“I have a boyfriend.”
“And I have bullets. His being in my way can be fixed.”
My stomach hollowed. “Emery?—”
“That’s it. Let’s go back out there, shall we?”
“You can’t say shit like that and expect me to be okay with it. I haven’t seen you in twenty years, and now you want to come back into my life and claim something that isn’t yours? Make that make sense.”
“It’s going to make a lot of sense soon.” He walked past me to the door and opened it. “Come on. Let’s go put a plan into place to keep my family out of prison.” For a moment, I just stood inshock, then I slowly made my way out of the door. I should have known coming here was a bad idea. Emery stood on his word back then, so I knew nothing had changed about him now.
I may have just opened Pandora’s box by coming here.
Shit!
Chapter
Two
EMERY ALDANA
(Em•er•ree Al•don•ah)
I stoodin the doorway with my hands in my slacks, watching Yumi and her colleague pull down the paved driveway. When she walked into my office, my chest expanded, and my brain flooded with memories of our past, a past that I regretted but was going to make my mission to bring back to the present.
When I hired the defense team at Jones & Golden, I had no idea Yumi would be the one to walk through my doors. Seeing her round, brown, beautiful baby face sent a warm feeling rushing through my body.
Yumi had always been the “It” girl in high school. It only made sense that the most popular nigga in the school got with the popular girl. When I saw her on her clueless shit with her homegirls, I just knew I had to have her in my space in some capacity.
We were together throughout high school until our senior year.
Back then, my uncle Nick and my father Marcel were grooming Mook and me to take over their empire, so I rarely went to school my senior year. The less Yumi saw of me, the more she began to doubt me and pull away.
I tried to keep my lifestyle away from her because I knew she came from a bourgeois background, and her parents were already looking at me sideways. I also knew she wouldn’t be accepting of my illegal activities, so when I stopped letting her come to my home as much, that was when the questions began, and I found myself trying to cover up what I really did in the streets.
We were young and fell so deep, so quickly that when she broke up with me and went off to college, a nigga actually cried. With her, I was simping hard, but to everyone else, I was ruthless. It was her energy and light that separated me from the underworld of my father’s empire.
She was my escape.
My refuge.
I didn’t choose this life. Our people chose it for us. We were young hoppers who should have been doing shit teenagers did, indulging in teen behavior, graduating, making mistakes, and going off to college to get a career, but that was never going to happen, being an Aldana.
We did homeschooling most of the time just so the people wouldn’t call CPS on us, and when we did go to school, it was only to show up for important events. We were the youngest, flyest, richest niggas in the hood, and had more bodies than the cemetery at the age of sixteen.
The gun range became our second home. We learned combat and martial arts to protect ourselves if we ever had to leave our guns behind. My father and uncle retired, and I was the oldest at thirty-eight, so I had to step up to the plate. I had doctors,the police, the commissioner, a few judges, and the mayor in my pocket.
It was the reason we were able to slide under the radar for so long, but with power came the problems—someone was talking, and everyone in the Aldana family looked to me for the solution.
I backed away from the door and closed it, then headed back to the office. As bad as I wanted to knock my brother’s and cousin’s heads off, I knew it wouldn’t solve a damn thing. Mill was moving sloppy as fuck and shining a light on us that we didn’t need.
Alphonso and Raymon were our top lieutenants and were put in charge of weapon distribution. They were paid handsomely, but of course, it wasn’t enough for them.
It wasn’t a coincidence that the feds and swats pulled up on us at our warehouse. Ray and Al had mysteriously disappeared days before the deal went down, then the boys pulled up on us thirty minutes later. They had just missed the deal, but since we still had that one trunk full of guns left, we had to dash. Otherwise, I would have stayed and let them get us. I made sure we stayed squeaky clean, which was why the boys couldn’t charge us with shit.
Not until this bullshit.
If that wasn’t enough, my pops had been on my head about marrying Normani Banks. Being a part of the five families, it was already set that we would marry one of the daughters of one of the families to keep the money in our lineage.
