“How the fuck does Bentley know Grant? They run in two different fucking circles. They shouldn’t even know each other.”
“That’s what I want to know, which is why I came here,” I said. “Is there any link to Bentley and Grant?”
“You mean besides us?” he replied. “Ta’lon didn’t like being around the fighting like that, and after Nine got with Cross, I made it my mission to keep her away. Niggas were moving funny, and I wanted to make sure she wasn’t caught up in anything.”
“I remember,” I said, nodding. “It was a few weeks before you got hurt. Uri had just come back to town, and he was helping you clean up shit. He’d had that fight with that one nigga.” I snapped my fingers a few times. “What was his name? Started with a K.”
“King,” Citrine answered, and I nodded.
“Yeah, King. He beat the fuck out of that nigga too,” I chuckled and shook my head. “That was the only night that I can think of that she was at the ring and at a race.”
“Bentely wasn’t with us, though,” Citrine said as he ran his hand over his hair. “I only remember because Ta’lon was acting funny as fuck that night once we got home.”
“You remember why?”
“Nah,” he sighed. Citrine opened the boxes and started going through them. He half ass paid attention to the pictures as he looked through them, then dropped them on the desk. “I just remember her having an attitude when we got back to the house.” He picked up the paperwork. For a few minutes, he sorted through them in silence, then stopped and started laughing. “But now I think I know why.”
I took the papers from him, read them, then dropped back into my seat in surprise. “Ta’lon is married to Quincy Kilmore?” My eyes were stuck on the marriage license I was holding.
“The entire time,” he said, and I looked at the date. “They’ve been married since they were sixteen years old.”
“What the fuck?” This was the last thing I was expecting to see. “That explains the picture.”
“What picture?”
I pulled the box to me and started going through it. When I found the old picture of Quincy, he was sitting against a white Charger. He had to be around nineteen or twenty. A woman was facing him, her arms around his neck, and he was smiling into the camera.
“This has to be Ta’lon, then, right?” I handed him the picture, and Citrine stared at it so hard that, if I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought the woman had turned around in the picture. “Citrine? That’s Ta’lon?”
“Nah,” he denied, shaking his head. “Nah, that’s not her.” He tossed the picture on the desk and wiped his hands over his face. “That’s not fucking her.”
“My nigga, that’s her,” I said, picking up the picture. “It’s fucking her, look at that stupid ass pineapple tattoo on the back of her neck. She had that tattoo back then.” I remembered that tattoo because I always thought the shit was odd. Whenever I asked her about it, she would say she got it with her two best friends.
“She had a pineapple tattoo, but it wasn’t on the back of her neck,” he said, shaking his head. “Hers was on her wrist.”
“Then she got another one,” I said, and he grunted. “Nigga, that girl was weird, she had a few paw prints on random parts of her body too, right?” he nodded. “Then ain’t no doubt in my mind that she got other pineapple too.”
I stood up and headed to the door.
“Where the fuck are you going?” Citrine asked when I got to the door.
“To talk to her,” I said as I opened the door. “You might be stuck, and I get that shit, but I’m not. It’s a reason she’s fucking here, and I want to know her fucking connection to Grant.” I turned and looked at him. “It’s a chance that Bentley could be Grant’s boss for all I know.”
“Let her enjoy her dinner,” Citrine said, shaking his head.
“She could leave.”
“She ain’t,” he denied as he looked at the screen. “She’s staying here, and it looks like they are enjoying their meal.”
Chapter thirty-two
Yale
“Yale, I need to talk to you,” Tulane said, coming into the living room where Clarke and I were playing chess. Well, it was more of her beating my ass in chess, and me sitting here confused on how the fuck she was so good at it.
“Talk, Tulane,” I said without looking up. Clarke split her attention between the board and the small piece of wood she was carving. She was making a bear, and every time I looked away, it felt like I was missing a vital step in her decision-making process. The way her hands never stopped moving fascinated the shit out of me.
“Your sisters are here,” he pointed out the obvious, and I shrugged. “You’re okay with them knowing?”
