Chapter 21 Mega
Mega
“How long are you going to be here?” Camille asked, rubbing her belly while she sat across from me on her new plush sofa.
She had just moved into this condo in Bethesda with her friend Lyric.
They had a nice lil setup out here but I couldn’t stay long.
Camille and I were fam but we weren’t super close.
She was the only lawyer in the family though and she’d helped me out of a bind before, so when I needed a couch and no questions, she was the call.
“Just until my connect comes through with a new spot. A week or so.” I leaned back on the couch and looked at her. “Quest know we cousins?”
“Not to my knowledge. I’ve never had a reason to mention you. Besides, Quest always kept me at arm’s length even when we were together. What did you do to him and why are you on the run? You kill somebody he loves? Did you hurt Serenity?”
“Nah. Hell no. I would never do something like that,” I lied.
As much as I wanted to lean on my cousin, I couldn’t fully trust her.
There was something about the Banks family that made people cave.
Made them loyal in ways that overrode blood.
Camille had been Quest’s girl for three years.
That kind of history leaves residue no matter how bad the breakup was.
“Uh huh.” She wasn’t convinced but she wasn’t pressing either. “Don’t bring no shit to my door, Mega. I’m eight months pregnant and I have to prepare for this baby.”
“Is that your baby daddy?” I asked, nodding toward the hallway where Lyric had just walked through the front door with shopping bags on both arms.
Camille rolled her eyes without dignifying it with a response. Lyric had been out of town since I moved in last week and this was the first time I’d be seeing her.
“Who is this?” Lyric asked, looking at me like I was a stain on the new furniture.
“You ain’t tell her I was staying here?” I shot back at Camille.
“This is my cousin Mega,” Camille announced.
“Wsup,” I said. Damn she looked good. Camille ain’t know what to do with all that. I never understood that whole situation but it wasn’t my business.
“Mega… Mega?” Lyric shifted her eyes to the ceiling like she was searching for something. Then they came back down sharp. “Wait a minute. Isn’t Quest’s sister Serenity dating someone named Mega? Are you that Mega?”
“Yeah.” I rolled my eyes.
“Listen, Lyric. Do not tell Quest that he’s staying here. Please,” Camille said.
“I won’t. Fuck him,” Lyric said as she walked toward the back with her bags. “Anyways, I’m moving to Atlanta this weekend. I found a place,” she called out from around the corner.
I watched Camille’s shoulders drop about three inches when she heard that. Whatever was going on between them, Camille was relieved that Lyric wouldn’t be around much longer. Less people, less risk. I understood that math.
“Can you trust her?” I asked.
“With my life.”
“Aight well I’m gonna head out. I got an errand to run.”
“Don’t get your ass killed.”
“Of course not.”
I grabbed my keys and walked out into the Bethesda air and sat in the car Camille had let me borrow, a Toyota that nobody would look twice at.
My phone had seven missed calls from Serenity over the last few days.
Seven voicemails I’d listened to but hadn’t responded to.
Each one softer than the last. Each one saying she missed me and wanted to talk and could I please just call her back.
I didn’t trust it.
This woman ghosted me for an entire month.
Didn’t answer a single call, didn’t respond to a single text, just vanished while her brothers were dismantling everything I’d built.
And now suddenly she wanted to see me? After her brother Quest had personally kicked down doors looking for me?
After Bryce had been snatched and was probably singing like a canary in somebody’s basement?
Nah. Serenity didn’t just wake up missing me. Her brothers put her up to this. They wanted her to lure me out and I wasn’t falling for it. Not directly anyway.
But I still needed her. She was my lifeline back into the Banks family whether she knew it or not. And more than that, she was mine. I didn’t care how long she’d been gone or what her brothers had filled her head with during that month of silence. We had something and I wasn’t done with it.
I just wasn’t gonna walk into a trap to get it back.
That’s where Dante came in. Vivica told me to go see him and Dante turned out to be exactly what I expected.
He was a weak man, that even in divorce did whatever his ex-wife told him to do.
He gave me a new burner and some extra cash.
And would help give me any intel on the Banks family that he could.
He worked for a rival liquor company and lived in a split-level in Bowie, Maryland with manicured hedges and a two-car garage and the energy of a man who’d spent his whole life being told what to do by women stronger than him.
“Call your daughter,” I told him. “Tell her you want to see her. Tell her you miss her and you want to reconnect. Tell her whatever you gotta tell her to get her through your front door.”
“She hasn’t spoken to me in months.” Dante said. “She’s not going to just show up because I call.”
“She will if you sound sincere enough. You owe her that much anyway.”
He looked at me with those tired eyes and I could see him calculating whether this was worth the risk.
Whether his daughter’s safety mattered more than Vivica’s orders.
In the end, Vivica won. She always did. Dante picked up the phone and called Serenity and told her he’d been thinking about her and he wanted to sit down and talk and maybe start mending what had been broken between them.
His voice shook a little but it worked because the vulnerability made it sound real.
She said she’d come. Tomorrow afternoon.
I drove to Dante’s house the next day and told him to leave. Told him to go run errands, go to the store, go sit in a parking lot for two hours, I didn’t care. Just don’t be here when she arrives. He left without arguing because that’s what Dante did. He left rooms when stronger people told him to.
