Justice
“You good?” Prime asked as we sat across from each other at the E Street Diner.
I leaned back in the booth and let out something between a laugh and a sigh. “Nigga, I am beat. Came too close to death last night.”
Prime chuckled and sipped his coffee like we were two regular men grabbing a late meal instead of two brothers who had just wiped a cartel off the map.
The diner was nearly empty at this hour.
A waitress refilling salt shakers at the counter and a drunk couple arguing in the back booth.
Normal people doing normal things while we sat here with gun oil still under our fingernails and adrenaline slowly draining from our blood.
“It’s over now,” he said.
“Mostly.” I rubbed the back of my neck where the tension had been living for weeks. “Still gotta find Zeph.”
Prime nodded and set his mug down. “Quest will handle that. Trust me, our brother ain’t letting that slide. But we gotta get back to our lives. You need to go see your babies and I need to head upstate to get my family.”
I studied him for a second. It was wild to hear him talk like that.
To watch a man who had spent most of his adult life moving through the world alone, sleeping wherever the job required, answering to nobody and needing nobody, sit across from me and say the words my family with a softness in his eyes he couldn’t even hide.
Fatherhood had done something to Prime that nothing else could.
Not the money, not the kills, not the decade he spent underground building a reputation that made dangerous men nervous.
None of that changed him. But those twins did.
Zainab did. I could see the eagerness to get out of here in his body as he angled towards the door, ready to jump at a moment's notice.
I understood that pull because I felt it every time Dream called me Daddy in that little voice that made the whole world shrink down to just me and her. My daughters were my center.
But I was also grateful for this break from them. As terrible as that sounded, the truth was that navigating a war had been easier than navigating the emotional minefield of raising a fourteen-year-old girl. Soldiers were predictable. Storie was not.
Something was shifting in my oldest daughter and I could feel it even from a distance.
Through FaceTime calls where her eyes were flat and her reactions were just slightly off from where they should have been.
She said the right words but they landed wrong, like someone had taught her the script without explaining the emotion behind it.
I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly, but my gut had been whispering about it for months.
I’d just been too busy with the war to listen.
That was about to change. I owed my girls my full attention and they were about to get it.
“You know Monica would’ve wanted you to be happy, right?
” Prime said, catching me off guard. He was looking at me with that older brother directness that he usually saved for conversations about business or strategy.
“I get y’all had y’all problems in the past, but she wouldn’t want you to keep punishing yourself. ”
All I could do was shrug. I appreciated what he was trying to do but he was knocking on a door I had sealed shut a long time ago.
Monica and I had our ups and downs. We went through things that would’ve destroyed most marriages and some of those things were my fault.
When she died, I made a promise to spend the rest of my life making it up to her through our girls.
I had failed her as a husband and I wasn’t going to fail her as a father.
Every decision I made was for Storie and Dream.
They were my redemption and my penance wrapped into two little people who looked just like the woman I lost.
“I hear you,” I said, because I did hear him. I just wasn’t ready to do anything with it.
Prime gave me a look that said he knew I was deflecting, but he let it go.
He’d planted the seed and that was enough for now.
We sat in a comfortable silence for a minute, two brothers decompressing from a night that would have given most men nightmares for the rest of their lives.
My phone buzzed on the table between us.
It was Serenity. I felt bad about how I hadn’t been physically there with everything she had going on. But I knew my boy Xander was going to get her right.
I picked up on the second ring. “What’s good, sis?”
“Justice.” Her voice was tight in a way that made me sit up straighter. She wasn’t crying but she was close. “Something happened with Grandma last night.”
My chest tightened. “What do you mean something happened?”
“She got up, got fully dressed, shoes and purse and everything, talking about she needed to get down to the club before Rosalee messed up the count. She called me Everly, Justice. And then she asked me where her gun was.”
I closed my eyes and pressed two fingers against my temple.
The exhaustion from the raid was already deep in my bones, but this was a different weight settling on top of it.
Rita was the foundation of our entire family.
She had been sharp, present and commanding for eighty-five years.
The thought of her standing in an apartment calling her granddaughter by a stranger’s name and asking for a revolver made something twist inside my chest that I couldn’t push down.
“When she snapped out of it, she looked so confused,” Serenity continued. Her voice cracked on the last word. “She went to her room and laid down with her shoes still on. I don’t know what’s going on but I’m scared, Justice. I think we need to get her looked at.”
“You did the right thing calling me. Keep your eye on her. I’m coming up there.”
“Today?”
“First flight out.” I glanced at Prime, who had been watching my face throughout the entire call. He could read the situation without hearing a word of it. “I’ll be there by night. I’ll fill everybody in once I’ve seen her myself.”
“Okay.” She exhaled and I could hear the relief in it. “Thank you.”
“That’s what I’m here for. Lock up, keep the security on, and try to get some sleep. I’m on my way.”
I hung up and stared at the phone for a second before sliding it into my pocket.
“Rita?” Prime asked. One word but it carried everything.
“Yeah. Serenity says she had some kind of episode. Got confused, didn’t know where she was, called Serenity by a different name. I need to get up to Hartford and see what’s going on.”
Prime’s expression shifted into something heavy and still. Rita had raised him when Vivica couldn’t be bothered. She was the closest thing to a real mother he’d ever had and I could see the worry land on his face even though he was trying to keep it together.
“You need me to come with you?” he asked.
“Nah. Go get your family. I’ll handle this and keep you posted.” I dropped a twenty on the table and stood up. My body ached from the raid and my mind was already racing through flight times.
“We just finished one war, man. I’m praying this ain’t the start of something we can’t fight.”
Prime didn’t respond to that. He didn’t need to. We both knew there were battles that bullets couldn’t win, and if Rita’s mind was starting to go, this was going to hurt worse than anything the Rios family could’ve ever done to us.
I walked out of the diner into the cold morning air and pulled up the airline app on my phone. There was a six-fifteen flight to Hartford out of Reagan. I booked it before I even reached my car.