24. Rewind
Jared didn’t speak for a long time.
The monitors continued their steady rhythm beside him while afternoon sunlight spilled through the hospital window.
Outside the room, I could hear muffled voices from our family waiting for answers.
Camilla was probably pacing. Zay was probably trying to calm her down while simultaneously threatening every nurse who walked past.
But inside the room, there was only my brother and me. For the first time since he woke up, I didn’t see the accusation in his eyes anymore. I saw hurt and confusion, but his love for me made him listen. He was now trying to understand what I’d been trying to say.
Finally, Jared dragged a hand across his face and exhaled slowly.
“Start from the beginning, YaYa, and don’t leave anything out.”
I cleared my throat and said, “Do you remember the dinner at my house?”
His expression changed immediately.
“Of course I do. Y’all almost broke a Nigga down with the headquarters unveiling. That was the night I realized I actually wanted to be the Mayor of Crestwood. It was the night Crestwood really started believing in me.”
I smiled sadly. “Everybody was celebrating.” My fingers twisted together in my lap. “Dad was crying.” A weak laugh escaped me. “Camilla couldn’t stop looking at you.”
That finally earned the smallest hint of a smile from him. Then his smile disappeared, and he focused back on the story, urging me to get to the point.”
I swallowed.
“Chanel and I were heading for the bathroom.”
The memory returned instantly. There was so much laughter and light at the dinner.
The music set the ambiance, encouraging the guests to grab champagne and mingle.
The campaign staff was making their rounds and networking with one another as politicians from the Democratic and Republican parties mingled and discussed policies and areas where they could engage in quid pro quo.
There were people everywhere; nobody was paying attention to the two sisters wandering through a hallway.
“We overheard two men talking. One was Matthew, and the other man we had seen a few times, but we weren’t sure of his name.”
Jared’s face hardened.
“They were talking about you.”
His jaw tightened. “What were they saying?”
I looked down at my hands. Because even now, a month later, I hated repeating it.
“Matthew was worried because the Democratic Party had been receiving anonymous assassination threats on your life. The man Matthew was talking to said, “Assassination attempts weren’t uncommon in politics.”
I forced myself to meet his eyes. “But Matthew also said this felt different.”
Jared’s expression darkened immediately. “Different how?”
The answer came back to me word for word.
The way some nightmares never really leave you.
“Matthew said he didn’t believe somebody was trying to scare you because the threats weren’t just threatening you at social events the way every candidate had in the past, but the threats were also about your personal life.
Some were threatening to find you at JoJo’s basketball game, or even while you visited Jazzy at Cherry.
Matthew was confused about why this felt personal compared to the threats other candidates received. ”
My throat tightened. “Chanel instantly began to sob because we were sure this had the Price family written all over it. Cameron was trying to kill you.”
Jared leaned back slowly against the pillows. The hospital bed suddenly seemed too small for him. He looked fragile, not the larger-than-life version of my big brother I knew.
For a month, we’d all been focused on the shooting. We all relived the blood and the gore. There is not a second that goes by that my chest doesn’t ache thinking about how I exposed our children to mayhem and trauma, but the alternative could have been our children burying their father and uncle.
“Chanel decided we had to do something. She was the one who was adamant that something didn’t feel right.
Because she knew politicians. She spent her entire legal career working with prosecutors-turned-politicians.
She knew power and threats, and she understood that this was too personal.
This was obsessive and targeted. So we hired Alex. ”
“Who’s Alex again?”
“The private investigator Chanel and I hired. She has come through for us majorly. She helped us find Alan and Carmen.”
I explained to Jared how we discovered that Charles was actually a Price and that Carmen was actually the warden at Crestwood Correctional Facility. He couldn’t believe that he had been in close proximity to one of the Price children for most of his life.
“At first, I hired Alex as a precaution. After we found out about Miles’ disloyalty, I figured we needed someone on the inside to look into things for us, without ties to the police. Then Alex started finding things.”
Jared’s eyes narrowed.
“What things?”
“That’s when she found the multiple hits I mentioned. But what I didn’t mention earlier was that the hits weren’t just on you.”
