“Who did you think was going as a representative?” Pyrite asked, and I shrugged. “It was always going to be her, baby bro.”
“Did you ever see a fucking body?” I looked up to see Tulane yelling as Mirror held him back. I looked around, confused about what he was talking about and who he was talking to. “Huh? Did you ever see a fucking body?” He pulled away from Mirror and got in my face. “Did you ever see a fucking body, Amethyst!”
“The fuck are you talking about?” I grilled him. I felt my brothers step to my sides, but I wasn’t worried about Tulane. I’d given him a pass before because he was Yale’s daddy, but that shit didn’t mean nothing to me now.
“That’s my fucking daughter!” He threw a manila folder at me. It hit my chest and fell to the ground.
“What the fuck are you talking about, Tulane?” I said, shaking my head. We were in the middle of the damn cemetery. Yeti’s body wasn’t even in the ground completely, and this nigga was talking about his daughter? I looked at the Forrester sisters; they were all accounted for.
“You had Morning look into what I told you about Doreen! Xavier was mentioned in the file!”
“She would’ve been because of the wreck,” I said, shaking my head. “You knew she had ties to the Kilmores. Why the fuck are you playing stupid for?”
“Because there are pictures in there!” Tulane yelled. “Pictures of Xavier from two weeks ago!” Mirror let him go and quickly bent down to pick up the folder. “My daughter is supposed to be dead! How is she in those pictures?”
“What?” I questioned him. “What the fuck do you mean Xavier is in those pictures? That’s impossible!”
“Apparently not!” Tulane snatched the folder from Mirror and put it in my face. “That’s my fucking daughter right there!”
“That’s Xavier?” I took the folder from Tulane and stared down at the picture. I’d never seen a picture of Xavier before. But now I was looking at a grainy photo of a woman’s back as she sat on the foot of Destyn’s bed. Diara was asleep in the bed holding Destyn.
“How do you know that’s her? You can’t even see her face,” I said, looking up from the picture. “That could be anyone.”
“Her tattoo!” Tulane tapped the picture. “That stupid ass pineapple tattoo on the back of her neck. She got it as a teenager with one of her stupid ass friends!”
“Wait, Xavier has this tattoo?” I asked, looking from him to Mirror. “Xavier has a pineapple tattoo!”
“This whole fucking time she’s been alive!” His voice cracked, and I saw, for the first time, the scared father in him start to show. He loved his girls, and that wasn’t ever up for debate, and I know that guilt ate away at him for not being there like he wanted to. “This whole fucking time! All these damn years, I never knew what happened to her, then you tell me that fuck ass story about a crash and finding out it was her in the car.”
“I saw the car blow up!” I yelled back. “I saw it with my own fucking eyes!”
“And now you’re holding a picture of my daughter from two weeks ago!” Tulane yelled, and Mirror stepped back up and pulled him back out of my space. “You saw what them niggas wanted you to see, Amethyst!” Tulane pushed away from Mirror and shook his head. “You saw what the fuck they wanted you to see to have this fucking guilt hanging over your head! Xavier isn’t fucking dead!”
“You don’t know that.”
“She’s not,” Diara said, approaching us. We turned and looked at her, confused as fuck about how or even why she would say that. Morning and his brothers stood behind her, ready if shit popped off. If he gave me the file and it had Diara and Destyn in it, then I knew that shit couldn’t be what I thought. Nah, Diara couldn’t be somebody we couldn’t trust. There was no way she was working for the enemy this entire time. “She’s not dead.”
“How do you know?” I asked her. “Huh, Diara, how do you know?”
“Because we were friends once upon a time,” she answered. “We met when I was with Theo. She’s his boss’s wife.”
“His boss’s wife?” I asked, and she nodded. “Who the fuck is she married to?”
“Robert Strong,” she answered.
Chapter fifty-four
Xoey
“You think you can take these damn cuffs off now?” I asked Gift from the back seat. He glanced at me through the rearview mirror, smirked, then shook his head. “But why?”
“Because you gave me permission to put them on you,” he answered, and I rolled my eyes. Flirting with Gift Blackmon was probably the worst decision I’d ever made in my life. It wasn’t that he wasn’t attractive because he was fine as hell. It was more that he scared me. I knew he wouldn’t physically hurt me because no warning bells were going off in my head when he was around. And that’s what scared me. I learned a long time ago to notice those subtle clues that my body gave off. There were very few men in my life whom I trusted easily. The few I allowed to get close to me didn’t scare me because I treated them like family. Gift was different. He made the voices in my head stoptalking. He made me relax and feel safe, something that had never happened before.
“I gave you permission while at the cemetery,” I corrected him, and he shrugged. “Gift Blackmon, take these damn cuffs off me.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said, laughing. “For now, sit back there, look pretty as fuck, and just enjoy the moment.”
“The moment?” I questioned him, and he nodded. “You’re acting like this is a date.”
