Irritated, I fling his body off me and shove to my feet, wiping my forearm over my eyes. I don’t trust Abena not to send anyone else up here to make sure the job was done. But, shit, the way I’m feeling, I hope she does. Then again, she’s so arrogant, she wouldn’t believe her two men couldn’t take me. It’s why she left instead of waiting to make sure I was really dead. Frowning, I stride to the door accessing the front of the warehouse, close and lock it, then set the alarm by setting my hand on the wall keypad.
Cleaning up bodies isn’t new to me; I don’t trust cleaners to come behind me like some of the families do. That’s more people who know my business. But I’m not used to doing it in my own home. And while I drag the bodies of the two men over my kitchen floor into the utility room, my annoyance grows. Quickly but meticulously, I strip them of their clothes and stuff them into a separate duffel bag to burn. Then each body goes into its bag for transportation to a pig farm outside the city. After returning to the kitchen, I mop and then scrub the floor and island and walls, ensuring no blood or brain matter or evidence of the two men—or even Abena and her second—can be located in my apartment.
Once that’s taken care of, I head to the bathroom to shower and take care of the cuts on my body. Staring in the fogged-upmirror at the various bandaged or superglued wounds, my mind flies to the woman who is at the root of all this shit. No, she didn’t put the wheels in motion, but it comes back to her. We have unfinished business.
I brush a fingertip over the slice directly above my pierced nipple, and a heated knot twists tight and deep in my stomach. For a moment, the pain of the knife and the pleasurable pulls of her mouth on my flesh sear my memory, my body.
My gaze drops to the red bruising on my wrist, and the lust hardens into something darker, something that I creep closer to like a naked, starved creature inching toward a nurturing fire. Something sticking, smothering that I want to backpedal away from on scraped palms and feet.
Chaining me to that bed tonight… Eshe took me back to a place I promised myself I’d never return to. Transformed me into a person I vowed never to be again.
A victim.
She’ll pay for that.
Her and her aunt.
Starting tonight.
CHAPTER FIVEEshe
“Bitch. What part of ‘you’re supposed to be dead because Abena put a hit out on you’ didn’t you understand?” Tera growls in my ear through the mic in my helmet. I grin, steering my ’Busa down Atlantic Avenue.
She’s one of the kapteni under me—one of my Seven. It’s not her rank that allows her to talk to me like that though. Someone else could try it and find their tongue stapled to their chest like money on their birthday. It’s sacrifice, commitment, blood, loyalty, love—that’s the shit that binds us tighter than soldier and kapten. Closer than kapten and olori.
We’re sisters.
Tera, Penn, Tyeesha, Nef, Kenya, Maura, Sienna, and I have been friends since we were in the third grade, stalking and fucking up Marcus Brown for shoving Sienna’s younger sister at recess and then flipping her uniform skirt so his little pervert-in-training friends could get a look at her drawers. I saw the shit, and apparently so had my girls—who weren’t my girls at the time. Sienna, slender and tiny even for a nine-year-old, had picked up a stick damn near bigger than her and slammed it into the back of Marcus’s head. When his boys tried to jump in—even more reason they were pieces of shit—they fucked around and found out when the rest of us left them bleeding and leaking on that playground. We’ve all been besties since.
And fuck yeah, I saidbesties. Even killers need homegirls.
“Umm, the ‘you’re supposed to be dead’ part?” I snicker.
Abena and I are similar like that. Both of us are ruthless and merciless as fuck. It’s the why where we differ. And the where and the why sum up the reasons I won’t sleep one night in the compound where my mother raised me. Yeah, I love my Mwuaji family, but I don’t put shit past a muthafucka. My mama raised a sociopath, not a fool. If Abena ordered them and the money was right, they’d come for my neck.
Wearecriminals, after all.
“So what in the fuck made you think it was a good idea to prance your li’l ass down State Street like you’re on a fucking float in the Juneteenth parade? I swear, Eshe, sometimes I think we should just go ’head and get a check for you. At least then the trouble you cause would literally be worth it.”
“Listen, I know you don’t get it, but there’s a method to my madness,” I assure her, weaving in and out of traffic as I near the Boston Waterfront. Not much beats the rush of flying down a road, my motorcycle humming between my legs and nothing but wind caging me. It’s pure freedom.
“‘Madness’ being the key word here,” Tera mutters. “But please, enlighten me.”
“By hiring the Huntsman and putting a hit out on me, she fucked up and violated the cardinal law we have as a family. Even she isn’t above it, and even God couldn’t save her bitch ass if anyone found out. We both know there’s only one punishment for that crime—death. So, in a way, I got that ho’s life in my hands since me, her, the Huntsman, and probably Ekon’s follow-the-leader ass are the only ones who know about the dirty shit she up to.”
There ain’t shit she does that Ekon—or Mirror, as everyone calls him—doesn’t know about or doesn’t have a hand in carrying out.Mirrorbecause he reflects every thought, idea, or action of Abena’s.
“Uh-huh. I already know all this shit since I’m the one who passed along the info about her meeting with the Huntsman to you.” In another era or lifetime, Tera would’ve made a stellar spymaster. She possesses a network of spies in the compoundthat makes the CIA look like pussy amateurs playing at G.I. Joe. Her information never fails, is never wrong. Next to her love of guns—and using them—it’s her most lethal quality. “I still don’t see what that’s got to do with you Meghan Markle–ing your ass down the center of Boston.”
“Because I want her shaking in her fucking red bottoms with the knowledge that, at any moment, I can fuck all her shit up. That everything she’s lied, bribed, betrayed, and killed to get can blow up in her face if I open up my mouth. I want her to know fear. Every time she looks at me, I want that bitch to choke on it.”
Silence beats down the phone line.
“You know she’s not going to admit to shit, Eshe, right?” Tera roughly asks.
On anyone else, it would be an attempt at tenderness, but this is Tera, sooo…
“Of course she’s not. And because she’s who she is, no doubt Abena believes she’s covered her ass so no one can prove she’s behind the attempted hit.”
