Chapter 21 Serenity
SERENITY
This is exactly why I’ve distanced myself from my family. Mehar has some nerve talking about my boyfriend being controlling, when that’s my entire family, and now her too. My brothers have always had their heads too far in my business. And the crazy thing is, they don’t know me that well.
Our mother sent me away to boarding school when I was just thirteen.
The next five years were some of the toughest in my life.
My brothers think that I’m just a weak little girl, but if they knew the things I’ve seen, the things I’ve been through, and the things I’ve done, they wouldn’t be looking at me that way.
I sat in my car outside Founding Farmers, breathing deeply before starting the engine, and pulled out my phone to scroll my socials for a minute.
For whatever reason, I still hadn’t blocked Julius and Ivy from my Facebook profile.
I barely used it anyway. But there they were in my feed, holding their infant.
A healthy baby boy with Julius’s eyes and Ivy’s dimples. The baby that should’ve been mine.
After everything I’d done for them, they betrayed me in the worst way. Julius must’ve forgotten that I held some of his darkest secrets. But I hadn’t. And when the time was right, I would exact my revenge. I wanted him to get so comfortable that he wouldn’t see what hit him.
I closed the app and pulled onto the road toward home.
Home was a McMansion uptown that Mega had been renting since before we got together.
Five bedrooms, a finished basement, a three-car garage, and a backyard with a hot tub he barely used.
It was flashy and had a big TV mounted over the fireplace, designer furniture that didn’t quite match, a kitchen with all the upgrades and nothing in the fridge.
But I’d made it feel like a home with candles, throw pillows, and those small touches that softened the edges of a house built on dirty money.
When I turned onto our street, I saw the motorcycles. Three of them, lined up in the driveway. There were two Kawasakis and a Yamaha, all dark colored with custom work. I recognized them because they’d been showing up more frequently over the past couple of months.
Since I’d taken over as BCC’s accountant, I’d had a front-row seat to every financial decision Mega made.
And recently, he’d been bringing in these young kids from Baltimore—a small crew called the Black Vipers who rode together and moved as a unit.
They were young, hungry, and loyal in the way that only broke people with no other options can be.
Mega hired them as muscle, though I didn’t know the specifics of what he had them doing.
What I did know was that I’d been cutting their checks and washing the payments through a series of shell accounts that made the money look like construction consulting fees.
The BCC had been struggling since Rashid’s death.
That was the truth nobody wanted to say out loud.
Rashid had been the connect, the brain, the one who made suppliers trust the operation enough to front product and extend credit.
Mega had ambition but he didn’t have Rashid’s reputation.
Plugs didn’t return his calls the way they used to return Rashid’s.
Shipments were inconsistent. Revenue was down.
And Mega was spending more than he was bringing in, which I could see clear as day in the books but couldn’t say to his face without starting a war.
I loved him though. I did. When he was sober and present, Mega was charming and attentive and made me feel like I was the center of his universe.
He was fine too—tall, dark, with a jaw that could cut glass and arms that made me feel small in a way I liked.
When things were good between us, they were really good.
Miami was proof of that. The way he’d surprised me with the trip, the way he’d held my hand on the beach, the way he’d looked at me over dinner like I was the only woman in the world.
But when he got high, something behind his eyes changed.
The warmth would drain out, and something colder would take its place, something mean and paranoid and looking for a reason to be angry.
I’d learned to read the shift the way you learn to read weather.
Clear skies could turn dark in seconds and all it took was one wrong word, one wrong look, one wrong breath.
I parked behind the motorcycles and checked my face in the mirror. Eyes still a little red from crying at the restaurant. I fixed my makeup, took a breath, and went inside.
The living room was full of smoke and bass-heavy music.
Mega was on the couch with three young guys I’d seen a few times before.
They were all lean and young, early twenties at the oldest, wearing dark hoodies and jeans.
I noticed the tattoos immediately. They were of vipers inked on their hands, their wrists, the sides of their necks.
Coiled and detailed, each one slightly different but unmistakably the same symbol. Their thing.
Mega looked up when I walked in. He was shirtless, chain hanging, a blunt between his fingers and his jaw set in that way that told me he’d been doing more than smoking.
I could see the residue on the coffee table.
There were lines of white powder cut into neat rows next to a rolled-up bill. He was high. The mean kind of high.
“Hey baby,” I said, walking over to kiss him. I kept it light and quick because I could already feel the temperature in the room, and it wasn’t warm. “I didn’t know you had company.”
“Yeah,” he said, not returning the kiss. Just watching me. “We was handling business.”
I turned to the guys on the couch and offered a polite smile. “Hey y’all.”
One of them nodded. Another lifted his chin. The third gave a small wave and a half-smile that seemed genuine.
