“Thank you,” she said, taking the money from him.
“Man, look, y’all can figure out your family drama shit later,” Citrine said, shaking his head. He sat back and moved back and forth.
“Blood doesn’t make you family,” Nine said. “I learned that a long time ago.” He wiped his hand over his mouth, then let out a deep breath. “Alright, so I looked into what you said, Amethyst. Like Citrine said, it looks like you’re right. Quincy has been using accounts that are in Yale’s name.” He looked up and smirked. “Grant had them set up before his death. Looks like years ago at that, so the activity didn’t raise any red flags.”
“What do you mean by years ago?” Yale asked, sounding surprised. “I never gave him permission to have anything in my name.”
“Looks like you did.” Nine turned his computer around to show us. “This is your signature, isn’t it?” He tapped the screen. “The date is a few months before y’all got married, right? You don’t remember signing these?”
“That’s not her signature,” I said, shaking my head. I knew Yale’s signature better than I knew my own, and what Nine was showing us wasn’t it. He looked up at me and nodded.
“Alright, well, let me do a little bit more investigating.” He turned his computer back around. “This was done at a bank, which means they have to have security cameras. I may be able to find the footage.”
“That was almost ten years ago; it could be erased by now,” I said.
“Normally, they only have to keep it for up to six months, but this bank doesn’t follow the same rules,” Nine said, then chuckled. “They keep their shit on the cloud forever.”
“Why?” I asked. “And how do you know?”
“Because the fucking FBI keeps harassing them and losing,” Nine chuckled. He looked over at Kenbral and smiled. “You in private and professional shit, huh?” He went back to typing and shook his head. “The bank owner hit me up years ago and asked me to hook them up. It was one of my biggest contracts until I got the one with the city. Niggas didn’t even realize they weregiving me unlimited information access. I could hack into the bank’s records and find out what I needed. You’d be surprised by what you can find out going through bank servers, and then I used the city cameras to find the niggas I needed to find.”
“Alright, so say you can find the footage, then what?” I asked. What I had in mind was to find out who it was and if it mattered now, I wanted their connection to Grant and the Kilmores. If they were useful now, I would snatch them up.
“Let’s make sure the footage is there first,” Citrine said, and I nodded.
Nine’s fingers stopped moving, then his face twisted.
“What?” I questioned him. He shook his head, then started typing again, only to stop and look over at his wife. Cross glanced at the screen, then up at him, then back at the screen. “What?”
“I found the video,” he said and tilted his head to the side.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Let us see.”
He turned his computer around and then pressed play. I leaned forward when the video started to play and squinted. There was no fucking way I was looking at Lavender standing next to Grant and Quincy. She was younger, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was her.
“So, she ain’t new to this at all,” I chuckled and sat back. I looked over at Krude, who was talking lowly with Mercy. When he felt me looking at him, he raised his head to meet my gaze.
“What’s up?”
“It’s Lavender,” I answered him.
Krude’s face twisted, and he shook his head. “Nah, man, ain’t no way,” he said. “That shit was doctored or something. My bestie ain’t with the shit like that.”
I quickly turned back to Nine and sat forward. “Y’all didn’t tell him?” I asked, and Nine shook his head. “Why the fuck not?”
“We were going to say something after we left here,” Cross answered. She pushed her round glasses up her nose and then sat back.
“Say something about what?” Krude stepped forward. “What don’t I know?”
“Lavender and Tank were responsible for the shit that happened with Yeti,” I answered him. Krude’s face twisted in confusion. “She came in first, I’m guessing to distract him, and then keep the girls preoccupied, then Tank came up. He chopped it up with Yeti, then Yeti got a call and stepped aside. When his back was turned, Tank snuck up on him.”
“That doesn’t mean Lavender was a part of shit,” Krude said, shaking his head. He was protective of the people he cared about, and we all knew he would take it hard. As goofy and over-the-top as he was, Krude was loyal by nature and didn’t just trust anyone. If he brought you into the circle, then that meant he looked at you like family, and he’d brought Lavender in. “She came first, right? Then she might not have known.”
“When she came out of the room, she didn’t even blink at the sight of Yeti down. She stepped over his body, kissed Tank, and they walked out hand in hand,” I said. I knew what it was like to be the last person to learn something, and from the looks on everyone else’s faces, they all knew. “We have it on video.”
Krude turned and looked at Mercy with a serious expression. “You find that funky flower bitch and gut her from the top of her whack ass raggedy bust down middle part wig that’s been plucked too many damn times to her seven-toe having feet.”
I looked over at Xoey because I knew they had hung out a few times and whispered, “She has seven toes?”
