Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Finding out that Amir thought I was going to make Kain weak, and ultimately easier to kill, kept me up that night.
Kain couldn’t afford to be anything less than strong in the world he lived in.
I’m weak.
This was something I already knew. It was inconvenient, but I’d come to accept it as a facet of my personality. It would be nice to have a hard shell exterior, but not everyone is so blessed.
But now my weakness wasn’t just a me problem. It was an us problem. Was my own weakness going to rub off on him? Was that even possible?
Yes. Yes, it was.
Kain slept beside me as I sat up, awake, recalling everything he’d ever done for me. Starting with the promise he made me the first night we met.
That was a moment of weakness.
I remembered the frantic phone call we had when he discovered Silas Montgomery put out a bounty for me.
Kain could have looked the other way, cut his losses, and moved on. But he called his friends and they set up a network of round-the-clock protection. His friends only did it because he asked them to. And he asked because…
That was a moment of weakness.
The weekends leading up to the Summer. Every flight he took to and from Tallahassee.
Those were moments of weakness.
That time Dad tried to punch him, and Kain walked away from the fight, even though he could have destroyed my father.
That was a moment of thoughtfulness. But in his world, it was weakness.
And then after I was grounded, Kain consistently picked up the phone. He stayed up late nearly every day, even though he had every intention of waking up at five o’clock the next morning. He lost sleep every night for three weeks to talk to me.
Those were all moments of weakness.
And finally, last night. As Kain told me everything, pouring out his inner most feelings and allowing me to truly see him.
That was the weakest he’d ever been in his life.
He didn’t have to say it for me to know that.
It was two o’clock in the morning. It had been four hours since Kain had fallen asleep, and he had not stirred or woken up once in the middle of it. For the second night in a row, he’d slept through an entire four-hour block. And it was looking like he would go on longer.
My smile was sad as I looked down at his sleeping frame. He looked so harmless to me this way, so peaceful. It warmed my heart to see him with all his defenses down like this.
But the thought of anyone else ever seeing him this way scared me to death.
If we were going to work, if I wanted to make sure he was always on his A-game, I needed to get stronger. I needed to stop being so scared. I had to stop allowing him to come down to my level, and work harder so that I could achieve his.
I was done letting Kain be weak for me.
I was going to be strong for him.
***
We were in Orlando.
Four hours from the Miami city line, a large enough distance from the epicenter of turmoil for us to actually be together in broad daylight.
I think Kain just wanted to get far away from home today.
It was Monday and Vance was set to officially be discharged from the Miami Federal Detention Center at three o’clock this afternoon.
So now we were at The Florida Mall, smack dab in the middle of Central Florida, bickering like an old married couple.
“I just think you need more color in your wardrobe,” I said to him, as I snatched up a chartreuse green polo shirt.
With it being the summertime, the Men’s Department in Macy’s was a rainbow of color just waiting to be rocked.
Kain looked at the vibrant shirt with genuine interest in his eyes, motioning for me to hand it over. As soon as it was in his hands, he cut the act and put it back.
“We’re here for you,” Kain reminded, patience wearing thin. “I’ve got clothes.”
On day two of my week with Kain, I learned that he does not like shopping for clothes. Grocery shopping, he enjoys. Shopping for clothes made him testy, though.
I was all covered. Bags from H&M and EXPRESS adorned along my arms, with Kain carrying what I couldn’t. The walk through the Macy’s Department Store was simply scenery along our journey back to the car.
He was so ready to go.
A long trip back was ahead of us, and at the rate traffic was going, we’d be arriving home at seven o’clock in the evening.
Home.
It just sort of happened to feel like that to me, too.
Five minutes after getting on the interstate, I decided to make conversation. Only this time, I wasn’t going to stick to easy topics. I’d decided to stop being such a crybaby about everything.
People die. Crime is unstoppable. Bad things happen.
The sooner I could get over these facts, the sooner I could be Kain’s support system as he tried to navigate his world.
To do that, I would need to come out of mine.
“Who is Laz? Why did Silas kill him? Who are Lyle and Rochelle?”
Kain offered no reaction to my random stream of questioning. His eyes remained on the road and for a second, I thought he was ignoring me. And then he spoke.
“You lasted a whole lot longer than I thought you would,” Kain said first. “You sat through that whole conversation at Poseidon, eyes the size of quarters.” He smiled faintly at the memory.
