Chapter 14 #2
Dank and Deuce grew up with him, but I’d only knew him for a few years, although it felt like forever. That’s the thing about loyal and genuine connections. It will make you feel like you’ve known a person your whole life, when in actuality, it’s only been years.
We loaded into his truck. Six of us total, pressed in close, the kind of silence that only existed when everybody in a space understood the weight of what was about to happen.
I didn’t have to question any nigga in this truck, and I knew they’d make sure we all made it out safely.
They’d rode for me twice in less than twenty-four hours.
Marco drove. I sat up front and looked through the photos he’d sent me again. I was going through the layout one more time while he pulled onto the highway and settled into a steady speed. Not too fast. Nothing to draw attention.
“Front gate has a lock that can be compromised and I have the tool for it.” I said, keeping my voice low and even. “I’ve got the bypass tool. Once I disarm it we have maybe thirty seconds before somebody inside notices the feed dropped. That’s the window.” I looked back at the team.
“Two guards at the front, two around back based on what Marco clocked last night. Could be more inside but we don’t know the exact count so we move like it’s more.
Silencers stay on from the jump. Nobody fires unless they have a clean shot.
We are not announcing ourselves to the neighborhood or giving anybody inside time to react.
” I paused. “Grim is somewhere in that house. He does not get touched. I don’t care what’s happening around him, you see him, you protect him.
That’s the only standing order that doesn’t change regardless of anything else. ”
Heads nodded around the truck.
“We clear the house room by room from the entrance back. Anybody that isn’t Grim or Cherish, you handle them. Cherish is mine. She’s not to be killed either.”
Nobody asked questions. That was the thing about working with thorough people. You didn’t have to repeat yourself or explain your reasoning or hold anybody’s hand through it. You said what needed to be said and they absorbed it and that was the end of it.
The ride was two and a half hours.
Marco kept the truck at an even pace and the city eventually dissolved behind us into stretches of dark highway and open land that told me we were getting deep into territory that didn’t get much traffic. Which was exactly why Cherish had chosen it.
Isolation was protection when you were holding somebody. Less eyes, less noise, less chance of somebody stumbling onto something they weren’t supposed to see. Cherish wasn’t smart at all because this was what I was going to use to my advantage.
I sat with my elbow against the window and watched the dark go by and let my mind go where it had been trying to go since I woke up this morning.
Cherish. And handling her ass once and for all.
I had thought of every version of what I was going to say when I finally saw her face, and none of them felt right because the honest answer was that I didn’t know how I was going to react until I was standing in front of her.
That was the part that bothered me most. I was a man who controlled his environment.
I planned, I prepared, I accounted for variables.
But she had gotten behind my walls in a way that I still didn’t fully understand, and I couldn’t guarantee what version of me was going to show up in that room tonight.
I didn’t want to be exposing my emotions, but the bitch had gotten to me.
She had made me believe she loved me. Not right away, it had built slow, which was what made it feel real.
She had been patient and deliberate and by the time I realized how deep in I was, I had already made the decision to let her live when I was supposed to put her in the ground.
I had gone against a direct order and risked everything I had built because I thought what she and I had was something real.
Then she disappeared. Woke up one morning and she was just gone. Nothing but empty space where she had been.
And I had carried that. Put it somewhere deep, locked it down and told myself it was done. But I still couldn’t move past it, no matter how hard I tried. That's why I needed this tonight.
Then she reappeared just to take Grim and put a number on his head and run the clock down like I was just another piece on a board she was moving around.
Using me again, and this time the bitch wanted money.
Nah. This bitch owed me answers, and tonight she had no choice other than to give them to me.
The part that settled into my blood like ice was that I still didn’t know exactly when she had figured out that Grim was my brother.
I had never told her. Never connected those dots out loud for her.
I pretended to just be the hired eliminator.
But I knew in the back of my mind the way she moved, her mannerisms with me, she had known for a long time.
She just never let me know that she knew.
A woman that calculated didn’t move without information. She had done her research on me the same way I should have done mine on her, and I had been too distracted by what I felt to see it coming.
She had used me the same way Grim had used people his whole life and I had still let her breathe.
That wouldn’t happen twice.
—
Marco cut the headlights about a quarter mile out and rolled the truck to a stop along a stretch of dark road where the trees gave enough cover that we wouldn’t be visible from the property.
We sat for a moment and did a final check.
Silencers secured, vests on, earpieces in.
I checked the magnetic bypass tool in my jacket pocket and confirmed it was reading.
We moved on foot through the dark, staying low and close to the tree line until the property came into view. The house was large, old money Southern architecture, the kind of place that had history soaked into the walls. Lights were on inside but dim. From the outside it looked almost peaceful.
It wasn’t. This bitch was inside orchestrating a war, and holding my brother captive.
I could make out the guard at the front gate from twenty yards out.
He was doing that thing bad security did when they felt safe, shifting his weight, checking his phone, not really watching or paying attention.
I moved to the gate panel and pressed the bypass tool against the magnetic lock.
The mechanism disarmed without a sound and the gate drifted open two inches.
Marco was already moving as soon as we were able to slide through the gate.
He came up behind the front guard fast and clean, one arm around the throat, the blade across it in one pull.
He’d slashed this man neck with no warning.
and lowered the body to the ground before it could make noise.
I didn’t think the nigga would use a hunting knife.
He was cold blooded, but however he needed to get the job done.
I understood. Simultaneously, I heard the suppressed double tap from around back that told me the other two were handled. Our men had laid them down, quietly.
Thirty seconds.
We regrouped at the front entrance without a word exchanged.
Marco looked at me and gave one nod.
We went inside.
The house swallowed us. The muthafucka was huge, and I had been in big ass houses before.
Dark hallways, high ceilings, old furniture that smelled like wood polish and something underneath it that felt like grief.
I mean, a whole family had been executed here.
The condition of this once beautiful home, it now told us that it had been unoccupied for a while. It was dusty, and unkept now.
We moved through the house like we were part of the shadow, clearing each room as we went further into the house.
The guard at the base of the stairs went down before he registered what was going on.
He was dead before he hit the ground. One near the kitchen didn’t even turn around before he was gone.
Two more in the hallway dropped in sequence, silenced shots that barely disturbed the air.
If these were the people she’d hired as help and her security, she did a piss poor ass job. They just let us kill them.
The further back we pushed into the house, the quieter it got, and the more I felt it. That specific pressure in your chest when you know the moment is right in front of you. I wanted revenge so damn bad that I could taste it.
The last door at the end of the first floor hallway had light coming from underneath it. I knew, that was the room.
One guard posted outside it, standing straight, actually paying attention unlike the rest of them.
As soon as he spotted me walking in his direction, he pulled for his gun off his waist. I gave him a crooked smile as I shook my head.
I pulled the trigger before he could fully lift his gun.
I reached for him before he could fall forward, caught part of his weight on the way down and eased him against the wall.
I didn’t have a second more to waste. I’d already let her slide for years. I pushed the door to the room open and stepped inside.
Cherish was sitting behind a massive desk that had to have belonged to her father’s.
Dark wood, heavy, the kind of desk that was meant for an important man.
She was watching the clock on the wall across from her, one hand resting flat on the desk surface.
She didn’t startle when the door opened.
Didn’t even look up immediately. Seeing her made my heart drop.
She was still as beautiful as the last day I had seen her, but now, she had a tiredness behind her eyes.
She needed rest, and if things went as I thought they would, I would soon give it to her.
“What took you so long,” she said, like she was commenting on traffic.