I didn’t make it two steps toward the kitchen.
The crash behind me was so sudden and so loud that I flinched before I even turned around.
Mega had kicked the coffee table over. The coke scattered across the hardwood, the rolled-up bill flew somewhere under the couch, and the ashtray shattered against the floor, sending ash and glass in every direction.
“The fuck was that?” Mega was on his feet now, eyes locked on me, nostrils flared. His voice was low, but the room had gone completely silent and everyone could hear every syllable.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I saw you. I saw the way you looked at him.” He pointed toward the youngest one on the couch, the one who’d given me the half-smile. “You were eye-fuckin’ Bryce. Right in front of me. In my house. I saw yo hoe-ass.”
“Mega, I said hi. That’s it. I was being polite.”
“Polite?” He closed the distance between us in three steps and his hand was around my throat before I could back away. “You were eye-fuckin’ that nigga right in front of me, Serenity. Bitch, you think I’m stupid? You think I can’t see what you’re doing?”
“I wasn’t doing anything,” I said, and my voice came out thin and strained because his hand was tightening. “Baby, I swear. I was just saying hi.”
“You want a new nigga? Huh? Want one of these young niggas?” He was close enough that I could smell the liquor and the weed on his breath.
All of that mixed with coke was violent combination.
“They broke, Serenity. They can’t afford you.
Can’t take you to Miami. Can’t buy you shit.
You wanna suck his dick? You wanna suck lil Bryce’s dick? ”
“Mega, stop—”
He threw me to the floor in front of the couch where Bryce was sitting. My knees cracked against the hardwood and my hands barely caught me before my face hit the ground. Mega grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked my head up so I was eye level with Bryce’s lap.
“Go ahead then. Suck his dick. Since you want him so bad. Go ahead, Serenity. Show me what you were thinking about when you walked in here looking at him.”
Bryce’s jaw tightened. He looked at Mega, then at me on my knees with tears running down my face and my hair twisted in Mega’s fist, and something shifted in his expression.
“Yo, bro.” Bryce stood up from the couch. His voice was calm but firm and he was looking at Mega with an expression that was more tired than scared. “That’s your girl, man. Go ‘head with all that. She ain’t do nothin’.”
The other two guys were already standing, reading the room, understanding that this wasn’t something they needed to be present for.
Bryce looked at me for a second—just a second—and there was something in his eyes that looked like recognition.
Not of me specifically, but of the situation.
Like he’d seen this before, in another house, with another man’s hand around another woman’s neck.
“Yeah, aight,” Mega said to them, not taking his eyes off me. “Y’all get up out of here. I need to talk to my girl.”
Bryce and the other two walked out without another word. The front door closed behind them and I heard the motorcycles start up one by one, the engines growling and then fading as they pulled off the block.
Mega still had his hand on my throat.
“See?” he said, pushing me down. My knees hit the hardwood and the impact shot pain up through my thighs. “They don’t want you. Nobody does. Nobody will but me. You need to be grateful for me.”
The kick caught me in the ribs before I could brace for it. I folded sideways, gasping, and my cheek hit the floor next to the shattered ashtray. I could see the scattered lines of coke from where I was lying. There it was, white powder on dark wood, close enough to taste if I turned my head.
He stood over me for a few seconds. Breathing hard. Then he stepped over me like I was furniture and walked down the hallway toward the bedroom. The door slammed.
I lay on the floor for a long time. The hardwood was cold against my cheek and my ribs were throbbing and there was glass from the ashtray a few inches from my face. The music was still playing. It was some trap song with heavy bass that vibrated through the floor and into my bones.
I thought about calling Mehar. Then I remembered what I’d said to her and the look on her face when I said it and I couldn’t pick up the phone.
I thought about calling Quest. Then I imagined what he would do to Mega and what Mega would do in response and I couldn’t make that call either.
I thought about my mother. Then I stopped thinking.
At some point I fell asleep right there on the floor, curled up next to the broken glass and the scattered cocaine, with my hand pressed against my bruised ribs and my eyes swollen shut from crying.
When I woke up, the living room was clean. The glass was swept. The table was upright. The coke was gone. And sitting on the coffee table where the lines had been were three dozen red roses in a crystal vase and a small burgundy box.
It was a Cartier box.
I sat up slowly, wincing at the pain in my side, and stared at the box for a long time.
I could hear Mega in the kitchen, cooking.
The smell of bacon and eggs drifted down the hallway, and I could hear him humming—actually humming—like the night before hadn’t happened.
Like he hadn’t choked me and kicked me and left me on the floor.
I opened the box. Inside was a gold love bracelet with a small screwdriver to lock it onto my wrist. You couldn’t take it off without the tool. It meant you belonged to someone.
I put it on.