream, cry, beg, all that shit. If you don’t, I’m gonna do you way worse than Rich has ever done you. You understand me?” I glared at the woman, and she nodded.
By the time I answered the phone, tears were sliding down her cheeks again while the little girl cried loud enough for Rich to hear every second of it.
“Where the fuck my family?” Rich roared.
“Please!” the woman screamed. “Please don’t let her hurt my baby!”
The little girl started crying louder right after that, and Rich went quiet on the other end for a second. I smiled as I leaned against the window.
“You hear them?”
“What the fuck you want?”
My smile widened.
“You finally ready to talk now?”
“You hit my house, stole my money, kidnapped my family, and you think this shit funny?”
“I think you thought I was weak because I lost my memory. Then you started slipping because you thought you had the upper hand, but hey, what do I know?”
Rich went quiet again, and I could practically hear him thinking through the phone.
“Put my wife on the phone.”
The woman immediately started sobbing harder. “Rich, please!”
“Shut up,” he snapped at her before lowering his voice again. “Koko, this ain’t how this shit gotta go.”
I laughed softly. “Nigga, we way past that.”
His breathing deepened slightly, but he still sounded controlled. Angry, but controlled.
“You made your point,” he said. “Now tell me what you want.”
“I want you nervous.”
Silence met me for a second.
“I want you looking over your shoulder every time your phone rings. Every time a car pull behind you. Every time somebody stand too close to you.”
“You talking like you already won.”
“I am winning.”
“You sure about that?”
I looked toward the woman and little girl before answering.
“You the one wondering if your family safe tonight. Not me.”
Rich laughed once under his breath, but there wasn’t any humor in it.
“You still think emotional.”
“And you still underestimate me.”
Another silence stretched between us before he spoke again.
“You know what your problem always was, Koko? You get reckless when shit get personal.”
“And you talk too much.”
“I’m gon’ find you.”
“You should’ve been trying harder before I kicked your front door in.”
That finally elicited a real reaction from him. I heard the anger sharpen in his breathing immediately afterward.
“You touch them, and everybody around you dies.”
A slow smile spread across my face again.
“Then come get them.”
Then I hung up.