Chapter 20 Rashid
RASHID
The boy wouldn’t stop crying.
I stood over him, arms folded across my chest, watching the tears stream down his face with a mixture of disgust and disappointment.
This was my blood. My nephew. A continuation of my legacy.
And here he sat, sniveling like an infant, snot running from his nose, shoulders heaving with sobs that belonged to a child half his age.
Pathetic.
“Enough.” My voice cut through his whimpering like a blade. “Dry your face. Compose yourself. You are a man, not a toddler.”
Yusef looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes magnified by those thick glasses. “I want to go home.”
“You are home.”
“No.” He shook his head, fresh tears spilling. “I want to go back to Auntie Zai. I want to go back to Prime. Please, just let me—”
“What you want is irrelevant.” I adjusted my bowtie, a habit I’d developed over decades of maintaining composure in the face of incompetence. “You are with family now. Your real family. Your father will be here tomorrow, and you will begin your life as it should have been from the start.”
“I don’t WANT my father!” The boy’s voice cracked, rising to a pitch that made my jaw tighten. “I don’t even KNOW him! Prime is—”
“Prime is nothing to you.” I let the words land heavy. Final. “He is not your blood. He has no claim to you. He is merely a man who inserted himself into a situation that was never his concern.”
“He loves me!”
“Love.” I nearly laughed. The naivety of children.
“Love is a weakness that men exploit and women weaponize. What you need is discipline. Structure. A father who will teach you how to move through this world as a man, not coddled and softened by a woman who doesn’t even have the sense to know her place. ”
Yusef’s face crumpled. “Auntie Zai is a good person. She takes care of me. She—”
“She has filled your head with foolishness.” I began to pace, my polished shoes silent on the marble floor of my study.
“Single mothers breed weakness in boys. They cannot teach you how to be a man because they do not know what manhood requires. They nurture when they should discipline. They comfort when they should challenge. They create soft, emotional creatures who crumble at the first sign of adversity.”
I stopped pacing and looked down at him.
“Look at you. Twelve years old and weeping like a woman. Is this what she has made of you? Is this the legacy of my bloodline?”
“I want to go HOME!” Yusef was screaming now, his small body trembling with a rage that almost impressed me. Almost. “You can’t keep me here! Prime will come for me! He’ll—”
“Prime.” I let the name sit on my tongue like something bitter.
“You speak of him as though he is some great protector. Some hero who will rescue you from your own family.” I leaned down, bringing my face close to his.
“Let me tell you something about your precious Prime. When I found him, he was a fat, stuttering, pathetic excuse for a boy. Couldn’t string two words together without tripping over his own tongue.
Couldn’t throw a punch without crying afterward.
He was weak. Soft. A target for anyone who wanted easy prey. ”
Yusef’s eyes went wide.
“I made him into what he is today. Every skill he possesses, I taught him. Every instinct he relies on, I honed. The man you admire so much? He is my creation. My weapon. And he has forgotten his place.” I straightened up. “But I will remind him. In time.”
Something shifted in the boy’s face. The fear was still there, but underneath it, something harder was forming. Something defiant.
“Prime is a good man,” Yusef said quietly. “He’s better than you.”
I almost smiled. There was fire in this one. Buried deep beneath the tears and the weakness, but present nonetheless.
Perhaps he could be salvaged after all.
“Prime is a soldier who has lost his way,” I said calmly. “Distracted by a woman who has filled his head with nonsense and his bed with lies. But that is not your concern. Your concern is—”
“I WANT TO GO HOME!”
Yusef launched himself off the couch with a speed I hadn’t anticipated. His small hands connected with my chest, shoving me backward with all the strength his skinny frame could muster.
It wasn’t much. I barely moved. But the audacity of it—the sheer disrespect—ignited something cold and sharp in my chest.
“Boy.” My voice dropped to a register that had made grown men reconsider their life choices. “Have you lost your mind?”
He was breathing hard, fists clenched at his sides, tears still streaming but his jaw set with defiance. For a moment, he almost looked like someone worth molding.
Then my hand connected with his face.
The slap sent him spinning. His glasses flew off, skittering across the marble floor, and he crumpled to his knees with a cry that echoed through the high ceilings of my home.
“You do not put your hands on me.” I stood over him, watching him clutch his face, watching the defiance crumble back into fear. “Ever. Do you understand?”
He didn’t answer. Just knelt there, feeling around blindly for his glasses.
I picked them up. Examined them for damage. Then grabbed him by the back of his neck and hauled him to his feet.