The confusion on his face mirrored exactly how I felt when Alex first told us.
“There were several hits on me.”
I counted on my fingers. “There was one on Chanel and Xavier and three on Zay.”
The silence that followed felt endless. Because suddenly this wasn’t about politics anymore. This wasn’t about a campaign. Somebody wasn’t targeting one member of our family. Somebody was trying to erase all of us. And that was the moment Chanel and I realized we were running out of time.
The hardest decisions never felt heroic while making them.
People liked to believe courage arrived with certainty.
They imagined brave people charging forward without fear, completely convinced they were doing the right thing.
That had never been my experience. Most of the difficult choices I’d made in my life felt terrible. This one was no different.
I stared at Jared for several seconds before continuing because even now, sitting beside his hospital bed, I wasn’t sure he’d forgive me for what came next.
“Alex spent every night from the dinner to the wedding digging.”
My fingers twisted together in my lap. “The deeper she dug, the uglier it got. Cameron was so sick, Alex helped uncover that she was the one who was anonymously sending information to Daniel Mercer, the reporter, even though what she sent incriminated her family, too. I guess she figured if we were ruined, she would gladly go down, too.”
Jared listened quietly, and he didn’t interrupt.
For the first time in years, my brother looked exactly like the man who earned a political science degree in prison.
He wasn’t reacting emotionally anymore. He was analyzing and trying to understand without reacting emotionally.
He was trying to reconstruct the board after seeing only half the game.
“At first, we thought the threats were coming from different people. That’s how Cameron wanted it to look.
The reports had been intentionally confusing.
There were different locations and different intermediaries.
Every hit that was taken out had different money trails.
While Chanel and I knew it had to be Cameron, we wanted to be absolutely sure.
But eventually Alex realized something.”
Jared leaned forward slightly.
“What?”
“Every road led back to the same circle. Some hits were put out by Cameron; others by Alan. The night before the wedding, Chanel sat at my kitchen island reviewing Alex’s reports.
We decided together that we couldn’t trust anybody.
We didn’t get X and Zay involved because for our plan to work, we needed hysteria.
They’re both too calculated to have been in on our plan.
Although Matthew and your team were taking your life seriously, we couldn’t trust security. ”
Jared frowned. “Why?”
“Because we didn’t know who was compromised. Cameron is an FBI agent. We didn’t know who was connected to her.”
Believe it or not, shooting you was your Baby Bear’s idea.
“What’d she say?”
I laughed softly. “She said if somebody wanted to kill you that bad, then maybe we should stop them from trying.”
“We knew they weren’t going to stop.” My throat tightened. “Not after the campaign. And every day you become more visible, more loved, and more powerful. So we made a decision.”
Jared closed his eyes. Taking in my words. I could see the acceptance cross his face.
No one wanted their siblings to shoot them.
No one wanted to believe their siblings could keep secrets and control aspects of their lives behind the scenes.
He understood that being in control meant making hard decisions that might anger your loved one.
He understood that he had limited time to make a decision and to weigh the risk.
“We decided to make it look like the threat worked,” I added. “I was supposed to shoot you.” The words sounded just as awful now as they had the first time Chanel and I discussed them.
Jared’s eyes opened slowly. “So y’all lost your damn minds.”
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. “Pretty much.”
The corner of his mouth twitched just slightly, then disappeared.
“We thought if they believed they succeeded, they’d stop.”
The tears finally came. Because even though I had spent my entire life making decisions to protect my siblings, like keeping the letters from Channy or shooting Jared, it haunted me.
I hated to be seen as selfish, Kenya, and the ruthless Davis sibling.
Yet time and time again, I was put in situations like this where I had to be hated to protect those I love.
I hated that protection didn’t always come with a choice.
While I saw understanding in Jared’s eyes, he also looked at me differently now, the same way Chanel lit up when she saw me, but her happiness never reached one-hundred percent. She was still carrying the weight of my secrets; that part never stopped hurting.
“I spent years training how to shoot, Jared.” My voice cracked.”You know I did.”