Chapter 16 Vivica #2
My chest tightened. Prime was many things—difficult, stubborn, a constant source of headaches—but he was still my son. Still my blood.
“Do whatever you want to Prime,” I said slowly. “But please… spare Quest and Justice. They’re innocent in all this. They’ve never crossed you or Kasim.”
Rashid was quiet.
“Especially Quest.” My voice cracked despite my best efforts to control it. “Please, Rashid. For me. For everything we’ve been to each other. Spare Quest.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Something shifting in his expression. Something almost like amusement.
“Why you so worried about Quest specifically?”
“Because he’s—” I stopped. Swallowed. “Because he’s the one holding the family together. The business. The legacy. If something happens to him, everything Alexander built falls apart.”
“That all?”
I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t say the words out loud. Not after all these years of silence.
But Rashid was dying. And some secrets were too heavy to carry to the grave alone.
“Because he’s yours, Rashid.”
The words fell out of me before I could stop them. Forty years of silence, shattered in three words.
Rashid’s whole body went still.
“What did you say?”
“Quest.” My voice cracked. “Quest is your son.”
I watched the words hit him. Watched his face change—confusion first, then disbelief, then something I’d never seen on Rashid Muhammad’s face in all the years I’d known him.
Shock. Pure, unfiltered shock.
“That’s not—” He tried to sit up, winced, fell back against the pillows. “Viv, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying what I should have told you thirty-eight years ago.” Tears were streaming down my face now. I couldn’t stop them. “When I found out I was pregnant, I knew. I KNEW. The timing, the—” I shook my head.
“No.” Rashid’s voice was barely a whisper. “No, you would have told me. You would have—”
“Told you WHAT?” The words came out sharper than I intended.
“That I was carrying your baby while I was married? That I’d been sleeping with both of you and didn’t know whose child I was carrying until I did the math?
” I wiped my face roughly. “I chose Alexander. I chose that life. I couldn’t turn around and tell him his firstborn son wasn’t his. ”
Rashid was staring at me like he’d never seen me before. Like I was a stranger wearing the face of someone he thought he knew.
“Thirty-eight years.” His voice was hoarse. Broken. “Thirty-eight years, Vivica. I have a son. I’ve HAD a son this whole time, and you never—”
“I couldn’t.”
“You COULD. You just didn’t.” Something shifted in his eyes. Pain. Rage. Grief. All of it swirling together. “I watched that boy grow up. Watched him take over the business. Watched him become a man. And the whole time… the whole time he was MINE?”
“Rashid—”
“Does he know?”
“No. No one knows. Alexander never knew. Quest doesn’t know. No one.”
He closed his eyes. A tear slipped down his weathered cheek—the first tear I’d ever seen Rashid Muhammad shed in forty years.
“My son,” he whispered. “I have another son.”
“I’m sorry.” The words felt pathetic. Inadequate. “I’m so sorry.”
When he opened his eyes again, that familiar steel was back. Even dying, even devastated, Rashid was still Rashid.
“I need you to do something for me,” I said, gripping his hand tighter. “Kasim. When he comes back. I need you to make sure he doesn’t touch Quest.”
Rashid studied me. “You want me to protect him.”
“He’s YOUR son, Rashid. Your blood.”
“Fine but Prime is done.”
I hesitated. “Prime… Prime made his choices.”
“He touched my daughter.”
“I know.” The words tasted like ash. “But Quest and Justice—they never did anything. Justice never hurt nobody. And Quest…” I swallowed hard. “Quest is yours. Please, Rashid. Please protect him.”
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he squeezed my hand with more strength than I thought he had left.
“I’ll make sure Kasim knows. Quest and Justice are not to be touched.” His grip loosened, exhaustion winning. “That’s all I can do, Viv. I’m dying. I can’t control what happens after I’m gone.”
“Thank you.” Tears spilled down my cheeks. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” His voice was fading now. “Just… tell him. Someday. When the time is right. Tell my son who his real father was.”
I sat there holding his hand, tears streaming down my face, the weight of four decades of lies finally spoken out loud.
Quest was Rashid’s son.
My eldest. My pride. The one who’d built the Banks empire into what it was today.
He had no idea that the blood in his veins wasn’t Alexander’s.
No idea that his real father was dying in this bed.
No idea that everything he thought he knew about himself was a lie.
And now Rashid knew too. Would die knowing he had a son he’d never really known. A son who’d called another man “father.” A son who’d built an empire thinking he was continuing Alexander’s legacy when really, he’d been continuing Rashid’s.
The cruelest part? They were so alike. The strategy. The control. The way Quest commanded a room without raising his voice.
I’d seen Rashid in him every day of his life.
And I’d never said a word.