Chapter 30
Max
One hour.
Jayden is one hour late.
I checked my phone again to make sure there weren’t any calls or texts I may have missed, but there still weren’t any from him.
“What’s wrong?” Tony asked. I glanced up from my phone to see him lean his shoulder against the wall beside me. “Kid flaked on you?”
“Jayden isn’t flaky,” I replied. “He’s always here on time. This isn’t like him.”
“Well, it is Thanksgiving week. Maybe he’s traveling and forgot to tell you.”
“I doubt that.”
Last week, we talked about the adjustments we needed to make to our schedule due to the holiday.
I offered to cut down some of the hours so he didn’t have to juggle training with work, but he declined.
He insisted he could come - that he wanted to stay consistent.
His progress has been on the uphill rise, and I think he’s finally noticing.
With the end of every week, he’s been less concerned about getting the money in his hand and more on hitting the goals we’d set.
He was starting to want to be here. If he had to miss a session, then he would’ve said something.
“Have you tried calling him?”
“Yeah, after the first ten minutes I spent waiting. He didn’t answer. I sent a text too, but I haven’t gotten a response to that either.” Jayden may be a pain in my ass, but his silence was worrying me.
“Maybe he got caught up with something. Life happens.”
I scoffed. “Let me have been an hour late without notice - life happening or not - and my ass would’ve been grass by now.”
Tony chuckled. “Well, if you wanna go track his ass down and grip him up, you’d better go ahead and do it now. It’s getting late.”
“You don’t need help closing tonight?”
“Nah, I’ll bribe some of the rookies into doing it.” He patted my shoulder. “Go check on your brother. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Nodding, I bid him goodbye and headed to the office to grab my stuff.
I drove down to Jayden’s house. As I rolled down the street, I noticed the black car I’d assigned my men to use for surveilling his apartment building was still parked a few feet down the road.
I couldn’t make out the figures through the tinted windows, but since I hadn’t received any calls, I assumed they were still there.
I walked up to the fifth floor and rapped my knuckles against the wood of his apartment door.
A few moments passed before I heard the clicks of locks.
The door flew open and a woman appeared in the doorway.
Her dark brown skin and mane of curls reminded me of my mother.
But she didn’t carry the same sharpness in her eyes.
Hers were softer, gentler, and wearier. They widened as they raked over my face.
The door started to swing towards me, and I pressed my hand against it to stop it from closing.
“Wait, wait,” I told her. “I’m Max; Rafael’s other son.”
Her brows stitched together. Again, her eyes raked up and down my face. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she murmured. “I thought I was seeing a ghost.”
I almost smiled. “The man isn’t dead yet.”
“To me he is.” For a moment, her soft tone shifted, hardening with every word. It quickly reverted back to its normal state as she spoke again. “What brings you here?”
“I’m looking for Jayden.”
The crease between her brows deepened as her head tilted in confusion.
“He’s been training with me at the MMA gym. He didn’t tell you?”
She hid the disappointment in her eyes with a small smile. “No. You know once boys hit eighteen, they think they’re grown. He only tells me what he thinks I need to know.” She opened the door wider. “You’re welcome to wait for him inside. He should be home soon.”
Accepting her invitation, I stepped through the doorway.
Inside, the brown carpet paired well with the golden and chestnut walls.
As I followed Jayden’s mother into the kitchen, we passed a wall showcasing nearly every year of Jayden’s life - from his baby photos all the way up to his senior portraits.
“Where’d he go?” I asked as we entered the kitchen.
“I sent him down to the clinic,” she replied. She motioned to the table. “Please sit. Can I get you something to drink? Or something to eat? There’s some spaghetti in the refrigerator.”
“No thank you, Ms…”
“Janelle,” she said. “My name is Janelle. Sorry I didn’t introduce myself properly. I’m still wrapping my brain around…” She waved her hands around my figure. “With Jayden, I can see some differences, but you…” She shook her head. “You look just like him.”
“Yeah. My mother always says her genes didn’t even put up a fight. And if they did, then they must’ve gotten their ass kicked pretty damn hard.”
A genuine smile graced her face as she joined me at the table. “Your mother was always a beautiful woman. It’s a bit of a shame you didn’t get something from her.”
“Oh trust me, I’ve got a few things. You just can’t see ‘em.” I cocked my head. “You knew her?”
