Chapter 21 Farah
FARAH
I couldn’t stop touching it.
My fingers traced the scarred hole where my ear used to be. The wound had healed—technically. No more bandages. No more bleeding. Just smooth, puckered skin where something used to exist. A permanent reminder of what Prime Banks had taken from me.
I couldn’t wear my hair up anymore. Couldn’t pull it back in the sleek ponytails I used to love. Every hairstyle now was strategic—designed to hide the deformity, to make me look normal from the right angles. But I knew the truth. Every time I caught my reflection, I saw it.
The absence.
The asymmetry.
The monster I’d become.
I sat on my bed in my father’s Virginia compound, curtains drawn, lights off. This room used to feel like a sanctuary. Now it felt like a tomb. I had quit my job as an event planner and my business as an interior decorator had stalled. I rarely left.
Prime had hurt me. He let his cousin rape me.
The worst part? I still loved him.
How sick was that? The man mutilated me. Cut off my ear like I was some enemy combatant in a war I didn’t even know I was fighting. And somewhere deep in my twisted heart, I still wanted him. Still remembered what it felt like when he used to look at me like I mattered.
Before her.
Zainab.
That bitch had ruined everything. Showed up out of nowhere with her ghetto-ass cinnamon rolls and her fake identity and her sob story, and suddenly I didn’t exist anymore.
Suddenly I was just the annoying event planner who couldn’t take a hint.
Suddenly I was the one getting my ear sliced off while she got the ring, the baby, and the happily ever after.
It wasn’t fair.
I’d known Prime for years. YEARS. I’d been patient. I’d been available. I’d made myself into exactly what I thought he wanted. And for what? To be discarded like trash the moment some hood rat batted her eyelashes at him?
The rage was always there now. Simmering under my skin. Mixing with the grief and the shame and the phantom pain where my ear used to be. Some days it was all I could do not to scream until my throat bled.
Today was one of those days.
I pulled my knees to my chest and rocked. Back and forth. Back and forth. Like a child trying to self-soothe. The therapist my father hired said I had PTSD. Said I needed to process my trauma in healthy ways.
Fuck healthy.
I wanted revenge.
I wanted Prime to feel what I felt. The helplessness.
The humiliation. The knowledge that someone you trusted could destroy you without a second thought.
I wanted him to lose everything—his precious Zainab, his unborn baby, his brothers, his freedom.
I wanted to burn his whole world down and dance in the ashes.
But I was stuck in this room. Hiding. Healing. Waiting for my father to figure out a plan that was never going to come because he was too busy dying.
A crash from downstairs made me jump.
Loud. Violent. The sound of something heavy hitting the floor.
“Baba?”
I was on my feet before I could think, my body moving on autopilot toward the door.
My father was sick—everyone knew that now.
The cancer that had been eating him alive for months had finally won.
He could barely walk most days. Could barely keep food down.
The doctors said it was only a matter of time.
Another crash.
I ran.
Down the hallway. Down the stairs. My bare feet slapping against the hardwood floors as I followed the sounds to my father’s study.
The door was open.
I stopped in the doorway, my breath catching in my throat.
The room was destroyed. One of the medical monitors had been knocked over, wires and tubes tangled across the floor.
A lamp was shattered. Papers were scattered everywhere.
And in the middle of it all, my father was on his knees, his fist bloody from punching something—the wall, the desk, I couldn’t tell.
“Baba!” I rushed to him, dropping down beside him, my hands fluttering over his frail body. “What happened? Are you okay? Should I call the nurse?”
“He’s dead.”
The words came out like gravel. Like broken glass scraping against concrete.
“Who? Who’s dead?”
My father looked at me. And for the first time in my life, I saw something I’d never seen in his eyes.
Defeat.
“Kasim.” His voice cracked. “They found him in his cell. They got to him.”
The world tilted.
Kasim. The one who was supposed to get out of that Panamanian prison and rebuild everything our family had lost. The one who was supposed to avenge us.
“No.” The word came out as a whisper. “No, that’s not—how? How is that possible?”
“Prentice.” My father spat the name like poison. “It had to be. He has connections everywhere. He reached into a prison in another country and killed my son like it was nothing.”
The tears came before I could stop them.
Not for Kasim—I didn’t know him well enough to truly grieve him. But for what he represented. Hope. Justice. The promise that someone would make Prentice pay for what he’d done to our family.
Now that hope was dead. Murdered in a cell thousands of miles away.
“There’s no one left.” My father’s voice was hollow. Empty. “Demetrius is gone. Kasim is gone. The Brick City Crew is scattered. Everything I built…” He looked around the destroyed room like he was seeing his life’s work in the shattered lamp and scattered papers. “Everything is gone.”
“Baba, please. You need to rest. Let me help you back to bed—”
“What’s the point?” He pushed my hands away weakly.
“What’s the point of resting? Of fighting?
I’m dying, Farah. The doctors gave me weeks.
Maybe days.” He laughed—a horrible, broken sound.
“I thought I could hold on long enough to see Prentice destroyed. To see Kasim come home and finish what I started. But now…”
He started coughing. Deep, wet coughs that shook his whole body. When he pulled his hand away from his mouth, it was covered in blood.