“I thought it would be the first thing you asked about as soon as you got the chance. But you were quiet the whole way home. You were quiet through lunch. And then when you finally spoke…” He shook his head. “…you asked me what my middle name is.”
“I’m working on developing strength. That means asking questions that I may not want the answers to. I don’t want to be weak anymore.”
He nodded.
“Lyle is Silas’ younger brother. Second born, out of five.”
Another uncle.
On day two of my week with Kain, I learned that Silas Montgomery has four younger brothers. I now knew the names of two—Vance, the youngest, and Lyle, the second oldest.
“Lyle has a wife. Her name’s Rochelle, but we all call her Ro.”
An aunt by marriage.
“Together they have Lorenzo, my cousin. We call him Laz.” Kain swallowed, correcting himself. “Called him Laz.”
“Were you close?”
“No,” Kain replied. “Not at all. Laz used to come by the house a lot when we were kids and every time he’d leave, always without fail, something in my room would be missing.”
He laughed at the memory. It was a melancholy sound.
“I didn’t care. Laz was three years younger, so the thought of beatin’ his ass over Gameboys and shoes was lame to me. Also… Laz was family. I wasn’t taught a lot of values growin’ up, but I was taught about the importance of family.” Kain sighed.
I did the math in my head. That would make Laz either seventeen or eighteen.
“Lyle and Ro were real regular folks. They lived real humble lives up in Memphis, and then one day Silas goes to his brother’s wife and says, ‘Come to Miami and work for me.’”
“His brother’s wife? Not his brother?” This was surprising. “To do what?”
“Turning young girls out,” Kain put it bluntly.
Now we were getting to the ugly.
“Rochelle is an OG when it comes to breaking down girls into the kind of women who jump at the opportunity to fuck for money. A world class bottom bitch. Do you know what that is?”
“A prostitute who keeps the other prostitutes in line.”
Kain shook his head. Not because I was wrong, but because he couldn’t believe I was right.
“Your Pops really gave you an A1 education,” he commented wryly. “So yeah… that was Rochelle. Except she doesn’t trick, she just makes them. Before you know it, Silas has got the entire little humble family pulled into his web.”
“Rochelle, turning out high class prostitutes like a factory. Lyle overseeing ten or twelve strip clubs that are really just brothels. And Laz…” Kain sighed. “Last month, after he turned eighteen, Laz got a job doin’ something very similar to what I do with Poseidon.”
“His club was Opium, the small spot down by Aventura.”
Of course I had no idea which club he was talking about. Clubbing wasn’t my scene.
“He was to pick up the prostitution revenue from all the strip clubs Lyle was running, on Sundays. Get the money washed the following Saturday by droppin’ it off at Opium. That was Laz’s only job.”
Wow, it really was a family affair.
“Prostitution money is not like drug money,” Kain informed. “When you give someone a kilo of anything, it comes with a market value. You know how much you get for how much you put in. It’s easy to catch thieves with drug money. With sex work money, numbers fluctuate.”
“Silas started to get real suspicious of Laz transportin’ all that money, and no way to confirm or deny if he was skimming any off the top.” Kain shook his head. “Remember, Laz already had a reputation for stealing.”
Oh my God, it was over money?
“So Silas, as a test, put five Gs into each of the strip clubs Laz was pickin’ up money from. That’s fifty grand in addition to actual revenue. If the numbers at Opium looked funny, it would tell Silas all he needed to know.”
“Wash day came, and when the money was gettin’ counted, Opium’s books said that week’s revenue was twenty-three grand.”
If I didn’t know that Silas had planted fifty thousand dollars, twenty-three thousand would have sounded like a successful week to me. Kain went on to tell me what the numbers should have looked like.
“As a rough estimate, I’m gonna go ahead and let you know that it should have been at least seventy-five without the fifty grand Silas planted. So basically, it was one hundred Gs missing in one weekend.”
“When people move money, they take some off the top all the time. It’s why everyone wants to do it.
Because who notices one or two Gs missing when the whole pot’s seventy-five, right?
But a hundred grand? That’s goddamn unforgivable.
” Kain shook his head. “But Laz was young and stupid. Nobody knew Silas was giving Laz this test except for me.”
“Why didn’t you warn him?”
Kain just looked at me, taking his eyes off the road for a moment. His eyebrows came together as if to ask, ‘Really?’
“That’s not something you do,” I realized.