I sat in the living room with the lights low and waited. The house was still and warm. He’d done decently after the divorce. I suppose his job made good money.
I’d done a line in the car before I came in because I needed to be sharp. The coke was barely doing its job anymore but it was better than nothing.
I heard the car pull up around 2:30. The engine cut off. A door opened and closed. Footsteps on the walkway, then up the front steps. The door opened because I’d left it unlocked.
“Daddy?” Serenity’s voice echoed through the foyer. Soft, cautious, hopeful. “Daddy, you here?”
I stepped out from the hallway into the living room.
She saw me and every drop of color left her face. Her hand was still on the doorknob and her body locked up and I could see the exact moment her brain caught up to what her eyes were showing her. The hope on her face collapsed into something cold and terrified and she spun toward the door.
I was faster. I crossed the room in three steps and slammed the door shut with one hand over her shoulder and grabbed her by the throat with the other and pushed her back against the wall. Not hard enough to hurt her. Just hard enough to keep her still.
“You ain’t even gonna say hi?” I said.
“Let go of me.” Her voice was shaking but her eyes were sharp. Sharper than I remembered. Something had changed in her while she was gone. She looked clearer. Healthier. Like somebody had washed the fog off of her and what was underneath was stronger than what I’d left behind.
“You ghosted me, Serenity. A whole month. No call, no text, no nothing. Your brothers dragged you off somewhere and you just let them? You didn’t fight for us?”
“There is no us.” She tried to pull my hand off her throat but I tightened my grip. Not choking her. Just holding. “Let me go, Mega.”
“You been calling me all week. Leaving voicemails talking about you miss me and want to talk. So talk.”
Her eyes flickered. I caught it. That split second of panic that told me the voicemails weren’t real. Weren’t hers. Her brothers had put her up to it and she’d made those calls with somebody standing over her shoulder coaching her on what to say. I was right. It was a setup.
But I didn’t care. Because she was here now. And having her in front of me with my hand on her throat felt like the first thing that had gone right in weeks.
“I’m gonna let you go,” I said. “And you’re not gonna run. Because if you run, I’m gonna catch you. And I won’t be as gentle the second time.”
I released her throat and she pressed herself flat against the wall and rubbed her neck where my fingers had been. Her eyes were wet but she wasn’t crying. She was fighting the tears back with everything she had.
”I just wanna talk,” I said. I walked to the dining room table where I’d laid out a small mirror and a baggie. “Come sit with me. Like old times.”
“I’m clean, Mega. I’ve been clean for over a month. Please don’t do this.”
“One line. For old times. Just one. To celebrate being back together.”
“We’re not back together. And I’m not doing that shit anymore. I went to rehab and I’m better now. I’m different.”
“You look different.” I poured a line onto the mirror and cut it with a card. “You look good. Healthy. Put some weight on. I always liked you thicker.” I held the rolled bill out toward her. “Come on, baby. One line ain’t gonna undo all that work. One line is just a line.”
“No.” Her voice cracked on the word. “Please, Mega. No.”
I walked over to her and grabbed her arm and pulled her to the table. She fought me but she was small and I was bigger and the math was simple. I pushed her down into the chair and held the back of her head and brought her face to the mirror.
“Do it,” I said. “And then we’re leaving. Together. The way it should’ve been this whole time.”
She was crying now. Full, silent tears running down her face and dripping onto the table. Her whole body was trembling and she was shaking her head no but I held her steady and pressed the bill into her hand and closed her fingers around it.
“Serenity. Do it.”
She snorted the line. Her body jerked like she’d been electrocuted and she sat up gasping and wiped her nose with the back of her hand and the sound that came out of her mouth was something between a sob and a scream that she swallowed before it could finish.
Her eyes went wide and glassy and I could see the drug hitting her system, flooding back into the spaces she’d spent thirty days clearing out.
“See?” I said. “That ain’t so bad. You remember now, right? You remember how good that feels?”
She didn’t answer. She just sat in that chair with her hands in her lap and tears on her face and stared at the mirror with the residue still on it and I watched something die behind her eyes.
Something she’d been building in rehab, whatever hope or strength or clarity she’d found in those thirty days, I watched it crack and start to crumble.
Good. I needed her dependent. I needed her needing me. That’s how this worked. That’s how it always worked.
“Let’s go,” I said. “We’re getting out of town. Me and you. Like we used to talk about.”
“Where?”
“I got a spot. Somewhere nobody can find us. Somewhere your brothers can’t reach.”
She stood up slow. Her legs were unsteady and her eyes were somewhere far away and she followed me to the door because the drug was already doing what it always did. Making the world soft enough to stop fighting.
I grabbed the baggie off the table, pocketed it, and led her out to the car.
I grabbed her purse from her and threw her phone in one of the bushes underneath a window.
She got in the passenger seat without being told and buckled her seatbelt and stared straight ahead at nothing.
I started the engine and pulled out of Dante’s driveway and headed south.
I had her back. That’s all that mattered. The Banks brothers could search every house in DC and they wouldn’t find her because Serenity wasn’t in DC anymore. She was with me. Where she belonged.
I glanced at her in the passenger seat. Her arms were folded over her stomach as she cried hard. I figured the coke had her emotional. It did that sometimes. Made you feel everything at once before it made you feel nothing at all.
I turned up the music and kept driving.