A cough seized my chest—sudden, violent—and I released him to turn away. I pressed my handkerchief to my lips, fighting to suppress it, but the fit had its way with me. When it finally passed, I folded the cloth quickly before the boy could see the flecks of red staining the white fabric.
Weakness. My body was betraying me at the worst possible time.
I straightened my posture. Adjusted my bowtie. Refused to acknowledge what I’d just seen.
“Come with me.”
My kitchen was larger than most apartments.
Italian marble countertops. Professional-grade appliances.
A wine cellar visible through glass doors.
I had built this mansion with the proceeds of decades of careful work—investments, partnerships, an underground legacy, the occasional necessary elimination of obstacles.
Every inch of it reflected the discipline and precision that had carried me from the streets of Detroit to the upper echelons of power in Washington DC.
And now my grandson was going to learn what discipline truly meant.
I released his neck and walked to the pantry. Retrieved a twenty-pound bag of rice—long grain, nothing fancy—and returned to the center of the kitchen.
Yusef was standing where I’d left him, still crying, still clutching his reddened cheek.
“Remove your clothes.”
His head snapped up. “What?”
“Your joggers. Your shirt. Remove them. Down to your undergarments.”
“No.” He shook his head, backing away. “No, I’m not—”
“That was not a request.”
Something in my tone must have communicated the futility of resistance, because after a long moment, his trembling hands went to the hem of his shirt. He pulled it over his head. Then his joggers, stepping out of them with the reluctant movements of a boy who knew he had no choice.
He stood before me in his boxers, skinny arms wrapped around his skinny chest, shivering despite the warmth of the house.
I tore open the bag and poured the rice onto the floor. It cascaded across the marble in a white wave, settling into a rough rectangle about three feet wide.
“Kneel.”
“Please—”
“Kneel.”
He knelt. The moment his bare knees hit the rice, he hissed in pain. The grains were small but hard, pressing into his skin with dozens of tiny pressure points that would only worsen with time.
“Arms extended. In front of you. Parallel to the floor.”
“I can’t—”
“You can and you will.” I retrieved a wooden spoon from the drawer beside the stove. “This is how men are made, Yusef. Through discipline. Through discomfort. Through the understanding that weakness is not tolerated and excuses are not accepted.”
He raised his arms, trembling, tears dripping from his chin onto the rice below.
“Your father will be here tomorrow,” I continued, pacing slowly around him. “Demetrius has made mistakes in his life—many of them—but he is still a man. He can teach you things that your aunt never could. Things that Prime, despite his skills, has clearly failed to instill in you.”
“Prime taught me—”
The wooden spoon cracked against his back. He cried out, his arms dropping.
“Arms UP.”
He raised them again, breathing harder now.
“Prime taught you nothing but softness. Attachment. Emotional weakness.” I circled him like a shark.
“When I assigned him to make contact with you, I expected him to assess the situation and report back. Instead, he inserted himself into your life. Became attached. Fell in love with your aunt like some lovesick teenager.”
I stopped pacing, staring out the window at the manicured grounds of my estate.
Prime had been one of my best. Perhaps the best. Disciplined. Precise. Ruthless when necessary and controlled when required. In all the years I’d known him, he’d only loved one woman—and that had been a carefully managed situation that served my purposes.
But this? This obsession with Zainab?
It had made him reckless. Made him challenge me in that prison hallway like I was some common adversary rather than the man who had shaped his entire existence. Made him forget who held the power in our arrangement.
I would remind him. After I secured my grandson’s future, I would have a conversation with Prentice Banks about loyalty and perspective. About what happens to soldiers who forget their place.
If I had the time.
I pushed that thought away. There was still work to be done. A legacy to secure. Whatever was happening inside my body, I would not let it stop me from ensuring my bloodline continued properly. Demetrius had failed. Prime had been compromised. This boy was my last chance to get it right.
“Please.” Yusef’s voice was barely a whisper now. His arms were shaking badly, dipping lower with each passing second. “Please, I just want to go home.”
“This is your home now.” I turned back to face him. “The sooner you accept that, the easier this will be. Fight it, and things will get considerably worse before they get better. Do you understand?”
He didn’t answer. Just knelt there in the rice, crying silently, his arms trembling at the edge of collapse.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I pulled it out. Looked at the screen.
Prime.
I stared at the name for a long moment. Watched it ring. Imagined him on the other end—frantic, furious, ready to tear the world apart looking for this boy.
Let him wait. Let him stew in his helplessness. Let him remember what it felt like to be powerless, the way he’d been when I first found him.
The phone kept ringing.
I slid it back into my pocket without answering.
“Keep your arms up,” I said to Yusef without looking at him. “We’re just getting started.”