Chapter 34 #2
“He had the amazing grandfather, the solid sports record, the distinguished military career,” she continued.
“And now he has a big family, a home of his own, owns a bunch of businesses, and has the hot, rich girlfriend.” She paused to let that sink in.
The FBI wanted information on the trafficking ring, but James needed this confrontation.
“He’s beaten you in every way, hasn’t he?
He got all the luck in the family, and you got shit. You both did.”
“His fucking grandfather thought he walked on water,” Chanel said.
Malcom’s eyes flickered in her direction, but he remained silent.
“Couldn’t raise his own fucking son, but his grandson?
He could do no wrong. No need for my baby brother to deal with the same shit the rest of us had to deal with.
No need for him to go hungry or dodge bullets or sell his soul to survive. ”
Daphne didn’t point out that James had dealt with all of those, except selling his soul. He’d still gone hungry, he’d still dodged bullets, he’d still lived surrounded by packs of warring gangs.
“And when one more good thing landed in his lap, the inheritance, you saw an opportunity to take it all away from him,” Daphne said.
“The shit doesn’t deserve it,” Chanel said.
“Nicole,” Malcom warned. Daphne noted his use of her assumed name and wondered if he’d left their past behind better than his sister had.
“You hired Weeks and Beeker to kill him. Probably didn’t even matter what the inheritance was,” Daphne mused.
“We make enough here, we didn’t need it,” Malcom replied, surprising Daphne. She hadn’t expected him to jump into the conversation. She paused and studied him from behind her two sentinels. Angry energy, fueled by fear, still flowed off James, but neither of the men stopped her.
“You wanted to bring him down a peg,” she said.
Death did a little more than that, but no need to be dramatic.
“Your entire life, he had everything, and you had nothing. And now a windfall was falling into his lap. It’s the principle of the matter, isn’t it, Malcom?
No one should lead such a charmed life when you were given shit. ”
Malcom’s head tipped two inches to the left.
“He shouldn’t have been born to begin with.
Our mother was a good-looking woman, she had enough clients to keep us fed, to pay rent on our apartment.
After she got knocked up, that all went away.
No one wants to fuck a woman pregnant with another man’s baby.
And the baby daddy was another gutter piece of shit. ”
“On that, we agree,” James said.
Malcom’s eyes flickered to him, then stilled. “You fucked up our already fucked-up lives. Then you went away, and we never had to hear about you again.”
“Until Henry Jefferson’s law firm reached out to you while trying to locate me,” James said.
“And it all came back, didn’t it?” Daphne interjected. “The hate, the injustice, the memories of everything he’d taken from you.”
“Didn’t matter that you’ve made your own way in the world,” James stepped in again. “As shitty a way as it is, you’re not hurting for food or shelter.”
“Back on his fucking high horse,” Chanel said. “Always better than us, always judging us.”
“Didn’t matter,” Malcom confirmed. “Sometimes Mother Nature needs a little help in making sure the cosmic scales stay level.”
The muscles in the back of James’s neck tensed, but Daphne sensed the minuscule reaction stemmed from something he’d heard through his earpiece rather than Malcom’s words.
“How’d you move into this?” Daphne asked. “Your clients are wealthy; this house cost a pretty penny. You didn’t crawl out of the gutter and launch this enterprise.”
“You don’t mince your words, do you, little girl?” Ken said.
“You don’t get to where I got in my business by mincing words, little boy,” she shot back. Ken narrowed his eyes at her, but she dismissed him. He was a lackey for Malcom and Chanel; he’d do what he was told when he was told. Gareth, on the other hand, well, his silence interested her.
Gareth.
She turned her attention to him and ran her eyes over his face, taking in his individual features: wide forehead, round eyes with sockets slightly smaller than average, a nose that fit somewhere between pointy and round, full cheeks that swallowed his cheekbones, and a jaw that, though not unattractive, was nondescript.
Dropping her eyes even farther, she focused on his hands. They still twitched.
“You’re not from their world, are you, Adam?
” she asked him, a picture forming in her head.
“Let me guess. You come from a wealthy family, apartment on the Upper East Side, summers in the Hamptons, that sort of thing. Then the drugs took control. Maybe your parents cut you off, or maybe you slid so far out of their reach they couldn’t help.
And you ended up getting in deep to a dealer.
In Trenton.” The rapid rise and fall of his chest told her she was on the right path.
“You wouldn’t have come up with the idea of Sweet Dreams on your own, your brain didn’t think like that, not then.
But you’d happily sell out someone to save your skin, to get another fix.
” She paused, then asked. “Who was it? A friend from school? Someone you knew from childhood? Your sister maybe?” The words made her sick, but when he jerked back at the mention of his sister, one she hadn’t even known he had, her stomach revolted.
“You traded your sister to your dealer,” James said, stepping in, giving her time to breathe through the nausea.
“Jacked her up on Mollys and had a whole lot of fun for a day or two,” Malcom said. Daphne couldn’t help but grab hold of James’s shirt, the horror of it rocking through her body.
“Her life for yours, Gareth,” Marcus said. Gareth, visibly sucking in short, rapid breaths, fixed his eyes on a point behind them.
“And thus Sweet Dreams was born,” James said.
“Gareth procuring the girls, you three procuring the clients. Then over the years, you realized that the real money lay the other way around. Clients from Gareth’s world and victims from ours, from our world of Black and brown and marginalized.
People to be tamed, conquered, subjugated.
“But you couldn’t take too many from our own neighborhood. No one would blink an eye at you pimping out girls to the John Doe down the block. But taking their girls out to service folks from his world.” James nodded to Gareth. “That wouldn’t fly for long.”
“So you moved here and expanded the net you cast for your victims,” Marcus said. “Atlanta, New York, Charlotte. You aren’t part of a bigger ring, you’re your own ecosystem.”
“No need to complicate things when you can deal with it yourself,” Chanel said.
They had their answers now, and as silence fell, Daphne realized she hadn’t listened when the team had relayed the next step in the plan. So focused on being with James, she hadn’t caught what happened once they had the information they needed.
“It’s over now,” James said.
“You may have a safe room you think you can dip into, but that won’t protect you forever,” Marcus said.
“The FBI is crawling all over the place. There’s a team waiting outside that door for me to give them the signal,” James said, nodding to the door behind him.
“The decision’s yours,” Marcus said. “What do you want to do? Walk away and live, or do something stupid and risk it all?”
“There’s not much to risk at this point, is there? But I’ll finish the job I set out to do,” Malcom said, swinging his weapon toward James.