Chapter 5 Farah #2
I watched my reflection in the window as Prime’s Bentayga pulled away from the compound. The woman staring back was a stranger.
Hair hanging limp and unwashed. Skin gray and dull. Cheekbones too sharp because I’d dropped almost thirty pounds—couldn’t keep food down, couldn’t taste nothing but metal and bile and the phantom flavor of duct tape adhesive.
My clothes hung off me like they belonged to somebody else. This sweater used to fit. Now I was drowning in it.
I ain’t slept more than two hours at a time since the warehouse. Every time I closed my eyes, I was back in that chair. Smelling cigarettes. Feeling hands that wouldn’t stop no matter how hard I screamed.
So I stopped sleeping.
Started pacing instead. Walking the halls of this big ass mansion at 3 AM, 4 AM, 5 AM. Checking locks I’d already checked twenty times. Washing my hands until they cracked and bled because I could still feel HIM on my skin no matter how hard I scrubbed.
The girl who loved Prime Banks was dead.
She died in that warehouse screaming into duct tape while his cousin ripped her apart.
What was left was something else.
I watched until Prime’s taillights disappeared down the driveway. Then I let the mask drop.
My hands were shaking. Not from fear.
From rage.
Prime’s family took everything from me. My ear. My dignity. My body. My mind. My ability to ever feel safe. My ability to sleep without nightmares. My ability to be touched without flinching.
So I was gonna take the most precious thing from him.
That baby.
If Zainab wasn’t locked up right now, I would’ve handled it myself.
I had it all planned out. Wait until she was alone. Break into wherever she was staying. Put a knife to that swollen belly and cut Prime’s baby right out of her while she watched.
Then I’d take it to a bridge—the Key Bridge, maybe, or the one over the Anacostia—and I’d throw it into the water.
Let Prime spend the rest of his life imagining what his daughter’s last moments were like. The cold water. The tiny lungs filling up. The crying that nobody came to answer.
Let that image haunt him the way Thad’s face haunts me every time I close my eyes.
But someone got to Zainab first. Had her arrested before I could make my move.
Didn’t matter. Plans could change.
She was going to prison now. She deserved to rot there for stealing the man I loved, for living the life that was supposed to be mine.
And when that baby came? When they took it away from her because she was a murderer, a criminal, an unfit mother giving birth in a cell?
I would be waiting.
I’d take that child before anyone else could. And I’d finish what I started.
Prime would never hold his daughter. Never hear her first words. Never see her take her first steps. That baby would disappear and he’d spend the rest of his miserable life wondering what happened to her. Did she suffer? Was she scared? Did she cry out for a daddy who never came?
Good.
Let him live with that. Let it eat him alive the way Thad’s hands eat at me every time I close my eyes. Because she will suffer.
That was worse than death.
That was forever.
I turned from the window and walked toward the east wing.
The smell hit me first. Antiseptic trying to cover decay. Medicine masking death. It got stronger with every step with monitors beeping, oxygen tanks humming, the wet rattle of lungs that had given up.
My father’s final soundtrack.
He was awake when I walked in. Propped up on pillows, those sharp eyes tracking me even though his body was failing.
The most dangerous man I’d ever known, reduced to one hundred-twenty pounds of bones and blood and borrowed time.
“He’s gone.” Daddy’s voice was thin. A whisper of what it used to be.
“Yeah.” I sat in the chair beside his bed, it was the same chair I’d been living in for five months. “You really had him thinking you ain’t have nothing to do with it.”
Daddy’s lips twitched. “I told him the truth. I don’t work with law enforcement.”
Daddy laughed, but it turned into a coughing fit. Wet. Rattling. When it finally passed, there was blood on his lips.
“I would never work with pigs,” he said, wiping his mouth with a tissue that came away red. “Prentice knows that.”
“He does now.”
Silence. Monitors beeped. Oxygen hummed. Outside, the sun was setting, painting the room in shades of orange and red.
“Baba.” I leaned forward. “Why didn’t you just kill him? When you had the chance. Why didn’t you let one of his soldiers put a bullet in his head tonight?”
Daddy turned his head slow to look at me. Even now, even dying, those eyes could cut right through you.
“Because death is mercy, baby girl.” His voice dropped low. “Death is a moment of pain and then nothing. Prentice don’t deserve mercy. He deserves to SUFFER. To watch everything he built turn to dust. To feel as helpless as I felt when he sent me that picture of your ear.”
My hand drifted to the side of my head. The plastic surgeons did their best but it was still just a mangled mess. At least Prime left me enough so that I could still hear.
“He’s already suffering,” Daddy continued. “His woman locked up. His baby gonna be born behind bars. His whole family scrambling.” A smile crept across his cracked lips. “And this is only the beginning.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I still got moves, Farah. Plays Prentice ain’t seen coming. People in places he don’t know about.”
“What people?”
He didn’t answer. Just smiled that smile I’d seen my whole life. The one that meant somebody’s world was about to collapse.
“Baba.” I grabbed his hand. His bones felt like twigs under paper. “I’m tired of waiting. I want him to hurt NOW—”
“I know what you want.” His eyes softened just slightly. “I see it in you. The change. You think I don’t notice you pacing these halls every night? Not eating. Not sleeping. Jumping at every sound.”
My throat tightened.
He knew something was wrong. Could see it all over me.
But he didn’t know the real reason. Didn’t know about Thad. Didn’t know what happened in that warehouse while he was at home waiting for Prime to send more of my body parts.
I couldn’t tell him. Looking at him now that he’s a skeleton in a hospital gown, machines doing half the work of keeping him alive. I knew the stress would kill him faster than the cancer.
And I wasn’t ready to lose my father. Not yet.
“I’m fine, Baba.”
“You’re not fine. But you will be.” He squeezed my hand. Weak but sure. “Kasim will be home soon. The money cleared. Paperwork’s moving. Your brother will be free within weeks.”
Kasim. My half-brother. Locked up in Panama for two years. Cold. Patient. Methodical. Everything I wasn’t.
“When he gets here,” Daddy said, “you tell him everything. He’ll help you plan. Help you execute. Together, you’ll make Prentice pay for what he took from this family. We will take out everyone. Quest, Justice, the nieces, the siblings. No one will be left behind.”
I nodded. Didn’t trust my voice.
Tell him everything. But not everything everything. The Thad part was my secret. My weapon. I’d use it when the time was right.
“But until then—” Daddy’s grip tightened. “You wait. You watch. You don’t move without Kasim. Understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good girl.”
His eyes started to close. Exhaustion pulling him under. These days he couldn’t stay awake more than thirty minutes at a time. The cancer was winning.
I was about to stand, let him rest, when his phone buzzed on the nightstand.
We both looked at it.
The screen lit up. Incoming call.
The name made my blood run cold.
VIVICA BANKS
I stared at my father. He stared back.
“Baba.” My voice came out strangled. “Why is Prime’s mother calling you?”
He didn’t answer right away. Just looked at that buzzing phone with something I couldn’t read in his eyes.