He stepped backward over the door threshold before he stalled with one corner of his mouth quirking, making herstomach knot and then plummet like forewarning of a bad omen.
“Oh, yea... I never gave you a proper induction to the family. Welcome to the fold, Larenn. This is a first for me, so don’t make me regret it.”
With that, he dipped out of view and down the stairs as Kennedy stood with her feet cemented in place, vexed. The sirens blaring closer didn’t overpower the thoughts in her head running rampant.
Relic pulling her into his business went beyond guilt, regret, or paying her back for the irreversible damage he’d caused, and she hadn’t seen the sign until he’d just held it dead in her face. He lured her into the fold and made her hands dirty so that she couldn’t point the finger at him or his family. Relic made it impossible for her to snitch, if she ever found out about the salon fire, without admitting her own culpability in his illegitimate enterprise.
The room spun, causing her body to waver before she crumbled to the floor while inhaling a strained gasp to fill her deflated lungs. It sank in that she’d been checked, but the game wasn’t over as long as her piece remained on his mental chess board. Kennedy was still his queen because Relic was clueless to the earth-shattering bomb Lomar had dropped before he’d shown up.
She’d made sure Lomar couldn’t repeat it again.
Relic had made the grave mistake of sparing her life, assuming her skills that he’d helped sharpen and fine-tune wouldn’t backfire on him, but she planned to use it to her advantage. Karma and payback were bitches, but neither had shit on Kennedy once she was a woman scorned. Like the last man who’d hurt her, Relic would find that out the hard way.
“Let’s walk through this one more time. You said that you were alone when the men broke into your home?”
Kennedy lifted her head from where it rested onto a steel table that she’d occupied for hours while retelling the same story. Her gaze wandered around the medically cold and stale interrogation room, pausing on the tinted mirror before routing to the stern-faced Caucasian man, and then his starched and creased attired black partner, beside him.
They’d come and gone at least three times since she’d been confined to that room—fact checking each detail she gave before returning to sift through her story for rifts and cracks that weren’t there because she’d cemented each one shut on the drive to the precinct. Kennedy huffed a sigh of exasperation, sat up, and placed her jittery hands onto her lap.
“How many times do we have to go over this?”
“Just help us make sense of it. You were with a friend and got home at three in the morning, correct? That’s kind of late, but what happened after that?”
Kennedy slit-eyed the chubby man whose rolls were bursting out of his clingy button-down shirt. His thick, red neck bent his collar out of shape, and she couldn’t help but think he had more important shit to worry about—like his health—than an open and shut self-defense case.
“And a few minutes after I got home, my phone went off to alert me that someone was at my door. It happened so fast. I saw masked men, so I hid in my closet. Then—”
Envisioning the incident corked her throat and cut off her sentence. She planted her hands on the table, watching them quiver as she allowed the emotions she’d bottled up to bubble onto the surface. She figured the officers would believe her more if they saw the truth. They didn’t need to know that her body’s reaction was more so from rage than fear, and that every ounce of it was solely for the man she wished she’d shot and let bleed out on her apartment floor with Lomar.
“Breathe, Ms. Sutton. Your nephew has access to your camera as well, correct?”
She nodded. “I’m sure he’s shown it to someone since I wasn’t allowed to grab my phone.”
“As a precautionary measure, it was best you didn’t touch anything that could become potential evidence. So, they came into your room, and you shot one—”
“No.” She cut him off, her tone firm and sharp-edged. “I waited, hoping they’d just leave. When I saw a shadow nearing my closet beneath the door, that’s when I grabbed my gun from my laptop bag. I’ve told you this already!”
“Ms. Sutton.” The second detective butted in, hoping to diffuse the situation. The good and bad detective tactic was growing old to her very fucking fast. “We’re trying to gather all the information we need so that we won’t have to bother you again. Okay?”
“Alright,” she muttered after a short pause, bobbing her head with a fresh round of tears starting.
“Now, why do you think someone you were dating tried to rob you?”
“Not sure. We went shopping together once, and he saw the money I was spending. Maybe that was why, but you’d have to ask Lomar that.”
The detectives cut one another a side glance, speaking a silent language she couldn’t read, and it made her antsy. Mr. Good Detective hummed while tapping his pen on his notepad.
“You said he pulled a gun on you after you heard the sirens, right?”
“No. He tried to convince me to let him go first. Then, we heard a noise in the stairway.”
Kennedy planted a hand on her belly as the contents of her stomach tried coming up for the umpteenth time at the mere mention of Relic. She couldn’t decide whether it stemmed from being in the presence of men who wanted his head on a platter, or because a part of her couldn’t stop obsessing over if he’d meant anything that he’d told her. A sharp pain wound around her heart before cutting into it like barbed wire. Kennedy knew neither taking Lomar’s life, nor the interrogation, were the causes since she had endured that ache before and hadn’t intended to feel that shit again.
“You don’t look well, Ms. Sutton,” the black detective who was playing good guy pointed out. “I was wondering when what you’ve done would catch up with you. Taking someone’s life is a hard pill to swallow.”
“Wait, Lomar is dead?”
She feigned clueless, and Detective Chubby folded his arms across his chest as he leaned back in his seat.