“Baba!”
“It doesn’t matter.” He slumped against me, his weight almost nothing. The cancer had eaten him down to bones and bitterness. “None of it matters anymore.”
“Don’t say that.” I was sobbing now, holding him, rocking him the way I’d been rocking myself upstairs just minutes ago. “Please don’t say that. We’ll figure something out. I’ll find a way. I’ll make him pay, I promise—”
“You?” He looked at me. And even now, even dying, I saw the dismissal in his eyes. The doubt. “You’re a party planner, Farah. You don’t have the stomach for what needs to be done.”
The words hit like a slap.
“I have more stomach than you know,” I said quietly. “He took my EAR, Baba. Do you think I’m going to let that go? Do you think I’m going to let him live happily ever after with that bitch while I hide in this house like a broken doll?”
Something flickered in my father’s eyes. Interest. Maybe even respect.
“What would you do?” he asked. “If you had the resources. The connections. What would you do to him?”
“I’d take everything he loves. His woman. His baby. His family. I’d burn it all down and make him watch.” My voice was steady now. Cold. “And then, when he had nothing left, I’d put a bullet in his head myself.”
My father stared at me for a long moment.
Then he smiled. A real smile, bloody teeth and all.
“There she is,” he whispered. “There’s my daughter.”
His hand found mine. Squeezed with what little strength he had left.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For doubting you. For treating you like you were weak. You’re not weak, Farah. You’re a Muhammad. And Muhammads don’t forgive. We don’t forget. We destroy.”
“Baba—”
“Promise me.” His grip tightened. “Promise me you’ll make him pay. For me. For Kasim. For everything he’s taken from this family.”
“I promise.”
He nodded. Closed his eyes. Let out a long, slow breath.
And then he was still.
“Baba?” I shook him gently. “Baba, wake up.”
Nothing.
“BABA!”
I pressed my fingers to his neck. Searched for a pulse. Waited for his chest to rise.
Nothing.
My father—Rashid Muhammad, the Shadow of Brick City Crew, the man who had trained Prentice Banks and terrorized the streets for all these years—was dead.
And I was alone.
I don’t know how long I sat there.
Could’ve been minutes. Could’ve been hours. Time didn’t mean anything anymore. I just held him, my tears soaking into his hospital gown, my screams echoing off the walls until my voice gave out.
The staff found us eventually. Tried to pull me away. I fought them at first—clawing, scratching, refusing to let go—but eventually the fight drained out of me. They took his body. Called the funeral home. Started making arrangements.
And I went back to my room.
Sat on my bed in the dark.
And thought about what I was going to do next.
I couldn’t do this alone. I wasn’t stupid enough to think otherwise.
My father was right about one thing—I didn’t have the connections or the resources to take on Prime by myself.
The BCC was scattered. Kasim was dead. Demetrius was missing, probably dead too.
Everyone who could’ve helped me was gone.
But there was one person who hated Prime almost as much as I did.
One person who had the power, the connections, and the motivation to help me destroy him.
I picked up my phone. Scrolled to a contact I’d saved weeks ago but never had the courage to call.
Vivica Banks.
Prime’s own mother.
The woman who’d approached me at that gala after Zainab slapped her. Who’d given me her card and whispered about making that bitch pay. Who’d looked at me with those calculating eyes and seen a useful tool.
At the time, I’d been too broken to follow up. Too consumed by my own pain to think about strategy.
But now?
Now I had nothing left to lose.
I hit call.
She answered on the third ring.
“Farah.” Her voice was smooth. Controlled. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“My father is dead.” The words came out flat. Empty. “He died an hour ago.”
A pause. “My condolences. Rashid was a… formidable man.”
“He died because of your son.” I let that land. “Prime killed his other son, Kasim. In a Panamanian prison. My father got the call, and it broke him. He was gone within minutes.”
Silence on the other end. I could picture Vivica processing, calculating, figuring out how this information could be useful to her.
“I need your help,” I continued. My voice came out steadier than I expected. “I want to destroy Prime. And I want to make Zainab suffer.”
“I want her to suffer to. Zainab is in California on house arrest. She’s pregnant. She’s vulnerable. And I tipped off the police about her identity and her sister’s death.”
“What do we do?” I ask.
“You get her bail revoked. Send her back to jail. Make her give birth behind bars like the criminal she is.” I gripped the phone tighter as I listened to this diabolical plan.
“And Prime will watch it happen. He will know that everything he loves can be taken away, just like he took everything from you.”
“Tell me how,” I spoke.
“Go to Los Angeles. I can’t go out there because of work. Just get out there first. I’ll get her address. They had to submit it to the courts. So you’ll keep an eye on the comings and goings. But don’t check into a hotel. I’ll arrange accommodations.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” Her voice hardened. “This is a partnership, not a charity. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“Good. I’ll send you the details.”
The line went dead.
I sat there in the darkness, phone still pressed to my ear, my father’s blood still on my hands.
He wanted me to make Prime pay.
And I was going to.
With his mother’s help.
How poetic.