“From afar.” She clasped her hands together as her smile began to fall. “You probably don’t remember, but I…I used to work for your father…in the casinos.”
“Oh.” I scanned her face again, trying to jog any memory of it.
When I was young, my parents didn’t bring me around the casinos unless they had to.
Moments like that were rare and short. They towed me so fast through the building and into the office that I barely had time to look at anything but all the flashing lights.
The waitresses brought me chicken strips and a Shirley Temple for dinner a few times.
Janelle could’ve been one of them, but I hadn’t paid enough attention back then to tell.
Even when I saw her through the window at my father’s house, I didn’t pay much mind to her face.
Only the full image of what I thought was happening. She’d always been a stranger to me.
“Yeah.” She wrung her fingers. “I’m sorry I…I never meant to-”
“Why’d you send Jayden to the clinic? Is he alright?” I asked, cutting off her apology. It wasn’t really mine to hear or accept. Besides, I didn’t come here for that.
“He got into a scuffle with some of the other neighborhood boys on his way home from work yesterday. He tried to downplay it, but judging from his wounds, they beat him down pretty bad. I wanted to go to the police, but you know he wasn’t hearing that.
The best compromise he could make was he’d go down to the clinic to get checked out after his errands today. ”
I raised a brow. “Did he say which boys were involved?”
She shook her head. “He never does. Honestly, I was just happy he wasn’t trying to go at them again. Talking him down used to be hard.”
“And his wounds? How bad were they?”
As Janelle opened her mouth, the lock of the front door clicked. “I guess you’ll see for yourself.”
“Ma?” Jayden’s voice echoed through the hall as the hinges creaked open.
“In here, baby,” Janelle called back.
His footsteps padded against the hardwood floor towards the kitchen.
“Nothing’s broken,” he said. “They gave me a higher dose of ibuprofen for the pain. They said the swelling should go down in-” Jayden stopped talking as he appeared in the doorway and his eyes fell on me.
“Max?” His eyes flicked between me and his mother. “What…what are you doing here?”
I gritted my teeth at the sight of the purple bruising around his left eye and the gash on his lip. “You missed our session today,” I replied, my voice tight. “I came to check on you.”
“Well, I’m fine so you can go now.”
“Jayden,” Janelle hissed. “Don’t be rude.”
“I don’t want him here, ma.”
“That’s too damn bad,” I told him. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what happened to your face.”
“I’m not telling you shit.”
I scoffed. “You better watch it before I black your other eye.”
Jayden opened his arms. “So, do it then!”
Janelle hopped up from her seat and rushed in front of her son.
More than a head shorter than him, she effortlessly pushed his arms back to his sides and pinned them there.
Her tone was firm as she whispered to him.
“You are allowed to be angry, but you’re not allowed to take it out on others.
He came here with good intentions. Don’t let your attitude screw that up.
” Releasing him, she added, “Now, go sit down and talk to him like you’ve got some sense. ”
Jayden frowned, but did as he was told. He took his mother’s seat at the adjacent side of the table. Crossing his arms, he threw his back against the chair and avoided my gaze.
“I’ll be down the hall if you boys need anything,” she told us.
“Thank you, Ms. Janelle,” I told her.
She gave me a smile. “No, thank you, Max.”
As she exited the room, I turned my attention back to Jayden. “Fix your face and look at me,” I demanded. “Now.”
Jayden reluctantly raised his gaze, now glaring at me.
“How bad are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
He sighed. “Black eye, busted lip, and a few bruised ribs. Nothing to worry about.”
“Where’d it happen?”
“On my walk home from work yesterday. I was zoned out, listening to music, when somebody came at me from behind. I tried to fight back, but…” His gaze lowered. “There were just too many of them.”
“Who did it?”
“I don’t know. It was dark, so I couldn’t really see.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. Who the fuck did it?”
He held his arms tighter against his chest, still hesitant to tell me. “It was those guys from the courtyard: Clyde and his boys. When they were done beating the shit out of me, he pushed my face against the concrete and put a gun to the back of my head.”
He paused, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed hard.
“I heard him pull back the security latch. For a second, I thought he was going to kill me. I thought I was gonna die. But, he…he didn’t pull the trigger.
He told me to remember whose leash I’m on, and he hit me one last time - hard - like he was trying to knock me out. ”