24. Rewind #2
He nodded. Of course, he knew. It was his idea. He would say, “No Queenpin should be waiting on a man to save her.”
I looked down at my hands.
The same hands that pulled the trigger.
The same hands that held his while he lay unconscious.
The same hands that prayed over him.
“I knew where to aim. I knew how to make it believable. But I also was sure that I knew how to keep you alive.” My voice finally broke completely. “But I didn’t know the city loved you that much.”
I wiped tears from my face. “We thought we’d fake your death.” The confession barely escaped my mouth. “We thought we’d buy time.” My chest tightened. “But the second you went down–” I swallowed hard. “The city turned you into a martyr.”
The memory still felt unreal. For thirty-one days, there were rallies, extensive news coverage, and prayer circles at various churches around Crestwood of different denominations.
Folks painted murals, and to this day, there are still people standing outside the hospital.
Many of them had come every day since the shooting.
Crestwood had fallen in love with my brother.
And none of us understood how much until they believed they were in jeopardy of losing him.
“I didn’t expect a coma.” The words came out as a whisper. “I didn’t expect almost losing you for real.”
And for the first time since this conversation began, I couldn’t hold his gaze. Because that was the truth I struggled to live with.
I stood on pulling the trigger, but what was hard for me to accept was the deception.
For a long time, neither one of us spoke.
The monitors continued their steady rhythm while afternoon sunlight stretched across the hospital floor.
Somewhere outside the room, I imagined our family being nosey and placing their ears to the door.
Camilla was probably losing her mind. Chanel was definitely crying. My father was probably praying.
But inside this room, there was only Jared and me.
The truth.
All of it.
It was ugly and imperfect, the kind of truth that could either heal a family or destroy one. I watched my brother process everything I’d said. The anger was gone now. The betrayal was fading, too. In its place sat something heavier, acceptance.
Because Jared knew the real Kenya. Not the version the city knew. The real me. The girl who spent her entire life throwing herself in front of bullets for people she loved. The girl who always ended up looking like the villain because she was willing to do what nobody else would.
Finally, Jared shook his head and laughed. “You know what’s crazy?”
I swallowed.
“What?”
His eyes found mine. “You always end up being the bad guy.”
The words hit me harder than I expected, because they were painfully true.
Growing up, I was the difficult child, the one Sharon called loud and stubborn.
I was nicknamed the problem child. Then I became a drug dealer and the sister who hid bins of letters from her younger sister and kept her from the love of her life.
Now, somehow, I’d become the sister who shot her brother trying to save him.
I laughed through my tears. “Story of my damn life.”
Jared stared at me for a moment before shaking his head again.
“No.” His voice softened. “That’s the story people tell about your life.”
The tears started falling again. “Jared—”
“You loved me enough to let me hate you. You knew being a father and a husband was more important to me than dying.”
The words broke something inside me. Because that was exactly what happened. When Chanel and I came up with the plan, we already knew what it would look like. We knew what people would say if they ever found out. We knew what our family would think if something went wrong.
But I also knew Jared might never forgive me. And I was willing to live with that if it kept him breathing. The realization hit him, too. I saw the exact moment he understood what I’d sacrificed.
Not my reputation.
Not my image.
Those things never mattered much to me.
But what did matter to me was his love. I had risked losing my brother’s love forever.
And no matter how many times I rethought about what I had done, I would do it again in each lifetime if it meant he was alive for his babies
“Come here, YaYa.” The words came out rough.
The second I got close enough, Jared reached for me. He wrapped an arm around me and pulled me into a hug, and just like that, I was eight years old again. I was safe and protected. I cried into his shoulder while he held me the best he could from a hospital bed.
“You scared the shit outta me, YaYa.”
My voice cracked. “I know, and I thought I killed you.” Another sob escaped me. Because for a month I hadn’t let myself say those words out loud.
Not to Zay.
Not to Chanel.
Not even to myself.
I thought I killed my brother.
Jared rested his cheek against the top of my head. Then sighed. “What else did you learn about the Price family?”
I took a deep breath and told him everything that had happened over the last thirty-one days.
I told him how Chanel and I ended Alan Price. I told him about our wild Set It Off moment with Carmen at the prison. I told him about the aliases and how Janessa was really Cameron and had tortured Chanel for years.
The deeper I got into the explanation, the darker Jared’s expression became. By the time I finished discussing the alleyway and Quan’s involvement, he looked ready to climb out of the hospital bed despite still having IV lines attached.
“Quan?”
His disbelief mirrored our own.
I nodded. “Quan.”
Jared stared toward the window. Then suddenly he laughed.
“Damn. The whole time we were looking for enemies. We were breaking bread with them.”
The war we thought we understood had become something much bigger.
And as I sat beside my brother’s hospital bed watching him piece together decades’ worth of betrayal, I realized something that brought me a bit of comfort: Jared Davis was finally awake, and only one of the people responsible was still left on the board.