Yayo #2
Kade looked up first from the living room, his eyes moving from me to Kayla before settling somewhere between the two of us.
Ysis sat curled up on the couch with her swollen feet propped on an ottoman, her laptop forgotten beside her as she studied us with that same look she always got whenever something wasn’t adding up.
Mama Sina glanced over the rim of her coffee cup, while Cassian, Marcus, and Cazmir all paused in the middle of whatever they’d been discussing.
Bree stood beside Cazmir with her hand resting lightly against his back, and Nia and Lauren exchanged one of those silent looks women seemed to have mastered without ever saying a word.
Nobody greeted us, nobody smiled. They were all too busy reading the room.
Kayla offered a quiet hello that barely rose above a whisper before making a beeline toward Ysis.
She leaned down and hugged her gently, careful of the babies, but even that hug looked different than usual.
It lingered a little longer, and when she pulled away, she forced a smile that didn’t fool either one of them.
Ysis noticed. She always did. Her eyes drifted from Kayla to me, then back to Kayla again before narrowing ever so slightly.
She didn’t ask what happened. She didn’t have to.
Whatever had gone down in Vegas had followed us home, and she knew better than to start pulling on a thread in front of everybody else.
Kade walked over and dapped me up, holding my shoulder a second longer than normal.
“Everything straight?”
“Yeah,” I answered automatically.
“Liar.” He looked me dead in my face. The corner of my mouth twitched, but I didn’t bother arguing with him. The truth was written all over both of us.
For a few seconds the room settled into an awkward silence before Marcus cleared his throat and redirected the conversation back to the matter at hand.
There were bigger fires burning than whatever was happening between me and Kayla.
Marius was still breathing, Aretha was gone, and everybody in that room knew the war wasn’t over.
Whatever me and Kayla had going on was just another battle waiting its turn.
Kade watched us for a moment before jerking his head toward the hallway.
“Yayo, Cassian, Cazmir, Marcus...come holler at me for a minute.” There wasn’t any urgency in his voice, but there didn’t need to be.
Whenever Kade spoke with that calm authority, people naturally listened.
None of us questioned him. We simply followed him down the hall and into his office where he quietly closed the door behind us.
Kade didn’t say anything right away. Instead, he walked around his desk, opened the bottom drawer, and removed four thick black folders before placing them neatly across the polished wood.
Marcus leaned against the wall with the smallest grin tugging at his lips, which told me this nigga already knew whatever was about to happen.
Cassian exchanged a confused look with me, while Cazmir stood quiet with his hands in his pockets.
Kade looked at each of us before resting both hands on the desk.
“We don’t have to become our fathers.”
The words washed over the room heavier than I think any of us expected. Nobody interrupted him because the truth was, every last one of us was still trying to unpack what he’d just said.
“We’ve spent too many years surviving,” he continued, as he looked between all of us.
“Everything we’ve ever been taught was about survival.
How to fight. How to hustle. How to read people before they crossed us.
How to make money. How to protect what belonged to us.
How to stay alive one more day. We learned how to survive before we ever learned how to live, and after a while, surviving became all we knew. ”
I felt those words somewhere deep because he wasn’t lying.
Every decision I’d ever made had been rooted in making it to tomorrow.
Every move, every shipment, every relationship, every body that ever dropped had somehow been tied to survival.
I’d never once stopped to ask myself what came after that.
Kade slid the folders toward us. “Open ‘em.”
I frowned before flipping mine open. The first thing I saw wasn’t anything I expected.
There were property deeds, investment portfolios, corporate ownership agreements, trust documents, wealth management statements, commercial real estate acquisitions, life insurance policies and equity agreements with Myles Tech.
Page after page of legal paperwork, numbers, percentages, projected returns, dividends, and assets I’d never even heard Kade mention before.
“The fuck is all this?” I asked, looking back up at him.
“Our future,” Kade answered simply before shaking his head.
“Matter fact...our children’s future.” Cassian thumbed through another section of paperwork, his eyebrows nearly disappearing into his hairline.
“Nigga...” Cazmir couldn't even speak. He just kept turning pages as if he couldn’t believe what he was looking at. Marcus chuckled under his breath, folded his arms, and leaned farther back against the wall.
“I told y’all,” he said. “This nigga been working.”
Kade nodded. “Every property in them folders is already producing income. Every investment account is active. Every portfolio is diversified. The life insurance policies are funded. The trusts are already established for children that ain’t even here yet.
If something happened to any one of y’all tomorrow, your families wouldn’t have to wonder where their next meal was coming from. ”
He walked over to the large monitor mounted against the wall and pulled up several financial reports. Graphs, portfolios, acquisitions, commercial buildings, projected returns, and ownership structures filled the screen.
“This...” he pointed toward one of the buildings, “brings in enough revenue every month to pay salaries without touching Myles Tech money. These apartment complexes appreciate every year while tenants pay the mortgage for us. These dividend accounts generate income every quarter. These acquisitions own other businesses that own other businesses. This is what wealth looks like.” He looked directly at me.
“Money and wealth ain’t the same thing. Anybody can make money. Money come and go everyday. Wealth keeps paying you long after you stop working for it.”
I looked back at the paperwork spread across the desk, realizing I’d spent years counting shipments while Kade had been counting assets.
“We know how to survive. Ain’t none of us gotta prove that no more. We done survived Marius, the streets, poverty. Hell, some of us survived ourselves. That part is over with.”
“I don’t need brothers that work for me.
I need brothers that build beside me. I need y’all creating something that’ll still be feeding your grandchildren after we all gone.
This”—he gestured toward the folders— “is how you break a cycle. Not by making more money than the next man. By making sure your babies never have to start where we started.”
Then his attention settled back on me. “Nigga, you don’t have to keep risking your life to prove you can make money.” I matched his stare but didn’t answer.
“You built an empire,” he continued. “Can’t nobody take that from you. But every time you leave this house, you gamble with whether you’ll make it back. You got a woman sitting out there who love your stubborn ass, and whether you ready to admit it or not, you love her too.”
I shifted in my chair. “Marius taught us nothing but how to survive, let me teach you how to live.” Kade said.
Something about hearing him say that hit different.
Maybe because it wasn’t judgment. Maybe because he wasn’t trying to take anything from me.
He was trying to give me something I’d never considered possible.
“You wanna marry Kayla someday?” he asked.
“What?” I frowned.
“You heard me.”
“You wanna marry Kayla someday? Then start acting like a husband...not a soldier.”
I didn’t respond right away. Truthfully, I couldn’t.
Everything I’d believed about success suddenly felt a whole lot smaller than it had thirty minutes ago.
I still wasn’t convinced I could walk away from the game.
Hell, I wasn’t even sure I knew how. But for the first time since Queen shut down our expansion in Vegas, I wasn’t thinking about what I’d lose if I left.
I found myself wondering what I might gain if I did.
After the meeting finished, Marcus gathered his folder without saying much and headed back toward the living room.
Cazmir lingered a while longer, still flipping through the pages as if he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around what Kade had just placed in front of him, before finally tucking everything beneath his arm and following behind Marcus.
Cassian thanked Kade, his voice carrying the exhaustion of a man trying to hold together more responsibilities than any one person should have to shoulder, before excusing himself as well.
Within a matter of seconds, it was just me and Kade standing in the office surrounded by blueprints of a future I’d never once allowed myself to imagine.
I remained where I was, absently thumbing through the folder one last time before closing it.
Every page represented something foreign to me.
I understood weight. Product. Supply and demand.
Territory. Routes. Customers. Men. Violence.
Those things made sense. This...this was different.
This was money that made money while you slept.
Buildings you never had to stand in. Businesses that kept producing whether you walked through the front door or not.
It was a language I’d never bothered to learn because I’d convinced myself the only language I needed to speak was survival.